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BruceHolland

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THE WORLD IS A GREAT DEAL SIMPLER THAN WE THINK

This point is being made more and more often in recent books on science and physics. As Stephen Wolfram says in A New Kind Of Science: "Whenever a phenomenon is encountered that seems complex it is taken almost for granted that the phenomenon must be the result of some underlying mechanism that is itself complex. But my discovery that simple programs can produce great complexity makes it clear that this is not in fact correct."

It seems that almost all complex systems are actually made up of very simple parts repeated over and over again. If you think of ants, the complex structure that we see as a colony is actually many simple individuals self organising in to a bigger more complex system. The human body is one of the most complex systems known in the universe and yet it is basically a colony of simple individual cells self organising themselves into something infinitely stronger than any of the individual cells. Wellington is a complex system of individuals (like you and me) who self organise themselves into a community. The same comments could be made for countries, companies, teams, the internet, the economy and any other living system you can think of.

When thinking about how these things self organise one is tempted to assume that the process must be very complicated whereas in actual fact it is ridiculously simple. In all cases it seems that the individuals self organise through simple interactions (feedback) between immediate neighbours. Group behaviour emerges that is distinct from the behaviour of any one of the individuals.

Over the last ten years, mostly in Virtual Group Business Consultants, I have experimented with the rules each of us need to follow in our interaction with each other in business. I'm not sure we've got them exactly right but we are getting very close.