I was recently reading a lot about Stafford Beer a cybernetician from the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. A word he used to describe the world outside of corporations has gotten lodged in my brain this week—-variety. It is a simple word that seems innocuous and simple, but for me expresses in a meaningful way what I like about the very human world we live in. Oftentimes I will call the world messy, chaotic, and unpredictable, but I’d say variety is a much more optimistic, positive, and transformative way to describe the world we’ve built.
The work I do as the API Evangelist focuses on governing APIs inside and outside enterprise organizations, but really focuses on the externalization of technology because inside the enterprise is much more potentially known and quantifiable, where outside the enterprise is always risky and threatening. I really like Stafford Beer’s perspective that outside the enterprise there is variety, and that it is something that should be embraced and not something we try to do away with using compute—-variety is a good thing.
Variety has more opportunity for creating good than it does for creating bad. Enterprises worry about variety outside the enterprise, while simultaneously are unable to see how variety can help them address the problems they face inside the enterprise. Now that I have lived in NYC for 1 + 2 years, I find it difficult to live in places that do not offer variety, and it is something that is following me into my work, and when I don’t find variety in a startup or enterprise, I find myself concerned–I prefer variety over the alternative.
