• Aware of psychology laws like Pareto’s 80:20?

• Know about “The Law of Requisite Variety”?

• Why is the most flexible person the most powerful?

Here, red10 ‘s Will Sudworth explains this psychological Law of Requisite Variety.

This article is part of the series on “16 concepts of a healthy mind in NLP” (Neuro Linguistic Programming)

How aware are you of psychological laws like Pareto’s Law?

The chances are that you’ve heard of Pareto’s Law. It’s the psychological law that states that 80% of the results come from just 20% of the effort.

Psychological laws are powerful truths that help us understand how we, as human beings, work.

So, when I saw that there was a Law I hadn’t heard of before, and that it was part of NLP’s research into the concepts that help maintain a healthy mind, I was very interested…

What do you know about The Law of Requisite Variety?

Requisite Variety is a technical way of saying: Flexibility is Essential.

The law states that “the most flexible part or person in a system is the most powerful”.

I find this to be counter-intuitive. I had thought that the most solid or unmoving part would be the most powerful.

These psychological laws make most sense when you look back over your life. When you think back, what situation do you remember where flexibility was the key?

Here’s the first answer I come up with…

Will’s playground fight

I’m not proud of this, not that it matters all these years later, yet when I was around 9 years old I remember having a fight in the playground with Gwyn*.

*not his real name.

Gwyn and I had been annoying each other for weeks. One of us got to the point of arranging a time and place to fight during a school lunchtime and we’d agreed to keeping it just between the two of us – so obviously all of our class came along to watch!

I remember us both boxing. I don’t know why, yet we both seemed to stick to the Marquess of Queensberry Rules. Neither of us really got anywhere. Every punch was blocked and matched with another punch that was then blocked. With a crowd around us, we knew it wouldn’t be long before a teacher came, and we’d be in trouble.

Gwyn was a lot bigger than me. I’d been learning karate, and I knew that if I used his weight against him, I could throw him over and we’d be done**.

Yet I felt the need to match his boxing style and “be strong”. Ridiculously, in the peer pressure of the moment, I thought I’d be doing the wrong thing in the eyes of all my class if I used anything other than boxing.

** When Gwyn reads this, he will probably disagree (he’s a friend of mine now!)

So what was the learning? If I’d chosen to be the most flexible in my approach, rather than the most rigid, I’d have won the fight quickly and we’d both have been done before the teacher caught us – and so avoided the headteacher’s punishment.

Perhaps, if I’d been more flexible in the weeks before the fight, maybe we wouldn’t have annoyed each other in the first place…and I could have avoided fighting.

Don’t Just Take My Word For It…

red10 ‘s Piers Carter has written a great article here about when he learnt to flex his style from the one he used when training police.
red10 ‘s Sureya Naidoo has written a great article here about how this law can help you regain control of your life and not feel overwhelmed.

What does this mean to you?

  • Some coaching questions for you:
  • Is there something happening in your life, where you’re choosing to be rigid rather flexible?
  • What is it?
  • Why are you choosing rigidity?
  • What would flexibility look like?
  • How could that be helpful to you?