Marian Mazur, “O potrzebie cybernetycznych badań rozwoju” (‘On the Need for Cybernetic Research into Development’), Problemy Inwestowania i Rozwoju 1966, vol. I, no. 1, pp. 1–4 (the journal of an institute dealing with the organisation of the construction industry).
Can one speak of development in general, and not only of the development of something? Mazur believes one can, just as metrology speaks of measurement in general, and he proposes a general formulation: development is the evolution of an autonomous system towards ever better states of functional equilibrium, and regression, evolution towards ever worse ones. He gives the name evolution to the mere shifting of this equilibrium over time, which is unavoidable because no process is completely reversible. The short article, written for readers concerned with investment, ends with a practical conclusion: research into development costs little compared with its benefits.
At the heart of the text are two criteria of a ‘better’ state. Absolute development is growth of the available energy and of output, that is, of strength in relation to the environment; relative development is growth of the ratio of output to input, that is, of internal resilience. In an organism the measure of the latter is the share of coordination power in total power, alongside idle power and working power; a similar indicator can be calculated for an enterprise. The criteria may diverge, and growth without an improvement in efficiency leads to overgrowth.
A community differs from an organism in that a superior second-order homeostasis operates above the homeostasis of its members. The evolution of a community is easier to influence, but stimuli too far removed from its current equilibrium are rejected like a disturbance, so decisions taken without knowledge of this mechanism miss their target. One of the examples concerns income: growth regarded as a success may in fact be a loss when measured against the optimum that was attainable.
The author builds his answer descriptively, without formulae, out of cybernetic concepts. Some of them (feedback, the homeostat, functional equilibrium, coordination power) are set out in Cybernetyczna teoria układów samodzielnych (‘A Cybernetic Theory of Autonomous Systems’), published in the same year, whereas that book contains neither the distinction between absolute and relative development nor second-order homeostasis. The theme of optimisation returns in Cybernetyka a zarządzanie (‘Cybernetics and Management’, 1969), and the homeostasis of a community in the paper “Homeostaza społeczna” (‘Social Homeostasis’, 1983). The entry pages for idle power and working power, the homeostat and functional equilibrium give later definitions from Cybernetyka i charakter (‘Cybernetics and Character’, 1976), in translation from Mazur's Polish, and these are not always identical with the 1966 approach.