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As the coronavirus presents new challenges for organizations, most leaders are dealing with too many unknowns as they make rapid, high-quality decisions. At the best of times, leaders already lack adequate knowledge, expertise, and experience to tackle complex, multi-dimensional challenges on their own. Now, when so much is going on and all of it is changing so quickly, they can’t possibly know enough.

Systems science explains why. The Law of Requisite Variety states that: “Only variety destroys variety.” In the context of the current crisis, this means that only a group of people with the right mix of job functions, geographies, business units, hierarchical levels, backgrounds, expertise, authority, and stake can collectively match the complexity of what’s going on around them. So, in order to confront the complexity of the current crisis, leaders must assemble a high-variety team of people from in and around their organization to accomplish three things.