The Law of Originality

More than a month ago I had this amazing insight in my car. At least, that's what I thought. I have a very inspiring car, which might have induced the brainwave. Anyway, this is what I blogged that evening…

It takes complexity to manage complexity.

Of course, as I could have expected, it now appears that a guy named W. Ross Ashby has already made two (unofficial) theorems out of it:

The Conant-Ashby Theorem
Every good regulator of a system must have a model of that system.
The Law of Requisite Variety
Only variety in a system itself can successfully counter a variety of disturbances in the environment.

In other words, for our software projects, it simply means this: processes and tools can never manage our software projects. We need people to do that. Because for management and control we need something that is even more complex than the software projects themselves. Processes and tools can be complicated, but only people are really complex. So, it appears we're stuck with project managers for a while…

I am now inclined to propose my own new theorem, The Law of Originality:
Every insightful idea has already been turned into a law by someone else.

But I'm sure this has already been published on some other blog…