Ashby's Law

I am successfully blogging today because nothing could stop me. Let me explain. My outcome is to blog every day, even if its a short paragraph, the outcome is to blog every week. I want to do this because I believe that in writing, we understand ourselves better and we process information optimally as it gives it more symantec. I understand that this will take a few hours a week so I'm prepared to forego the accumulation of the little time wasters like sporratic email checking, facebook checking, and other such unscheduled activities. I understand that I have a very busy and demanding routine day to day and much of what I do at work is unplanned and pops up very last minute - so here's where I had to be very critical about the plan and ask myself a battery of questions like:

1. What if I get an urgent phone call

2. What if I get too many emails from work?

3. What about my Dentists appointment?

4. What if i feel tired?

5. What If I cant think of what to write?

And so on and so on. I prepare my mind for the environmental variables of my familiar day to day routine so now when they happen I have this little response inside saying "I prepared for this, I know what to do", and such self dialogue keeps me in control of the "system"

In the book "Introduction to Cybernetics" by Dr. William Ross Ashby, you will find The Law of Requisite Variety, which also came to be known as "Ashby's Law", and while technical in its application, it later came to be an aid in many other applications like Biology and Psychology, and in fact could be viewed as truth in any context really. This law basically states that in any given "system" the "controller" must be prepared to handle more variety than the envoronment can throw at it, or else its not in control. Jerry Richardson draws a wonderful parrallell to this concept with the concept of building rapport in his book "The Magic of Rapport" - where he asserts that being more prepared for the variety you will encounter in conversations, the better you are able to maintain control.

I look at this concept as being so incredibly relevant to personal development and change. If you could take an inventory of all of the "responses" that your life has programmed into your subconscious to deal with change, I believe the insight into oneself would be unparrallelled. And that right there is another fundemental structure of NLP - reverse engineering the subject's "perceptions" so as to understand how they will percieve their environment. When you have decided on a given outcome for yourself, or a goal, it means that the problem in between current state and desired state will contain a lot of the same environments you have been used to, but you now have a responsibility to program new responses to those environments in order to arrive at that lasting outcome. A crucial part in the strategy to change is to take a critical inventory of the "ifs" and "thens", and insure the "thens" are conducive to the outcome. If you dont take the time to briefly "live" these variety's and envision the new response you will introduce, you risk giving the control back to the environment or stimulus, and before long - abandoning the journey as you retreat to the logical excuses of your subconscious - which will put up a compelling argument to get you back to familiar patterns.

More on Asby's Law soon....