Menu

Self-Organizing Systems: A Tutorial in Complexity

May 29, 2004 By Uncategorized 3 Comments

I’m going to bring a little more focus in form to this weblog, mixing short posts in a more traditional weblog format with longer essays divided up into parts so you don’t get big long chunks of text to wade through.

And we begin with a paper called Self Organizing Systems: a tutorial in Complexity

This is a tutorial on the processes and patterns of organization in complex natural systems. No technical details are included in describing the models or theories used. Instead, I focus on the concepts of self-organization, complexity, complex adaptive systems, criticality, the edge of chaos and evolution as they pertain to the formation of coherent pattern and structure in nature.

The paper looks at mechanisms of self-organization (thermodynamically open, many parts with local interaction, nonlinear dynamics, and emergence) and then moves into complexity, chaos and evolution. It’s a great introduction to complex adaptive systems and a rich source for metaphors.

Applied intuition

May 29, 2004 By Uncategorized

In case you think that intuition is just some wacky new age concept with no place in a real world which demands reason and logic, consider the case of Stanislav Petrov who single handedly saved the world from nuclear devastation in 1983 on nothing more than a gut feeling:

It was Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov’?s duty to use computers and satellites to warn the Soviet Union if there were ever a nuclear missile attack by the United States. In the event of such an attack, the Soviet Union�?s strategy was to launch an immediate all-out nuclear weapons counterattack against the United States.

On this particular day, something went wrong. Suddenly the computer alarms sounded, warning that an American missile was heading toward the Soviet Union. Lt. Col. Petrov reasoned that a computer error had occurred, since the United States was not likely to launch just one missile if it were attacking the Soviet Union �? it would launch many. Besides, there had been questions in the past about the reliability of the satellite system being used. So he dismissed the warning as a false alarm, concluding that no missile had actually been launched by the United States.

But then, just a short time later, the situation turned very serious. Now the computer system was indicating a second missile had been launched by the United States and was approaching the Soviet Union. Then it showed a third missile being launched, and then a fourth and a fifth. The sound of the alarms was deafening. In front of Lt. Col. Petrov the word �?Start�? was flashing in bright lettering, presumably the instruction indicating the Soviet Union must begin launching a massive counterstrike against the United States.

Even though Lt. Col. Petrov had a gnawing feeling the computer system was wrong, he had no way of knowing for sure. He had nothing else to go by. The Soviet Union�?s land radar was not capable of detecting any missiles beyond the horizon, information that by then would be too late to be useful. And worse, he had only a few minutes to decide what to tell the Soviet leadership. He made his final decision: He would trust his intuition and declare it a false alarm. If he were wrong, he realized nuclear missiles from the United States would soon begin raining down on the Soviet Union.

He waited. The minutes and seconds passed. Everything remained quiet �? no missiles and no destruction. His decision had been right. Stanislav Petrov had prevented a worldwide nuclear war. He was a hero. Those around him congratulated him for his superb judgment.

Thanks to Barista for the link

Intuition

May 28, 2004 By Uncategorized

From Curt Rosengren comes a link to a Wall Street Journal article on trusting intution:

“Watch for bias. Don’t confuse intuitive thinking with personal subjectivity, which often emerges as a result of prejudices, biases, fears, fantasies or purely emotional reactions. Constant analysis of your thinking is the only way to winnow genuine intuitive grain from emotional chaff.

Keep a record. To determine how strong your intuitive ability is, keep a record of your intuitive insights, or hunches, as they occur. Rate them objectively. If a reasonable number have worked out, cultivate and pay attention to your intuitions.

Diary-keeping is the best way to separate genuine intuitive hunches from wishful projections. If you discover that many of your hunches turn out to be wrong, take stock. Try to learn how your personal interests, wishes, fears and anxieties tend to distort your perceptions and block the way to clear and valid intuitions.

It’s a normal function. Realize that intuitive thinking is a normal function of the brain, not a euphemism for clairvoyance, mystical precognition or similar questionable phenomena.

Intuitive thinking requires thorough spadework on a problem. You’ve got to have the basic facts and information before intuitive processes can take over. Jerome S. Bruner of Harvard University says, ‘Individuals who have extensive familiarity with a subject matter appear more often to leap intuitively into a decision or to a solution of a problem — one which later proves to be appropriate.’

A combined approach. Use intuitive and analytic modes of thought in combination. The intuitive mode isn’t opposed to the rational, cognitive mode, but complements it. Typically, intuitive insights both precede and follow the exhaustive use of analysis, reason and logic.

Depending on the problem, decide which mode is most appropriate. Where the intuitive mode is used first, the analytic mode should be tried afterward. In fact, all intuitive thinking should be subsequently transposed into linear, logical order for articulation and implementation.

Analyze and wait. Genuine intuitive insights are not under conscious control or will. You can’t predict when they’ll come. So tackle problems consciously. Learn as much about them as you can using the analytic processes. Acquire all known data. Laziness often is the source of faulty hunches.”

Following up on the music postings this week, this list is a guide for animating improvisation, because the best kinds of improvisations come from the gut as intuitive responses to a situation. But again, intuition, like improvisation, needs to be honed with practice and reflection. There is no book that can tell you how to refine your intuition, but articles and lists like this point the way towards a set of practices that will put you more in touch with the skills you need to be able to think on your feet.

