11. Mission-Critical Tasks (Step III)

The third diagnostic step aims to find out what exactly needs to be controlled and organized. We will therefore first consider the operational units in System 1 and ask how they deal with their environmental and operational complexity. Since Ashby’s law of requisite variety also applies here, we want to find out how operational unit amplify and attenuate variety to achieve the desired balance. Behind these amplifiers and dampers lie tasks that are critical to success and that must be organized. This approach serves to elicit the few yet essential tasks that, according to the Pareto principle, account for the bulk of success. We find such tasks both in the individual operational units and in their interactions. These mission-critical tasks are the raw material for the fourth diagnostic step (Chap. 12), in which we distribute the tasks among the levels of recursion.