Diverse Teams and The Law of Requisite Variety

In a project meeting the other day with a client, I was asked why I had said I was pleased to see a mixture of non IT graduates on the project. At the time I just gave a rather facile “Its nice to get a diversity of viewpoints” kind of answer.

A bit of digging turned up W. Ross Ashby, and his ‘theorem’ that

Only variety in a system itself can successfully counter a variety of disturbances in the environment.

Makes sense to me.