Basic models of flocking behavior are controlled by three simple rules:

1. Separation - avoid crowding neighbors (short range repulsion)
2. Alignment - steer towards average heading of neighbors
3. Cohesion - steer towards average position of neighbors (long range attraction)

With these three simple rules, the flock moves in an extremely realistic way, creating complex motion and interaction that would be extremely hard to create otherwise.

via wikipedia

This is a very good post that starts to find the rules for deep group work on tough problems - IE Netflix prize work - at its heart are Nature's Rules for Flocking - here they are. As with all things Natural - the rules are few and simple but drive huge complexity.

You know you have shit rules when they are many and complicated.

In this video we will look more deeply at the Mapping Process

There is no greater predictor of how a person or an organization will turn out over time is culture or the aggregation of values.

So if we can see what is a healthy culture versus what we have we can do a gap analysis.

All in nature has a pattern. So if we can see what the pattern is for the intangible – culture – we can see where we are and where we are going.

With a map we have a starting point – Galileo and Pasteur gave us a fantastic starting point for a map for values and culture.

So if we can find this “map” we will have a good chance. Here in the next video is the starting point for a Map.

Here we look at “Seeing” the New Map and its power. Such as Galileo saw how the heavens really worked. Pasteur saw how germs worked.

So Stuart has “seen” that it is the Intangibles that drive what happens to people.

That there is a pattern to them that like the heavens or germs can allow us to make predictive thoughts and assumptions.

The Starting Point is our culture – so what are the parts and connections in culture that will help us.

This is a Copernican POV – we put the intangibles first not the tangibles.

Stuart introduces the idea that within human culture there are only 3 main “parts” just as DNA has only 4 and most complex systems have only 3 rules.

So the system has a “simple” starting point. The complexity comes from the many interactions.

Just as color only has 3 primary colors – but an infinite number of colors and shades that are derived from these three.

We will soon talk about these three and will start with Nurturing

Values are not chosen by you – they are you. Lining up to your real values is how you become most effective and grow in a healthy way.

Here Stuart offers us the hope that we can make a map of culture. Maps do not mean that you are guaranteed to reach your destination - but they do increase your chances.

With no map and no navigational aids, you are truly lost.

We will show you later that you can quite easily find out where you are and where you should end up. We will show you the main features of the map - but in the end like all mariners, your will have to sail your own ship as well as you can.

The more you do it - the better you will be. But there is always THAT storm out there!

What might be a outcome of Twitter Lists? I think it may be a step nearer to “Emergence” in some key areas.

This slide shows what happens to children’s language as they approach Emergence in the 3rd picture on the right.

I think our use of Twitter can track this trajectory. At first it was me and a few friends that I knew from my face to face or blogging life prior to Twitter.

Then in the last 3 years, I have added a few more friends from the Twitterverse. These in my case have come mainly from Pub Media and from the Bryant Park Gang that Morphed into the Planet Money Gang.

I exclude myself from the many who merely add thousands of folks indiscriminately. I have added several hundred of these but I find that only 1 or 2 have been people that I have learned to care about or interacted with in a good way. The Dunbar number is not a nice to have but a Rule!

What I have immediately seen from the new lists that are emerging around the two and related areas of my interest – the PM/BPP Gang and Pub Media – is that I have some real gaps. Those that created the lists whom I like care for and admire have people that I don’t know and who don’t know me.

But it is highly probable that we will get on – your friend is my friend!

So we move toward phase 3. When we get a critical mass of Trust – Affection – Attraction then don’t we get close to “Emergence” being possible?

Andy Carvin’s NPR News List would surely make an incredible starting point for more experiment – now add to it his Pub Camp list and you have the 300 Spartans!

This then is power.

A large, talented and also diverse group that has a large bond of trust.

Such a group can surely take on the “Persians” of our time?

Did you cringe when he reminded us of how we usually plan? Did it make sense to be sensible?

Most of us hope that for every problem there is a cause and a solution that has a direct link - poor health needs more medicine. Poor educational outcomes - more teachers and tests. Poor economy - more credit and so on. The world of politics is especially prone to making these simple connections. Most large organizations have not time for anything else.

But today most of our problems are at best Complex - meaning that there can be no direct causal linkage. What is causing global warming? How should I as a teen prepare for the unknown future? What is causing my business to fail? Why am I depressed? And so on.

The only way to find answers to these kinds of problems is to look for patterns. We find them best not in evidence and in statistical data but in stories. When we see enough story, a pattern will emerge. Now we have NOT a cause and effect but a Pattern where we can see the tendencies or probabilities emerge. For instance, we know that a certain kind of parenting will tend to produce the best chance of a child being on a trajectory for reaching optimal development. We know what this pattern is. But this is not a sure thing and a child who does not have this optimal parenting might not be condemned - but mostly is.

Today many of our challenges go beyond Complex. They are Chaotic. Such as what is the sustainable future for Media or Food Systems? What is a new kind of Credit that works for most people?

Here we can only send out "Expeditions" to the Future - experiment. For the answer CANNOT be known by analysis or forethought. Once enough experimentation is done, then a pattern drawn from the stories will Emerge.

So for all of us that are interested in finding a sustainable food or media system, there are two steps.

