In which we look at the WEIRD North Atlantic narrative repertoire through the lens of Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety — and offer three small ways to start un-entraining the cognitive patterns underpinning modern professional-managerial psychology.
After decades working with hundreds of leaders across industries, regions, cultures and contexts — across EMENA, with Japanese, Indonesian, Italian, Russian and more teams — you’d think I would have encountered a dizzying diversity of story forms and sense-making habits.
It’s certainly true if I count my “offroad” adventures (more of these soon in my Field Notes on Substack). But when it comes to senior leaders educated in the Western business and management tradition, frankly, not so much.
They intuitively and habitually reach for:
- The same frameworks and models
- The same sets of metaphors
- The same story structures
- The same binary framings
This is not by accident.
This habituation is a byproduct of what Wim van Binsbergen 
Wim M.J. van Binsbergen is Emeritus Professor of the Foundations of Intercultural Philosophy, Philosophical Faculty, Erasmus University Rotterdam. The work of van Binsbergen moves across many terrains; ethnography, intercultural philosophy, comparative mythology, and long-range epistemic analysis. calls the North Atlantic knowledge practice — a centuries-old way of producing and legitimising knowledge shaped by, amongst other things:
- Scientific rationalism
- Imperial histories
- Institutions and markets
Across time, these threads have acted as various types of constraints (Juarrero, 2002):
- Constitutive constraints determining which knowledge is thinkable
- “Pruning” constraints on which knowledge is legitimate or valuable
- Maintaining constraints on which knowledge is recognised and sustained
When I read Joseph Henrich's Joseph Henrich, PhD, is an American anthropologist and professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University. Henrich's research areas include cultural learning, the evolution of cooperation, social stratification, prestige, technological change, economic decision-making, and the evolution of monogamous marriage and of religion. work on WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic) psychology some years ago, it crystallised the phenomenon I’d been experiencing for decades.
People raised in WEIRD societies exhibit a strong tendency towards:
- Narrow cognitive styles
- Narrow interpretive repertoires
- Single “root cause” diagnostics
- Analytic, decontextualised (ie non-relational) schemas
- High degrees of self-certainty
And the kicker:
- Discomfort with contradiction and contextual reasoning itself.
This tendency aligns closely with what cognitive psychology terms Need for Cognitive Closure — a well-established construct describing the motivation to reach quick, definite answers and avoid ambiguity, even at the cost of accuracy (Webster & Kruglanski, 1994; Roets, 2015).
This profile is not a separate phenomenon from the North Atlantic knowledge practice. It is its socio-psychological imprint. And over time, this imprint becomes stabilised and embodied.
Note that these patterns describe probabilistic tendencies, not deterministic laws — but they’re certainly robust enough across experimental, organisational, and cross-cultural research to warrant serious attention in leadership practice.
A leader’s narrative identity (McAdams & McLean, 2013) — the way they see, experience, sense-make, negotiate and manage themselves — is deeply entangled with the narrative forms a culture and its socio-technical systems normalise, and legitimise.
These forms are reinforced through repetition and familiarity (Zajonc, 1968; Hasher & Goldstein, 1977) and gradually sediment into expectation, affect, and habit (Damasio, 1994; Varela, Thompson & Rosch, 1991).
I call this full process narrative entrainment: the long-term alignment of sense-making, expectation, and agency to a dominant narrative grammar.
The problem, however, is that when these grammars remain invisible and unexamined, our strategies and our stories stay the same too — regardless of how incompatible they may be with the complexity of the world around us.
The WEIRD North Atlantic narrative default
One of the most pervasive outcomes of these systemic and socio-psychological constraints is the dominance of the Western “equilibrium → disruption → re-equilibrium” monoplot structure.
This monoplot, this Todorovian structuralist arc, has become the unspoken dominant narrative operating system of Western business, journalism, media, management, and even public discourse.
Its shape is instantly recognisable:
- Enigma — a problem appears (“We were facing X…”).
