About twenty years ago I was privileged to have a 1-1 airport conversation with James "Connections" Burke. (I'd escorted him there from a speaking gig.) At the time he was interested in ecosystems, and as I'd done a graduate degree in systems science and worked on environmental monitoring projects, that became the topic of conversation.
In the course of the chat, Burke came up with approximately the following statement, which has stayed with me since:
"Systems dump excess energy in the form of structure."
It may not sound like much, but it's rather profound. It essentially says that a system operating in surplus won't stay so, but instead will act to build up its own structure at the expense of the surplus. Looked at the right way, it's a nutshell explanation for the existence of life - an eruption of structure in response to excess solar energy.
I doubt the meat of the statement was original with Burke, but given his gift for a turn of phrase, the formulation may have been. At any rate, I've never seen it elsewhere. It keeps coming up in my own thinking and writing, so I've decided to memorialize it as "Burke's Law of Metadynamics" for reference by myself and anyone else who cares. The 'Burke' is obvious, the 'metadynamic' sets it aside from rules that operate within dynamic systems of fixed structure; it is a statement instead about the malleability of structure.
It's been long since I've done ecosystems work, so that's not the reason it keeps coming up. Experience has show me that the statement applies equally to human organizations and systems, particularly if you substitute 'wealth' by analogy to 'energy'. In that form it's a more succinct statement of several of John Gall's Laws of Systemantics.
I've used or partially quoted Burke's Law in a number of posts here and comments elsewhere, enough so that a single linkable explanation seems in order. Since I feel another such post coming on, here it is.