Regulating rate of social change

The rate at which a social institute can change can be regulated by the mechanisms that keeps the Catholic Church impressively steady and those that make student groups flitter. things like:

• institutionalized learning
• seniority and long/ short terms
• respect for tradition and consensus
• restrictions on personal freedom
• the opposites of those things.
• large and centralized

An organizations rate of change should be tuned in line with what service it is providing and what kind of climate it is operating in. If it is providing a service that will always be needed, that all people need, and its long term survival is not a question, than that institution should be conservative/ have a slow rate of change. This will Insulate the institution from day to day/week to week/year to year confounds that will not have a lasting influence. Considering their universality, these organizations are also best large and impersonal. Organizations that support truly universal human needs and rights fit this.

An organization whose survival is very sensitive to its environment and that, in line with its goals, seeks to be responsive to the constant noise of a dynamic society should institute policy to prevent the influence of elements in the above list.

Influencing rate of change is one way of applying Ashby's Law of Requisite Variety to social institutions, changing the number of possible states of a system over some time by modulating the 'some time' part.