That's closer I think. There's little point to agility for a little fish after it has been swallowed. All that helps then is making excuses... briefly. Agility only helps if you sense the 'disturbance' and avoid the attack entirely. Derivatives are long range indicators of out of model events approaching.
Phil Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry -----Original Message----- From: "glen e. p. ropella" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Mon, 28 Apr 2008 10:32:51 To:The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] recap on Rosen -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 phil henshaw wrote: > The 'symptom' I was referring to was being caught flat footed without a > model to warn you about the approach of major environmental change. It's not clear to me what you and Marcus are arguing about... But I'll offer the only real insight I've gained over the past few years. [grin] There is only one way to prepare for potentially catastrophic change: agility. We can, post hoc, find examples where an entity (lineage, organization, organism, etc) is pre-adapted for some change such that it _seemed_ like that entity somehow predicted the change. But this isn't an effective tactic. Complex systems are unpredictable (by definition) in the concrete. The only way to be prepared for some unspecified, truly novel, abstractly named "change" is to be as agile as possible. And the best way to develop agility is to rapidly swap out "vignettes" (scenarios, use cases, aspects, stories, models) on a regular basis. The point is not to make attempts to ensure that your suite of vignettes contains a semblance of the coming change, however. The point is to smear the risk by practicing/training in as many different vignettes as possible. And the only way to do this is by continually maintaining multiple models of reality, all the while staying agnostic about the meaning and usefulness any of those models. You don't commit to any one model as the Truth if you want to remain agile. Of course, in stable times, exploitation (commitment) is the rule and exploration is the exception. But in unstable times, exploration is the rule and exploitation is the exception. The trick is to be willing to sacrifice your exploitative efforts when the landscape starts to destabilize. The committed end up dying because their, once true enough, convictions are no longer true enough. This is why small businesses are the heart and soul of capitalism/liberalism and why it's more agile than other organizational strategies. The high attrition rate of small businesses allows us to balance exploration and exploitation. When times are stable we grow big behemoth exploiters. When times become more chaotic, those behemoths come crashing down and us little guys scramble and wander like ants, with all our various deviant models and expectations of the world, exploring the dynamic landscape and hoping to stumble into a niche and become the next behemoth exploiter. Then we hope to hoard enough resources to skate through the next period of instability. The trouble with applying this to "sustainability" is that we define "sustainable" in terms of human comforts, wants, and needs. What I think Rosen would try to justify is the idea that we _cannot_ engineer a world that sustains _human_ comforts, wants, and needs. A sustainable ("living") system can only be designed holistically, from the inside. Any design based on external or sliced up and extracted aspects/purposes will eventually fail (or grow out of "control"). "Humanity" is an abstract and pitifully impoverished _slice_ of Gaia (for lack of a better term). So any design we put in place to preserve the system from the perspective of the human slice will eventually fail or mutate into something not so human friendly. Note that I'm _merely_ arguing from that perspective. I don't personally believe it wholeheartedly. The only part I do believe is that agility is the key to handling novelty and multi-modeling is the key to maintaining agility (as well as _generating_ novelty). - -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-219-3846, http://tempusdictum.com A government which robs Peter to pay Paul, can always count on the support of Paul -- George Bernard Shaw -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFIFgpDpVJZMHoGoM8RAls6AJ0W4AHcuSgus9c+FlazwtaDq6tXsgCeNLtt 8SfCOG7wvVA+a9G7u5ar9rQ= =cZOR -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