Experiment widely - follow the stories of the experiments and look for patterns.

If you want to fail - it's easy - keep trying the old ways harder!

Emergence 3 – The Rules – A Science – Our Only Chance?

by Rob Paterson

October 6, 2009 at 11:11 am · Filed under Emergent

Once before, at a time of great change – the Ending of the Ice Age – Mankind used Emergence to not only come through but to take a new place on the planet. Don’t we face the same kind of challenge today? Is not Emergence our best chance?

We have so little time that if we are to face our challenges directly and use Emergence as a process, that we have to know what to do. We have to know the science and hence the predictable rules?

Because we know the rules for electromagnetism, we can use them to change our world. My bet is that we we know the rules for how best to use the social energy of people, amplified by social media, we may change the world even more than when we first amplified our group potential when we acquired complex language.

Then we created consciousness.

We were able to discuss novelty into being – the very essence of Emergence. And for most of this time, all of this happened like this – face to face in small groups.

What might happen, if we can expand our circle from face to face to a global conversation but with the same intimacy? If the result 60,000 years ago was so momentous then – what might be our destiny now?

With our place in the world in such jeopardy, global warming, resource shortages, peak oil, political logjams – we don’t seem to be making any progress with our current way of “seeing” and “acting”. I wonder if our only hope to “see” our place more clearly and to “discover” solution that will work is to press for a larger process of Emergence. If we could harness a global conversation, what might be the result.

In parts 1 and parts 2 – I have done my best to offer a directional approach to this voyage of discovery.

Now we come to the hard part. What are the rules. For if social energy is as real as electro-magnetism, it will have rules.

That once we know them, we can make a break from mere speculation, techno babble and kumbya and design in the full power of social media to make this great link up that it offers. Then we can get to work.

Here is the concluding part of this 3 part series where I do my best to show how we might use emergence as a product of social software to do important things.

In my first post in this series I proposed that if we use the ideas of Emergence we might find the larger opportunity in Social Software – that it may help us solve many of our intractable problems.

That Social Software – if used properly – might have the same explosive impact on human society and our connection to the rest of the planet that the acquisition of complex language did 60,000 years ago.

If you are still with me – let’s remind ourselves of what drives emergence generally and then see if we can find the model for humans and then how Social Media may fit. What would using Social Software “Properly” mean?

To have Emergence you need 3 elements:

• You need some kind of “Container” - An Environment that is optimal for the Emergence in question. This can be physical such as the ideal environment for an Acorn to reach its potential as a tree Or it can be physical and energetic such as the physical and the social environment needed for a baby to be set on her way to reach her potential.

• You need a lot of “Optimal Contact Points“ – Emergence is all about patterns. To have patterns you need many points of connection. Computers are not able to become conscious because they don’t have enough synaptic connections. They have a few hundred – the human brain has billions. A Human with too small a social world cannot reach her potential. 3 birds cannot make a flock. A few breezes don’t make a hurricane. A few stars do not make a galaxy. No flow in water and you cannot have a vortex. When man had no complex language, he could not communicate widely enough to make much technical progress. He could not create patterns. A father might show his son how to carve a hand ax but an emergent breakthrough like a throwing stick or a bow and arrow would be beyond them. For without complex language enabling abstractions and enabling a large circle of participants the creation of patterns – abstract thinking and design – cannot happen. For then, if it could not be seen and copied it could not happen

• You need a few rules that both shape the pattern and also keep it coherent. As we learn more about complexity, we are astounded by how few the rules are and how often they are so simple. With computers it is easy to model bird flocking now. But, to get the pattern, we also need the process of iteration and we need a computer to do the math. But to model, we need to know the rules. Nature always has rules. Nature’s rules always have a mathematical base. We now know the rules of Electro Magnetism. There will be rules for Social Energy as well. They will be few. They will be fractal. They will need to be iterated. This is not Kumbya – there will be a science here.

So can we posit what the essence of these 3 requirements may be to offer us a chance of seeing the true workings and the real potential for Social Software? I think we can. In this remaining part of this post, I will point directionally to where I see the answers. In the next post I am going to speculate about the details.

So stripped back to the essentials I think that we can see the Container and the Connections in the following single picture.

In this post I deal with the design of the optimal human system for Emergence.
In the 3rd post this weekend I will offer my best shot at the rules.

Beyond disrupting organizations and value as we know it, what is going to be the deep result of the use of Social Media? Many of us see it as at least making organizations more effective – faster, more informed etc. But I wonder. My growing feeling is that the widespread use of Social Media might soon enable us to gain the benefit of “Emergence”.

What you might ask is “Emergence”. Here is an example of how each of us as humans acquire the scale free use of language:

Here is the opening of a 3 part series on Emergence. I think I can see how its rules co joined with Social Software may help us take another evolutionary jump as we did when we acquired language itself 60,000 years ago.

The lesson of the Netflix Prize

by Rob Paterson

September 30, 2009 at 11:35 am · Filed under Emergence, Emergent

For those that do not know – Netflix held a multi year competition to find a better search and ratings system – many teams competed.

In the final stretch the breakthrough came when many of the teams joined forces – the big difference was made by adding teams that up to then had “got it wrong”. A great story of this competition is on Wired.