- Disequilibrium — tension rises (“Then this happened…”).
- Resolution — order is restored (“Then we did Y, and it was solved.”)
This monocausal, linear, closed-story format forms the deep neural narrative grammar of the North Atlantic world.
You can find it in:
- Aristotelian plot structure (beginning → middle → end)
- Campbell’s hero cycle (problem → ordeal → triumph)
- Hollywood’s three-act model (setup → confrontation → resolution)
- McKinsey-style case logic (“situation → complication → question → answer”)
It is so deeply embedded in our psychology that you can even feel it in the continual “rush to closure” in LLMs, which mirror that psychology straight back at us.
It is our culturally most dominant story form — and the cognitive template the majority of WEIRD North Atlantic leaders default to without ever noticing.
We have become so deeply narratively entrained into this rhythm that it also functions at a somatic level — through its emotional cadence, and its location of the body, the self, as the primary site of agency, responsibility, effort, and endurance.
Each time this rhythm is encountered (and it is everywhere around us, within our algorithms, our media and our own discourse, remember), it produces a small dopaminergic reinforcement effect. Repetition legitimises. And familiarity feels an awful lot like truth (Hasher & Goldstein, 1977; Zajonc, 1968).
For decades, this Western cultural monoplot has shaped how leaders behave, how they expect the world to behave — and often ensures that they misread it whenever it fails to conform to that tidy arc.
Why it matters: Ashby’s Law and the limits of low-variety leadership
“The regulator must contain at least as much variety as the system it is to regulate.”
— W. Ross Ashby (1956)
Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety tells us that to self-regulate in complexity, any system must contain at least as much internal variety as exists in its environment.
In other words, only variety can absorb variety.
Subsequent organisational research has shown that Ashby’s Law can be empirically operationalised: systems with higher internal informational and interpretive variety exhibit greater adaptive capacity under environmental complexity (De Raadt, 1987; Poulis, 2016).
When narrative repertoires are narrow, what cannot be absorbed cognitively is displaced elsewhere in the system — a predictable outcome of long-term narrative entrainment under low-variety conditions.
Consider ecology:
- A monocultured field might look nice and orderly and efficient — until a single pathogen sweeps through and collapses the whole system.
- A diverse ecosystem, by contrast, can absorb shocks because it has many possible responses. In this sense, variety isn’t indulgence — it’s resilience.
It’s the same in political discourse:
- A two-party binary system cannot possibly absorb the complexity of a multi-issue world. It collapses nuance into combat: and the result is narrative warfare.
- And when the narrative space narrows, societal resilience narrows with it.
The same applies to leaders:
If you meet a complex, polycentric environment with only one storyline — one explanation, metaphor, or framing — you’ve already lost the variety Ashby says you need even to perceive the environment appropriately, let alone strategise effectively.
- Linear stories cannot absorb nonlinear reality
- Binary plots cannot absorb polytely (multiple, contradictory goals)
- Heroic agency cannot absorb distributed causality
Low narrative variety produces low cognitive variety — which produces low diagnostic variety. And without diagnostic variety, strategic options collapse.
This is not a “storytelling” problem. It is a strategy, and often somatic, problem for leaders, too.
In leadership contexts, these tendencies translate into a familiar cluster of symptoms: over-reliance on a single explanatory frame, premature closure under pressure, escalating effort when situations refuse to stabilise, and a tendency to personalise and internalise what are, in fact, systemic mismatches of variety.
These are not individual shortcomings. They are predictable leadership symptoms of long-term narrative entrainment operating under conditions of insufficient variety.
Over time, these leadership symptoms are often accompanied by bodily ones: sustained tension, vigilance, and a sense of carrying the system personally when it will not resolve.
This is not incidental. When narrative variety is low, regulation is pushed downward into individual effort and endurance. The body is recruited to compensate for what the narrative–cognitive repertoire cannot absorb.
