When management encounters complexity

This paper aims at showing how management has come to encounter the sciences of complexity. Therefore the various levels and domains of management are outlined which leverage from the study of complexity. This is not, however, a descriptive study. Rather, we focus on how management can benefit from knowing of the sciences of complexity. New tools and rods, new languages and approaches are sketched that show a radical shift in management leading from a once dependent discipline from physics and engineering, towards a biologically and ecologically permeated new management.Whereas the main concern for complexity consists in understanding complex phenomena and systems, at the end a number of successful applications of complexity to management and entrepreneurial consulting are considered

Persons Versus Brains: Biological Intelligence in Human Organisms

I go deep into the biology of the human organism to argue that the psychological features and functions of persons are realized by cellular and molecular parallel distributed processing networks dispersed throughout the whole body. Persons supervene on the computational processes of nervous, endocrine, immune, and genetic networks. Persons do not go with brains

The interpretations and uses of fitness landscapes in the social sciences

__Abstract__ This working paper precedes our full article entitled “The evolution of Wright’s (1932) adaptive field to contemporary interpretations and uses of fitness landscapes in the social sciences” as published in the journal Biology & Philosophy (http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10539-014-9450-2). The working paper features an extended literature overview of the ways in which fitness landscapes have been interpreted and used in the social sciences, for which there was not enough space in the full article. The article features an in-depth philosophical discussion about the added value of the various ways in which fitness landscapes are used in the social sciences. This discussion is absent in the current working paper. Th

Synergy between biology and systems resilience

Resilient systems have the ability to endure and successfully recover from disturbances by identifying problems and mobilizing the available resources to cope with the disturbance. Resiliency lets a system recover from disruptions, variations, and a degradation of expected working conditions. Biological systems are resilient. Immune systems are highly adaptive and scalable, with the ability to cope with multiple data sources, fuse information together, makes decisions, have multiple interacting agents, operate in a distributed manner over a multiple scales, and have a memory structure to facilitate learning. Ecosystems are resilient since they have the capacity to absorb disturbance and are able to tolerate the disturbances. Ants build colonies that are dispersed, modular, fine grained, and standardized in design, yet they manage to forage intelligently for food and also organize collective defenses by the property of resilience. Are there any rules that we can identify to explain the resilience in these systems? The answer is yes. In insect colonies, rules determine the division of labor and how individual insects act towards each other and respond to different environmental possibilities. It is possible to group these rules based on attributes. These attributes are distributability, redundancy, adaptability, flexibility, interoperability, and diversity. It is also possible to incorporate these rules into engineering systems in their design to make them resilient. It is also possible to develop a qualitative model to generate resilience heuristics for engineering system based on a given attribute. The rules seen in nature and those of an engineering system are integrated to incorporate the desired characteristics for system resilience. The qualitative model for systems resilience will be able to generate system resilience heuristics. This model is simple and it can be applied to any system by using attribute based heuristics that are domain dependent. It also provides basic foundation for building computational models for designing resilient system architectures. This model was tested on recent catastrophes like the Mumbai terror attack and hurricane Katrina. With the disturbances surrounding the current world this resilience model based on heuristics will help a system to deal with crisis and still function in the best way possible by depending mainly on internal variables within the system --Abstract, page iii

Collaborative learning and coordination across agency boundaries to tackle wicked problems

