Laws of Leadership: Ashby's Law

Centralizing decisions because of "incorrect" or "bad" decision making causes bottlenecks and slows your entire operation to a crawl while frontline teams wait for approvals.

Ashby's Law: Only variety can absorb variety. To effectively control a complex system, the controller must have at least as much flexibility (variety) as the system it's managing; otherwise, it gets overwhelmed.

This one is essential for correctly integrating decision making into systems.

When someone on your team makes a bad decision, the temptation is to centralize authority, pulling choices up to higher levels assuming tighter control will prevent mistakes and improve outcomes.

Ashby's Law reminds us that centralized decision-making fails in complex ops because one leader (or small group) can't match the variety/complexity of real-time issues on the front line. Distribute decisions to absorb that variety, but first simplify them to make delegation safe and effective.

Distributed decision-making delivers faster, more responsive operations than leader-only decision systems, and you'll actually get better decisions when you let the people closest to the problems make them.

When bad decisions happen, many leaders react by forcing more oversight from the top. But improvement isn't what you will get.

Instead, systematically simplify decisions first, then distribute them.

Hick's Law shows that more choices slow reactions, so limit options. Fredkin's Paradox warns that similar alternatives waste time without value, so standardize to essentials. Once simplified, Ashby's Law kicks in: frontline teams, closest to the variety of daily challenges, have the requisite flexibility and situational knowledge to handle them, central leaders don't.

If you're optimizing decision-making in a process, start by mapping choices: simplify by reducing options and clarifying criteria (Hick's/Fredkin's), then delegate to the lowest level (Ashby’s) - empower with training, clear guidelines, and quick escalation paths for true unknowns.

You can create a lot of burnout trying to centralize decision-making. It overloads leaders, delays actions, frustrates teams, and amplifies errors.

And realize that top-performing teams aren't controlled from afar, they’re controlled from within, with simplified decisions handled where the action is, absorbing complexity at the source.

Leading change is hard. Understanding Ashby's Law (building on Hick's and Fredkin's) helps us build distributed, agile processes, which we need.

Change leadership is a marathon. You can't centralize decisions without damaging processes.