Le Chatelier's Principle as Applied to Social Systems

Liberating Provocations: use of negative and paradoxical strategies (Part #18)

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"Reformers, critics of institutions, consultants in innovation, people in short who 'want to get something done', often fail to see this point. They cannot understand why their strictures, advice or demands do not result in effective change. They expect either to achieve a measure of success in their own terms or to be flung off the premises. But an ultra-stable system (like a social institution)... has no need to react in either of these ways. It specializes in equilibrial readjustment, which is to the observer a secret form of change requiring no actual alteration in the macro-systemic characteristics that he is trying to do something about."

Stafford Beer.The Cybernetic Cytoblast - management itself.
(Chairman's Address to the International Cybernetic Congress. September 1969)