Emergence

In an earlier post I was complaining about the Washington Area traffic. The nation's capital is also the site of capital traffic jams. Highways are shut down due to construction or all but one lane is blocked off and a long line of cars are burning gas and waiting patiently to get through. Very quickly like water pressure finds the weak point in a submarine's hull, the traffic finds an exit to some side road that runs through a quiet residential neighborhood. Soon all the cars are pouring through roads that are single lane wide and riddled with stop signs and a 25 mile an hour limit.


The careful well planned highway capable of carrying six lanes of traffic at 60 miles or more an hour lies idle as the side roads are choked with traffic far beyond their carrying capacity. What is happening here? The drivers are exhibiting emergent behavior. If one were to magically wave a wand and expand the by lanes to turn them into highways, they would soon become the "new normal" until the old highway comes back into service. Maybe the old highway may never be used again.

I am a fan of the late author Michael Crichton. Only now as I am slowly beginning to understand emergent phenomena, I am beginning to realize that emergent behaviors are a thread that run through most of his books - be it a virus mutation in the Andromeda Strain, the adaptive learning of the human brain in The Terminal Man or the emergent behavior of prehistoric animals brought back to life in Jurassic Park.

I look at nature and I see emergence everywhere. The termite hill in the distance is a product of emergent building as are ant hills, bee hives, and bird's nests. Did they have a static plan when the insects and animals who built them started? Or did the hill or hive or nest get built as they went along? Did the icicle always grow at the same place (crystalline structures are fractal, but the overall shape of the crystal may be a result of lopsided growth).

Emergent behavior, speaking loosely is an unplanned evolution of behavior that results from many factors, often unanticipated. Emergent behavior defeats the static planning and the estimation of dynamic calculations that form the bedrock of architecture work. We as architects are trying to plan the various parameters of a system based on assumptions of growth and evolution and capacity limits and topological structures that reflect the world as we understand it today and our assumptions for the next say, three, five or even ten years. Emergent behaviors tend to wreak havoc on this planned and organized way of being. Emergent behaviors are opportunistic. Emergent behaviors are driven by unforeseen constraints, an urge to get ahead, impatience with the static status quo and a host of other motivating factors.

Emergent behaviors seem to exacerbate when there is an explicit disconnect between the "swarm" and the resources. I had observed behavioral differences between customers at fast food restaurants in Germany where you have to ask and pay for ketchup and jam versus customers in the United States, where these condiments are set out in piles of packets for customers to help themselves.

I am looking forward to doing more research on "emergent architectures" and the phenomenon of emergence as it relates to systems engineering to develop ways to manage the evolution of architecture topologies to match emergent behaviors rather than stay static with the assumptions of yesterday ill suited to the behaviors of today. The area of cloud computing is a domain that is akin to the fast food example I have mentioned earlier.

Sure-Fire Crystal Ball Gazing

It is always interesting how I stumble upon some great thinking and writing by serendipity but rarely have the wherewithal at hand (pencil, paper, laptop, iPad, whiteboard) to ponder and tease and work those thoughts into coherence and direction for my professional and personal life. This was one time when I was by my computer while I was reading an extremely pertinent article for all of us who are in enterprise architecture, technology strategy and the crystal ball business.


I was reading the April 2012 issue of Smithsonian magazine and came upon an article on FUTURISM by the celebrated science fiction writer and author of Tomorrow Now, Bruce Sterling. Aside from the extremely witty and apt quotations, his observations on forecasting the future were very interesting. His thesis is that you don't need to be clairvoyant to predict the future.

If individuals have never encountered modernity, then you can tell them about real genuine things that already are happening NOW. For them, that is the future.

