I want to argue that connectedness is the fundamental feature
of successful systems.
I also wish to posit that connectedness is a fundamental feature
of failing systems.
The difference between success and failure is a matter of “coupling.” You may think of coupling defined as “how
things are connected.”
Connectedness sounds like risky business, why not just avoid
it?
Consider almost anything you can think of – without connectedness,
it is inconsequential... The best content in the universe not distributed is
certainly not king [“content is king”]. A lone transistor, the foundation of our modern, technology assisted
world is itself nothing useful unless connected to many other transistors. Neurons, businesses, computer systems,
communities, examples abound: nothing
much interesting happens until there is connectedness.
Why is this? Connectedness
brings on what we call “network effects.” Network effects are basically the appearance or emergence of new
properties of a thing (a whole) that none or only some of the involved parts
share. So the saying goes: “The whole is
greater then the sum of its parts.” You
may imagine that a crowd has properties that an individual does not, a brain
properties that a neuron does not, a circuit properties that an electrical
component does not and so on and so on.
Clearly connectedness is “good” thing.
If connectedness is so great than why do we find so many
examples in which failure seems directly related to “this being connected to
that.” Why to business units want
autonomy? Why do programmers dread “spaghetti
code?” What are the short comings of public transportation? Air conditioners, automobiles and aerosols
cause climate change? Clearly connectedness
can be troublesome stuff. Not all
network effects are “good” or “desirable.”
Making the network work for you:
The key to prosperity is the creation of so-called “virtuous
cycles” – catalytic processes that build, one iteration upon another. Each
additional input’s potential magnified and managed by presence of others.
Magnified and Managed?
In order to for a catalytic process to be “virtuous”, it
must not produce unwanted effects. Chain
reactions taken to extremes can be devastating. Think global warming. The design
of the atom bomb leverages a chain reaction to unleash in terrible violence the
power behind the elegance of E=MC^2. Feedback is the processes of taking the output of a system and “feeding”
it back in to the system as input. It is
uncontrolled feedback that almost certainly leads to undesirable outcomes. Experience with feedback has taught us that we
must include gates, valves if you will, that allow us not to accept the
feedback in to a system as input when we have reached certain thresholds. Systems that have this ability are generally
capable of balancing themselves. You may
not that our planets ecosystem is in constant search of balance – good or bad
for human survival. Thus it is up to us to consider with great care of the
network effects, the pressures we put upon the Earth.
We understand that in order for one thing to be influenced, magnified
and also managed by the presence of other “nodes” or members of the network, it
must be connected to them. The secret to
deep management of the network is in the coupling of on thing to another. It at the point of coupling the nature/processes
of systems turns from virtue to vicious.
The absence of connectedness is almost certainly a recipe
for failure. Traversal of the landscape
of connectedness is to dance with care, the subtle balance between prosperity
and devastation. In order to leverage network effects we must of course have a
network. In order to make sure that all
network effects are “desirable” we must examine how things are connected to,
not connected to, and are “gated with” one another.
I’ll
be back in a bit with a closer look at coupling.
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