In complex adaptive systems, variety means capacity, capability, and agency.
To paraphrase Cynthia Kurtz: the more possibilities we can see for ourselves and for others, the more resilient we become.
As Homo narrans we use stories to think with.
Expanding your narrative repertoire expands your cognitive and strategic variety.
Three simple ways to expand your narrative repertoire
Below are three simple practices you can put into practice today.
Each increases internal variety.
Each opens new discursive spaces.
Each takes a little bite out of our WEIRD North Atlantic entrainment.
There are many more — but these should start to give you a feel of what un-entrainment work feels like.
1. Hold multiple hypotheses, not a single story
“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up (1945)
As we know, most leaders have been entrained into a monocausal, single-story way of thinking. But complexity rarely has a single “why”.
Instead of hunting for the “one true story”, try holding multiple plausible stories, at once. Try:
- Generating three strong alternative hypotheses for every one you currently have
- Performing pre-mortems: ask in advance why your nascent project failed
- Treating each framing as a “safe-to-fail” experiment
As Rudolph’s work in adaptive decision-making shows, expert practitioners form hypotheses early not to confirm them, but to keep updating them as new cues emerge.
This pattern is characteristic of naturalistic decision making, where expertise is marked not by exhaustive analysis, but by rapid generation and continual revision of plausible interpretations as situations unfold (Klein, 2008; Rudolph et al., 2009).
The hypothesis then becomes a cognitive scaffold — provisional, flexible, and continuously revised. It offers orientation without premature closure.
In our rethreading process, where we test the causal logic of strategy, there are moments where we practice this ourselves; holding multiple alternative hypotheses open concurrently.
Many years ago, Michiel, while watching the response of the team I was leading, coined the perfect phrase for what this space feels like for the majority of Western business leaders. He calls it, “Keeping the patient open on the table.”
Folk often experience real discomfort here — not because the work is unclear, but because the cultural impulse to close the arc is deeply ingrained.
The rush to resolution is strong. But staying open a little longer is exactly the point. Because when you resist the WEIRD drive to closure:
- More of the world becomes visible.
- More paths become thinkable.
- More actions become available.
And remember, this impulse to closure is not a personal failing.
It is a common, deeply entrained socio-psychological trait.
2. Rotate your metaphors
“Metaphors are not just rhetorical devices; they structure our perceptions and understanding.”
— Lakoff & Johnson, (1980)
Metaphors are themselves cognitive architecture. They shape what feels reasonable or even thinkable (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980). Controlled experiments demonstrate that metaphor choice systematically alters reasoning, problem framing, and policy preference — even when participants are unaware of the metaphor’s influence (Thibodeau & Boroditsky, 2011; 2013).
Yet most organisations rely almost exclusively on the same sets of mechanical metaphors (systems, levers, engines) or military ones (strategy, front lines, command and control). These metaphors are not neutral — they define what feels possible.
Rotating metaphors opens narrative and strategic space.
Try:
- Reframing a situation through an ecological metaphor
- Viewing a team through a musical metaphor
- What genre of music are you?
- What band? Who plays what? Who’s driving the beat? Who’s holding it down? Who is out of time?
- Asking “what would this look like if this is a landscape, not a battle?”
New metaphors bring new affordances (Gibson, 1979).
And new affordances generate new strategies.
3. Split sense-making meetings from decision-making meetings
“Scout mindset is what allows you to recognize when you are wrong, to seek out your blind spots, to test your assumptions and change course”
— Julia Galef, (2021)
One of the most damaging habits that I see in Western organisational life is collapsing sense-making and decision-making into the same frantic meeting.
The result is that the group converges on the first plausible narrative simply to “move forward.” That’s because we think in narrative formats. And the first plausible story tends to dominate — whether or not it is true.
This effect mirrors the hidden profile problem in group decision-making, where groups systematically privilege shared, early information over unshared but decision-critical insights — especially when decisions are made prematurely (Stasser & Titus, 1985; Lu et al., 2012).