As a person interested in thought patterns, process patterns and information patterns, I lapped up the classification scheme used by futurists to predict the future

1. Statistical: analyze the volumes of hard data collected by businesses and government and sift out underlying trends. It's demographic research, not clairvoyance, that predicts that a new Starbucks coffee shop will appear in a heavily foot trafficked urban locale.
2. Reportorial: The future is often a dark mystery to people because they haven't invested the effort in finding out what's likely to happen. Some simple shoe leather spadework (interviews, search engines, social networks) coupled with basic questions of who, what, when, where and why can be of great use here. (This method is the basis for what has become known as "Open Source Intelligence")
3. Historical Analogy: Sterling believes is radically inaccurate, yet also dangerously seductive, because people are profoundly attached to the seeming stability of the past. In practice, though our ideas of what has already happened are scarcely more solid that our predictions of tomorrow. If futurism is visionary, history is revisionary.
4. Scenario Forecasting: What Sterling calls a set of strange rituals which assists bewildered clients who can't frankly admit to themselves what they already know. The job is to encourage mental change through various forms of playacting and rehearsal.
5. The fifth and final method, Sterling believes is the most effective of all. If individuals have never encountered modernity, then you can tell them about real, genuine things that already are happening now - for them, that is the future.

Put another way, Sterling argues, the future is already upon us, but that is happening in niches. The inhabitants of that niche may be saint-like pioneers with practical plans for applying technology to eliminate hunger or preserve the environment. Far more commonly they are weird people with weird ideas and practices and are objects of ridicule.

Sterling cites the example of the French cartoonist Albert Robida who he claims is probably the greatest futurist of the 19th century who predicted all the advances of the twentieth. His cartoons depicted the use of electricity, flying machines, the emancipation of women, and other then far out prospects. Sterling also wryly observes that "Even the cleverest, most deeply insightful forecast becomes paper thin when time passes it by. Visions of the future are destined to fade with the dawn of tomorrow."

There are a few well phrased quotations buried in Sterling's extremely readable prose:

"Tomorrow obeys a futurist the way lightning obeys a weatherman."

"If futurism is visionary, history is revisionary."

"Visions of the future are destined to fade with the dawn of tomorrow."

Robida's cartoons are excerpted at Smithsonian.com/robida.

Estimate That!

The other day, I was at the store and the guy at the counter rang up the sale. An awkward $10.18 Meaning, I was going to haul back a few dollar bills and 82 cents in jingling, heavy change. Determined to forestall an increase in the metal payload in my pockets, I fished around my pockets and to my delight, I found two dimes. With a triumphant smirk, I put the two dimes on the sales counter along with a $20 bill. And waited and waited, as the poor guy first looked at his left hand holding the twenty dollar bill and then the right holding two dimes and finally at the cash register display that showed $10.18. Finally at peace, wearing a smile, he gave me back the two dimes, rang the sale for a $20 payment and gave me nine dollar bills and shot the small change of 82 cents through the coin chute.


Other than suffering the inconvenience I had hoped to avoid with my twenty cent gambit, the deeper regret that surfaces is that we are not teaching our children to estimate and carry and manipulate numbers in their heads. We are not teaching our children how to approximate and come up with ballpark numbers that are often close but not exact. Modern technology has reduced the problem of calculation to the silicon chip and a few deft finger strokes and the illusion of perfect knowledge and computation - in much the same way that the Internet has dumbed down the amount of knowledge we need to carry in our heads because the facts are simply an iPad or smart phone away - or the way in which managers blindly believe in the numbers on a spreadsheet without an inkling or approximation of what the numbers should be - or how we remember friends' telephone number by their auto-dialing prefix on our smart phones.

Nowhere is this blind faith more evident than the executive dashboard - a panoply of software display "gauges" that tells the executive that all her projects are in good health - as the green colors clearly showed. Or the "analytics" that are now freely available to the executive who wants to serve himself with the conclusions and does not want to bother himself with the supporting data.

The conventional management wisdom "to measure is to manage" and its logical extension "to measure accurately is to manage effectively" must give way, in a constantly changing world where measurements are both impossible to make and where accuracy in a single dimension has no meaning in the context of many dimensions, to the maxim "To estimate well is to assess, and to assess is to understand where to lead". Ballpark knowledge is often just enough for effective leadership.

Estimation is like an exoskeleton for the mind - just as an exoskeleton allows a human being to carry superhuman loads, or walk superhuman distances, estimation and approximation stretches the ability of the mind to fathom the vast deep of the unknown. Estimation and approximation allows the thinker to draw the sketches of hypothesis as patterns that come from thought and observation.