Hey, this is kind of fun and also quite exciting. I also need to be
careful, otherwise this will end up as an unacceptably long post.
In LO Digest #1063, there was an attempt to start a new thread on, rather
appropriately, "Spontaneity" (LO10735). In LO Digest #1064, there was a
raft of stuff on an established thread, "Insecurity => Creativity". It is
also apparent that some of us take The Digest which provides an holistic
perspective of the LO, whilst others use the WWW which is more
"thread-oriented" and, thus, more specific with an enhanced content in the
form of diagrams. At the same time, my impression is that the
thread-orientation means that the holistic perspective and relationships
between different threads may sometimes be missed.
I was suddenly struck by just how like a "complex adaptive system" the LO
is: and how this has implications for "Spontaneity", "Insecurity =>
Creativity" and learning organisations.
The Santa Fe Institute views a "complex adaptive systems" as a system in
which many agents (i.e., us) are acting in parallel and the environment in
which they operate is influenced by the way in which they react to each
other. As a result, nothing in the environment is fixed.
The control of the system tends to be highly dispersed - for example,
there is no master neurone in the brain, nor is there a master cell within
a developing embryo. The LO is similar since Rick moderates and guides,
but others contribute to the content.
Coherent behaviour in an adaptive system arises from collaboration and
competition between the agents themselves. The system has many levels of
organisation with agents at one level serving as the building blocks for
agents at a higher level. The system is constantly revising and
rearranging its building blocks as it gains experience. (This has
interesting parallels with "The Principal Of Subsidiarity").
Complex adaptive systems anticipate the future but this business of
anticipation and prediction is encoded into the system in terms of "if
.... then .... rules". In a business context, this is consistent with
Schein's view of culture. (See LO10636 and LO10700).
Finally, complex adaptive systems typically have many niches, each one of
which can be exploited by an agent adapted to fill the niche (through
their expertise or contribution to a thread). The very act of filling a
niche creates other niches. Thus, new opportunities (for posts) are always
created by the system. Interestingly, Confucius observed that: "a man of
humanity is one who, in seeking to establish himself, finds a foothold for
others, and who, desiring attainment for himself, helps others to attain".
Overall, a complex adaptive system is always in transition. The only time
it is in equilibrium is when it dies. Since the space of possibilities is
so vast, agents can never optimise their fitness or utility. All they can
do is change and improve themselves relative to what other agents are
doing. As a result, the systems are characterised by "perpetual novelty".
In the early 1970s Professor John Holland observed that an adaptive agent
is constantly playing a game of prediction based on feedback with its
environment. Ordinarily, prediction is based on an explicit "mental model"
of the world. Many psychologists are convinced that mental models are the
basis of all conscious thought.
Holland felt the concept of prediction and mental models ran far deeper
than this. All complex systems - whether they are economies, minds, or
organisms - build models that allow them to anticipate the world. Thus the
problem that intrigued him was to determine where these models came from.
Since many of the mental models are not conscious, for example a
nutrient-seeking bacterium, they cannot come from a master programmer.
Therefore he concluded that the models must emerge from feedback from the
environment.
The truth of this assertion was proved by the development of classifier
systems. The underlying principles of these systems is that knowledge can
be expressed in terms of mental structures that behave very much like
rules, that these rules are in competition, so that experience causes
useful rules to grow stronger and unhelpful rules to grow weaker and that
plausible new rules are generated from combinations of old rules.
This, in turn, has many parallels with Hebb's work on "The Organisation Of
Behaviour" and the functioning of the brain and nervous system. (This is
also the basis of today's neural network computer programs). Hebb's
fundamental idea was that the brain is continuously making changes to the
points where nerve impulses jump from one cell to the next. These are
known as "synapses". Any external impulse leaves a trace on the neural
network by strengthening all the synapses that lie along its path. As a
result, a network that starts out at random rapidly organises itself.
Experience (through posts) accumulates through positive feedback (in the
form of new posts from us agents). Frequently used threads grow stronger
(e.g., Wheatley Dialogue, Dilbert, Insecurity => Creativity). Those
threads that are not used become weaker and die. This selective
strengthening of the threads causes agents to organise themselves into
"agent assemblies" - thread-readers on the WWW. Hebb referred to these
"agent assemblies" as "cell assemblies" and considered them to be the
basic building block of information. However, they are not distinct and
overlap with other cell assemblies (through "The Digest"). As a result
activating one assembly will, in turn, activate others which leads to
larger assemblies and concepts, and more complex behaviours.
To me, this Hebbian model is also a good model of organisations and how
they learn. IMHO creativity is a function of positive feedback from other
agents in a community of practice, not as a result of insecurity. I will
develop this further in another post as this one is already too long.
However, en passant, I would just add that more people in the LO are
interested in the failings of neo-classical economics than I thought. The
economy is another example of a "complex adaptive system". All of the
above provides another way of thinking about Brian Arthur's work on
"positive returns and path dependence" in an economy, and also the way in
which markets operate.
Sorry about the length of this post, but I would never have written it if
I had not received so much positive feedback to my earlier ones.
It is going to be fascinating to see what happens to the emergent thread
on "Spontaneity" and why.
Best wishes to you all.
Julian
Julian Macnamara
Glandore Associates
100317,2417@compuserve.com
<http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/glandore>
--Julian Macnamara <100317.2417@CompuServe.COM>
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>