Plus, we are not — to misquote Sir Ken Robinson — ‘heads on sticks’. Cognition is embodied and distributed — unfolding across brain, body, and environment (Varela, Thompson & Rosch, 1991). And when we rush ourselves, we cut our sense-making loop short.
This is a danger to good decision making.
In many regions — including much of the Middle East, where I’ve worked extensively — mixing these types of sessions would be unthinkable.
Sense-making requires openness; decision-making requires closure.
Mixing the two will force people to perform clarity before they actually have it.
Instead, when dealing with complex matters, why not hold two different types of meetings:
- Sense-making meetings: No decisions, no commitments — only exploration, hypotheses, conflicting viewpoints, ambiguity.
- Get people to tell stories about things. This lets people smuggle thoughts into the meeting, generate and test hypotheses — without losing face. Encourage role play. Maintain openness.
- Decision-making meetings: No new information, no new framings — only convergence and choice.
- Do not hold a decision meeting straight after a sense-making meeting. The body needs time to metabolise what it has taken in (Damasio, 1994). Insight often arises in slow moments — in the shower, or, for me, most often, after working hard for an extended period of time, and then cycling to pick up my son from school and I have to keep stopping and jotting down notes. Every. Bloody. Time.
This approach helps break the WEIRD narrative impulse to closure.
It enables teams to adopt what Julia Galef calls the Scout Mindset: seeking to understand the terrain fully before deciding how to move through it.
And, just as importantly, it gives your embodied, distributed cognitive system the space to do its slow quiet work — the work that makes for quality decision making.
Innovation & re-wilding the narrative–cognitive ecology of leadership
“A community’s narrative landscape is healthiest when it contains many stories told in many ways.”
— Cynthia Kurtz, (2014)
In the end, Ashby’s insight lands somewhere simple but profound: the variety inside a system must match the variety around it.
For leaders, that means this: the number of ways you can understand the world sets the number of meaningful explanations, hypotheses, and strategic options you can generate about it.
This is the real engine of innovation: not a personality trait or a workshop output. Innovation becomes possible when your repertoire of sense-making exceeds the variety of the situation you’re facing.
New stories make new explanations possible — and new explanations make new forms of action and behaviour possible.
Change the stories — and the story structures — you can think with, and you change what becomes visible, possible, and doable.
This is why expanding narrative repertoire is not cosmetic story work. It is the development of strategic cognitive capability — the ability to perceive, diagnose, and act within complexity with greater range and resilience.
Increasingly — especially in the light of AI, society, sustainability, and the planet — this is ethical work.
A world as complex, entangled, and polycentric as ours cannot be understood — let alone stewarded — through our inherited binaries and mechanistic metaphors.
Rewilding discourse, as is our mission, is ultimately about restoring our capacity to meet the world on its own terms: with humility, curiosity, heterodoxy, and a willingness to think with more than one story at a time.
I believe that the leaders who cultivate that capacity will be the ones who shape futures worth living in.
Be splendid.
— Steve
References
- Ashby, W. R. (1956). An introduction to cybernetics. London: Chapman & Hall.
https://ashby.info/Ashby-Introduction-to-Cybernetics.pdf - Binsbergen, W. M. J. van. (2003). Intercultural encounters: African and anthropological lessons towards a philosophy of interculturality. Münster: LIT Verlag.
https://lit-verlag.de/isbn/978-3-8258-6783-8/ - Damasio, A. R. (1994). Descartes’ error: Emotion, reason, and the human brain. New York, NY: Putnam.
https://dokumen.pub/descartes-error-emotion-reason-and-the-human-brain-1nbsped-0380726475-9780380726479-k-2607413.html - De Raadt, J. D. R. (1987). An empirical test of Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety. Kybernetes, 16(1), 29–40.
