BP, PR and Ashby's Law of Requisite Variety

Taking a view of BP's PR efforts on social media today compared with the first weeks and it is noticeable that Twitter is being much more actively used by BP than at the start as well as the company's Facebook BP America page.  The Facebook page is also taking in feeds from Twitter comments and commenting on them showing a growing understanding of the integration of the different services.

A comment from BP America's today (14th June) "We want our page to be an appropriate forum for everyone, and an exchange of constructive dialogue from differing opinions" highlights the developing conversation.  This was entirely absent in the first hours and days of the Gulf oil spill.

Tony Hayward, CEO of BP.

BP's PR effort on a range of counts has been heavily criticised.  The latest broadside was this weekend in the Financial Times although the article acknowledged that any company would have suffered major reputational damage over such an incident.  However the FT notably linked communications problems to wider organisational and cultural issues within BP over how it ran its American subsidiary.  In particular a failure to have a senior heavyweight management team run by Americans dealing with the US government and US media (as opposed to its very British-
centric team who have gone down badly) and included in this was the
fact, that BP also employs a British PR consultancy even for its US work, Brunswick. Other commentators have been more direct over Brunswick's failures and I would add that social media has also never been Brunswick's strength.

 Ross Ashby.  (Source: Principia Cybernetica.)

This lack of organisational and cultural sensitivity in BP brings us to one of the pioneers of systems theory, Ross Ashby.  A physciatrist and academic, Asbhy was famous for his work on Systems Theory and Cybernetics and influential to a generation of academics particularly in the (1960s) developing field of business and organisational strategy (not least PR's own Open Systems Theory).  His Law of Requisite Variety ( interpreting in organisational context), says that an organisation must have the capabilities (technical, managerial etc) and "variety" for the environment in which it operates.  The more complex the environment the more "variety" needed within the organisation.   On all these fronts BP has failed - and BP's communication performance is symptomatic of these failures.