Conventional approaches to government are confounded by issues that cross agency, stakeholder, jurisdictional, and geopolitical boundaries. These open-ended and highly interdependent issues are often characterized in the literature as ‘wicked problems. Typically, policies and budgets are developed to align with organizational boundaries, making it difficult to bring the appropriate talent, knowledge and assets into an interagency approach to tackle the interdependencies of whatever wicked problem is at hand. Many governments have recognized the need for interagency coordination in the face of highly complex problems; and in response, there has been advocacy for improved approaches to increase collaboration and synchronized interagency working. However, without appreciating that the perspectives and values of the various government agencies and other stakeholders can vary widely, and often can be in conflict, interagency endeavors often start out to solve very different perceived problems. Furthermore, interagency constructs are frequently organized through periodic meetings and loose agreements. They do not develop concrete strategic and operational plans for how an integrated approach will be organized and implemented. The research described in this thesis was conducted to develop and evaluate a Systemic Intervention (boundary-exploring and multi-method) approach to designing interagency responses to wicked problems. This multi-method approach attempts to address many of the challenges to interagency design found in the literature. The Systemic Intervention approach was trialled on the wicked problem of international organized drug trafficking and its interface with local gangs in Chicago, USA. This wicked problem illustrates extreme complexity and the need for a cross-cutting design that cut across agencies, jurisdictions, and geographical boundaries. The research was conducted in two phases: (1) the creation of a common understanding of a wicked problem among multiple agencies using Boundary Critique and a new participatory Problem Structuring Method (PSM) called ‘Systemic Perspective Mapping’; and (2) the design of an interagency meta-organization using the Viable System Model (VSM), introduced to participants through a novel board game layout, so drug crime could be addressed at multiple scales. The research findings indicate that the combined use of Boundary Critique and Systemic Perspective Mapping was able to generate enough of a common understanding to provide a foundation for the design of an interagency organization. Also, the VSM Board Game effectively enabled multiple agency representatives to intimately interact with their representation of the V wicked problem and with each other in order to clearly delineate new agency responsibilities, communication mechanisms and channels, adaptive operations management, and an anticipatory function – all tailored to address the wicked problem they had structured as a group. The methodological approach developed in this research shows significant promise for transfer and adaptation to help tackle the design of interagency organizations for other wicked problems

Do organisms have an ontological status?

The category of ‘organism’ has an ambiguous status: is it scientific or is it philosophical? Or, if one looks at it from within the relatively recent field or sub-field of philosophy of biology, is it a central, or at least legitimate category therein, or should it be dispensed with? In any case, it has long served as a kind of scientific “bolstering” for a philosophical train of argument which seeks to refute the “mechanistic” or “reductionist” trend, which has been perceived as dominant since the 17th century, whether in the case of Stahlian animism, Leibnizian monadology, the neo-vitalism of Hans Driesch, or, lastly, of the “phenomenology of organic life” in the 20th century, with authors such as Kurt Goldstein, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Georges Canguilhem. In this paper I try to reconstruct some of the main interpretive ‘stages’ or ‘layers’ of the concept of organism in order to critically evaluate it. How might ‘organism’ be a useful concept if one rules out the excesses of ‘organismic’ biology and metaphysics? Varieties of instrumentalism and what I call the ‘projective’ concept of organism are appealing, but perhaps ultimately unsatisfying

Evolutionary Computation

This book presents several recent advances on Evolutionary Computation, specially evolution-based optimization methods and hybrid algorithms for several applications, from optimization and learning to pattern recognition and bioinformatics. This book also presents new algorithms based on several analogies and metafores, where one of them is based on philosophy, specifically on the philosophy of praxis and dialectics. In this book it is also presented interesting applications on bioinformatics, specially the use of particle swarms to discover gene expression patterns in DNA microarrays. Therefore, this book features representative work on the field of evolutionary computation and applied sciences. The intended audience is graduate, undergraduate, researchers, and anyone who wishes to become familiar with the latest research work on this field

Metaphors for cyber security.

This report is based upon a workshop, called 'CyberFest', held at Sandia National Laboratories on May 27-30, 2008. Participants in the workshop came from organizations both outside and inside Sandia. The premise of the workshop was that thinking about cyber security from a metaphorical perspective could lead to a deeper understanding of current approaches to cyber defense and perhaps to some creative new approaches. A wide range of metaphors was considered, including those relating to: military and other types of conflict, biological, health care, markets, three-dimensional space, and physical asset protection. These in turn led to consideration of a variety of possible approaches for improving cyber security in the future. From the proposed approaches, three were formulated for further discussion. These approaches were labeled 'Heterogeneity' (drawing primarily on the metaphor of biological diversity), 'Motivating Secure Behavior' (taking a market perspective on the adoption of cyber security measures) and 'Cyber Wellness' (exploring analogies with efforts to improve individual and public health)