that if a certain quantity of disturbance is prevented by a regulator from reaching some essential variables, then that regulator must be capable of exerting at least that quantity of selection. Ashby saw this law as relevant to problems in biology such as homeostasis, and a "wealth of possible applications". Later, in 1970, Conant working with Ashby produced the good regulator theorem which required autonomous systems to acquire an internal model of their environment to persist and achieve stability (e.g. Nyquist stability criterion) or dynamic equilibrium. Boisot and McKelvey updated this law to the "law of requisite complexity", that holds that, in order to be efficaciously adaptive, the internal complexity of a system must match the external complexity it confronts. A further practical application of this law is the view that information systems (IS) alignment is a continuous coevolutionary process that reconciles top-down ‘rational designs’ and bottom-up ‘emergent processes’ of consciously and coherently interrelating all components of the Business/IS relationships in order to contribute to an organization’s performance over time. The application in project management of the law of requisite complexity is the model of positive, appropriate and negative complexity proposed by Stefan Morcov. Applications Applications to organization and management were immediately apparent to Ashby. One implication is that individuals have a finite capacity for processing information, and beyond this limit what matters is the organization between individuals. Thus the limitation which holds over a team of n men may be much higher, perhaps n times as high, as the limitation holding over the individual man. To make use of the higher limit, however, the team must be efficiently organized; and until recently our understanding of organization has been pitifully small. Stafford Beer took up this analysis in his writings on management cybernetics. Beer defines variety as "the total number of possible states of a system, or of an element of a system". Beer restates the Law of Requisite Variety as "Variety absorbs variety." Stated more simply, the logarithmic measure of variety represents the minimum number of choices (by binary chop) needed to resolve uncertainty. Beer used this to allocate the management resources necessary to maintain process viability. The cybernetician Frank George discussed the variety of teams competing in games like football or rugby to produce goals or tries. A winning chess player might be said to have more variety than his losing opponent. Here a simple ordering is implied.