Reading Public Service Co-Production through the Lenses of Requisite Variety

Governance and Metagovernance: On Reflexivity, Requisite Variety, and Requisite Irony

There has been growing interest in the past twenty years or so in the potential contribution of new forms of governance to solving coordination problems in and across a wide range of specialized social systems (such as the economy, the legal system, the political system, and the health system) and in the lifeworld (or, broadly understood, civil society). This interest is reflected in growing am...

Action Variety of Planners: Cognitive Load and Requisite Variety

The complexity of planning tasks have increased over the past decade. There is relatively poor understanding what the implications are of increased task complexity in planning and scheduling operations. Previous work in the behavorial sciences have investigated the concept of cognitive load, addressing both task complecity and task workload or stress, and have concluded that decision makers ten...

A Framework for Data-Driven Public Service Co-production

Requisite variety, autopoiesis, and self-organization

Ashby’s law of requisite variety states that a controller must have at least as much variety (complexity) as the controlled. Maturana and Varela proposed autopoiesis (self-production) to define living systems. Living systems also require to fulfill the law of requisite variety. A measure of autopoiesis has been proposed as the ratio between the complexity of a system and the complexity of its e...

Inspiring service innovation through co-design in public sector healthcare

How can we inspire service innovation through the co-design of public sector healthcare delivery particularly when facing a large and complex challenge? The design and development of a new prototype food service to address malnutrition in older adult hospital patients is used as a case study. It describes how methods used predominantly by designers have been adapted to empower, train, inspire, ...