I’m happy to be back here guest-blogging on the Cognitive Edge. I thought it would be good to start my two-week stint by sharing a little of my learning process with Dave Snowden. I first heard him talk — and offer the analogy of birds flocking to describe emergent behavior — at a Delphi Group IKMS conference in 1998. This past Saturday, I accompanied my family to the Boston Museum of Science, where the Modeling exhibit contains the Virtual Fish Tank (the link takes you to the website, where you can see the tank).
The Virtual Fish Tank is a wall-size screen with an animated model of four types of fish (Phil A, Sharky, Flash, and Angel), a deep-sea diver, a food source. There are several computer terminals. Two let you build a fish (as you can do on the web site.) Four additional terminals each control the behavior of one of the fish:
It’s fun to watch how the fish congregate or disperse depending on how their “controllers” are pushing the buttons. (I’m afraid that when there are a lot of small children, the buttons do get pressed, a lot, randomly.)
I found a quieter station where it is possible to set the rules for the flocking of birds. You can set the rules and see what happens to the birds. Each specific behavior has one or more rules associated with it. You have to know, or guess, which rules to select. For flocking, three rules (I may not have them exact):
For roosting, one rule: stay three bird-lengths away from your nearest neighbor
Simulations are great fun to watch, and it’s helpful when the rules are known because of exhaustive and specific research. In research, the behaviors come down to separation, alignment, cohesion, and avoidance. How to translate this into human network terms?
My (very preliminary) thinking:
Hmmm… anyway, Dave set me thinking about all this just 10 years ago, and I’m still learning.
Cognitive Edge Ltd. & Cognitive Edge Pte. trading as The Cynefin Company and The Cynefin Centre.
© COPYRIGHT 2023
This has been an exciting week for us. We're in the final stages of an ...
I spent most of my career working for a company that was full of smart, ...
Leave a Reply