Variety Without a Mandate — Statecraft

Last week the city of Leiden opened a House of Active Citizenship: a meeting and working space for resident initiatives, neighbourhood coalitions, cooperatives and local entrepreneurs. There were people, coffee and currant buns. And then, writes Marije van den Berg in her column Loketdenken (“Counter thinking”, in the public administration weekly Binnenlands Bestuur, 10 July 2026), someone said what initiators really needed: a counter. At the municipality.

Her column then does something that rarely happens in administrative commentary: it skips the service-delivery literature and reaches for cybernetics. Rightly so. The Law of Requisite Variety, formulated by Ross Ashby in 1956, states that a system can cope with the complexity of its environment only when it possesses sufficient variety itself. Stafford Beer, who made the law accessible to administrators in Designing Freedom (1974), supplied the formulation Van den Berg quotes: only variety can absorb variety. Beer also described the two instruments with which a system relates to an environment too complex for it. An attenuator dampens the incoming variety to manageable proportions. An amplifier enlarges the system’s own variety, so that it can handle more. An organisation that accepts applications only through the form attenuates. A team given the mandate and the budget to deviate from the form amplifies.

The counter is an attenuator, and an understandable one. A municipal organisation is hit at every hour of the day by signals of a thousand kinds: applications, reports, complaints, initiatives and ideas that care nothing for the departmental structure. Whoever cannot process that, channels it. One entrance, one form, one appointment. As long as nobody expects the entrance to supply the processing capacity as well, there is little wrong with that.

Thirty years of one counter

The problem is that public administration has expected exactly that for thirty years. In the mid-nineties the Ministry of the Interior launched the programme Overheidsloket 2000 (“Government Counter 2000”): fifteen pilot municipalities would use modern computer technology to realise one integrated counter for municipal services, eventually to cover national services too. A quarter of a century later, the public sector looks out over a landscape of form systems, personal government portals, apps, participation platforms and the digital system for the new planning act. There are by now counters for the counters; the neighbourhood social team is one of them. The word stayed the same for thirty years. So did the problem.

Van den Berg rightly establishes that this is not a planning error and not a matter of under-investment. It is the law itself: a counter dampens signals but does not process them. Behind the counter sits exactly the same incapacity as in front of it — and that, she adds drily, goes for chatbots too. Why the pattern nonetheless keeps repeating can be completed with one observation: the counter is countable and the processing capacity is not. An opened counter, a turnaround time, a customer-satisfaction score can be reported. The capacity to actually handle a complex case cannot be reported. So the system optimises the interface and leaves the processing behind it untouched. The failure of counters is answered with new counters, and every new counter mainly proves that the previous one added no processing capacity.

The test that is missing

Up to here the column is strong. Then comes the remedy: complexity can be processed at the place where the variety is greatest, with a mixed group, in collaboration. Residents, entrepreneurs and well-equipped professionals. Not a counter, but currant buns.

There the argument stops precisely where it gets difficult. For Ashby’s law is symmetrical: it applies not only to municipal counters but also to community carriers. A mixed group without a mandate and without a budget is itself an attenuator. A place where signals are absorbed into engagement and conviviality, instead of processed into decisions that land somewhere. The question every participation infrastructure must be able to answer is not whether the opening was a success, but what is still standing when the quartermaster has left, the subsidy has run out and the people who drove it have moved on. In The Direction of the Movement (manuscript in preparation) I call that the anchoring test: success is measured not on opening day, but by what stands when nobody thinks about the intervention any more.

The answer, incidentally, is already in the column, in passing, in the list of amplifiers: a mandate, training, money on the table. That is the list that counts. Only, the column does not work out who supplies it, and that is no detail. It is the whole difference between an amplifier and a second attenuator with a warmer interior.

Who signs

For anyone who builds delivery structures this is not an academic question but a daily design question. In the build-up of a regional collaboration in the youth care domain I see it return in virtually every meeting: which variety do you centralise because scale delivers processing capacity there — procurement, contract management, data exchange — and which do you leave local because that is where the variety sits, such as access and casework? A regional front door that only attenuates reproduces the jungle of counters one layer of government higher.

The same test applies to every house, every platform and every mixed group that will be opened in the coming years. Three questions suffice. What may this group decide, and is that written down somewhere that binds a council or an executive? What budget moves along when something is agreed here? And who on the government side is obliged to process what is delivered here? Whoever has no answer to all three has not built an amplifier but an attenuator with coffee.

Van den Berg is right: the counter solves nothing, and another counter solves even less. But the alternative is not the currant bun. The alternative is variety with a mandate, with a budget and with a receiver obliged to do something with it. Variety without a mandate is warmth. Not processing capacity.

Sources

Marije van den Berg, “Loketdenken”, Binnenlands Bestuur, 10 July 2026. · W. Ross Ashby, An Introduction to Cybernetics (London: Chapman & Hall, 1956). · Stafford Beer, Designing Freedom (Massey Lectures; London: Wiley, 1974).

Jacob Huibers is an interim manager with more than twenty years of experience in the Dutch public sector. He has worked as cluster manager, cluster director and quartermaster at municipalities ranging from fifty thousand to over two hundred thousand inhabitants, and at inter-municipal collaborative bodies across the social and physical domains. Statecraft is his platform for strategic reflection on public-sector execution, pillar IV of House of Viridian.

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