https://doi.org/10.1108/eb005775 - Galef, J. (2021). The Scout Mindset: Why some people see things clearly and others don’t. New York, NY: Portfolio.
https://www.amazon.com/Scout-Mindset-Perils-Defensive-Thinking/dp/0735217556 - Gibson, J. J. (1979). The ecological approach to visual perception. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin.
https://library.uniq.edu.iq/storage/books/file/The%20Ecological%20Approach%20to%20Visual%20Perception%20Approach/1667383098The%20Ecological%20Approach%20to%20Visual%20Perception%20Classic%20Edition%20(James%20J.%20Gibson)%20(z-lib.org)%20(1).pdf - Hasher, L., & Goldstein, D. (1977). Frequency and the conference of referential validity. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 16(1), 107–112.
https://doi.org/10.1016/S0022-5371(77)80012-1 - Henrich, J. (2020). The WEIRDest people in the world. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_WEIRDest_People_in_the_World - Juarrero, A. (2002). Dynamics in action: Intentional behavior as a complex system. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
https://aliciajuarrerodotcom1.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/dynamics-in-action-pdf1.pdf - Klein, G. (2008). Naturalistic decision making. Human Factors, 50(3), 456–460.
https://doi.org/10.1518/001872008X288385 - Kurtz, C. F. (2014). Working with stories: A field guide to participatory narrative inquiry (3rd ed.). Cynthia F. Kurtz.
https://workingwithstories.org - Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we live by. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
https://books.google.nl/books/about/Metaphors_We_Live_By.html?id=r6nOYYtxzUoC&redir_esc=y - Lu, L., Yuan, Y. C., & McLeod, P. L. (2012). Twenty-five years of hidden profiles in group decision making: A meta-analysis. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 16(1), 54–75.
https://doi.org/10.1177/1088868311417243 - McAdams, D. P., & McLean, K. C. (2013). Narrative identity. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 22(3), 233–238.
https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721413475622 - Poulis, K. (2016). Transforming the Law of Requisite Variety. Academy of Management Review, 41(4), 658–678.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/281281578_Problematizing_Fit_and_Survival_Transforming_the_Law_of_Requisite_Variety_Through_Complexity_Misalignment - Roets, A. (2015). Need for closure. In M. Mikulincer & P. R. Shaver (Eds.), APA handbook of personality and social psychology (Vol. 1, pp. 123–140). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
https://doi.org/10.1037/14341-004 - Rudolph, J. W., Morrison, J. B., & Carroll, J. S. (2009). The dynamics of action-oriented problem solving: Linking interpretation and choice. Academy of Management Review, 34(2), 227–247.
https://www.academia.edu/86126772/The_Dynamics_of_Action_Oriented_Problem_Solving_Linking_Interpretation_and_Choice - Stasser, G., & Titus, W. (1985). Pooling of unshared information in group decision making. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 48(6), 1467–1478.
https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.48.6.1467 - Thibodeau, P. H., & Boroditsky, L. (2011). Metaphors we think with: The role of metaphor in reasoning. PLOS ONE, 6(2), e16782.
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0016782 - Thibodeau, P. H., & Boroditsky, L. (2013). Natural language metaphors covertly influence reasoning. PLOS ONE, 8(1), e52961.
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0052961 - Varela, F. J., Thompson, E., & Rosch, E. (1991). The embodied mind: Cognitive science and human experience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
https://monoskop.org/images/2/21/Varela_Thompson_Rosch_The_Embodied_Mind_Cognitive_Science_and_Human_Experience_1991.pdf - Webster, D. M., & Kruglanski, A. W. (1994). Individual differences in need for cognitive closure. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67(6), 1049–1062.
https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.67.6.1049 - Zajonc, R. B. (1968). Attitudinal effects of mere exposure. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 9(2, Pt. 2), 1–27.
https://doi.org/10.1037/h0025848
Leave a reaction and contribute to our blogcast
0 reactions
No comments yet — be the first!