Agility comes from a strong ability improvisation and improvisation arises out of a well-honed intuitive sense. Most decisions one needs to make in a complex and changing environment are not self-evident. They are made out of a field of choices. Honing these agility capacities makes one better able to make better choices, finding the je ne sais quoi that rises above the avilable data and creates something truly new and spectacular.

Music and improvisation part three

May 27, 2004 By Collaboration, Facilitation, Music, Practice

The last of three parts on music.

We are talking about improvisation as a method for working with or being in groups – developing a set of practices that refine one’s ability to think on one’s feet and to see full opportunities in small hints (Blake’s “world in a grain of sand“). Improvisation, especially in a collaborative environment, produces material that would never otherwise arise.

And yet, it is worth pointing out that great improvisation is not simply making stuff up on the spot. Consider this from Becker’s essay:

When I used to play piano in Chicago taverns for a living, I dreaded the nights when guys who had been playing dances would come in, after their jobs had ended, to sit in with our quartet. In a traditional jam session, we would play well known tunes and everyone would have a turn to solo, improvising on the chords of the song. Why did I dread it? If there were, say, four horn players sitting in, in addition to our own, every one of them would play the same number of choruses. If the first player played seven choruses of “I Got Rhythm,” the other four would all play seven; I would have to play seven, whether I felt like it or not; the bass player, if his fingers help up, might play seven, and the drummer too; then people might start trading four bar phrases ad infinitum. That could easily add up to sixty thirty-two bar choruses of a song whose harmonies are not very rich (I was fond of songs, like “How High the Moon,” that had what we called “interesting changes,” harmonies that changed frequently and departed from the original tonality). Remember that the pianist mainly plays accompaniment for all these choruses and you can see how someone who had already played for several hours might feel like falling asleep as the procession of choruses–not very interesting ones, usually–went on interminably.It wasn’t always that bad. Once every several months, a lot of things, varying more or less randomly (although my colleagues and I often went in for theories that involved phases of the moon), would come together right, and the results would be extraordinary, we thought and felt. Usually that didn’t happen, and everyone involved was bored, not only listening to the other players’ choruses, but even to their own.Why was that? For one thing, most improvising was not quite so inventive as the language we used (and that most people still use) made out. In one way, it was in fact spontaneous, created at that moment, and not exactly like anything anyone had ever played before. But, in another way (as Paul Berliner has amply demonstrated), every one of those seven chorus solos was basted together from snippets the players had played hundreds of times before, some they had come on themselves, many slight variants of what he had heard on records (of Gillespie or Parker or Getz); among these collages, especially when it was late and we had heard it all over and over again already that night, one of us might do something that sounded to our ears really different and original, even though it might well be something we had spent a week working out in privacy rather than something invented on the spot.

Soloing in this context, the height of improvisation, does not happen out of the blue. The preconditions for excellent improvisation include:

  • Practicing options and thinking about how they might work in performance
  • Studying material and knowing the tradition and context of what you are doing.
  • Being aware of etiquette of improvisation and understanding when to give an take.
  • Being grounded in theory so that your improvised contributions make sense within the field of meaning.

In short, improvisation demands a set of highly refined personal practices that create the conditions for a perfect eight bar solo. The material payoff is miniscule in proportion to the amount of preparation, but the quality of the result can often be extraordinary, wildly out of proportion to any investment in practice.And there is another condition to take in account too, and this is tremendously overlooked. Improvisation happens on a ground which is prepared and maintained by tedious repetition and grunt work. The pianist endlessly comping chords is actually holding a harmonic space open for the freewheeling contributions from the soloist. This work is critical and it is hard. It is hard to sit through the slog and remain in the background. One wants to do something different just to keep things interesting, but to do so would change the field for the soloist. So this is the last practice of improvisation, the accompanist’s yin to the soloist’s yang: quietly maintaining the filed of play, holding space, inviting contributions and allowing people to be free while you remain both fully present and totally invisible.

In planning, facilitation and all kinds of group work, this lesson is perhaps the most important. It allows for a quiet space to be opened amidst the noise of messy brainstorming and creative endeavour. In every high performance engaged in generating amazing things, there is someone patiently comping the chords.

Music; the shared emotional space

May 26, 2004 By Collaboration, Music, Practice

Another post on music, this one inspired by a great essay on the etiquette of improvisation, by Howard Becker:

Collective improvisation–not like Keith Jarrett, where one man plays alone, but like the more typical small jazz group–requires that everyone pay close attention to the other players and be prepared to alter what they are doing in response to tiny cues that suggest a new direction that might be interesting to take. The etiquette here is more subtle than I have so far suggested, because everyone understands that at every moment everyone (or almost everyone) involved in the improvisation is offering suggestions as to what might be done next, in the form of tentative moves, slight variations that go in one way rather than some of the other possible ways. As people listen closely to one another, some of those suggestions being to converge and others, less congruent with the developing direction, fall by the wayside. The players thus develop a collective direction which characteristically–as though the participants had all read Emile Durkheim–feels larger than any of them, as though it had a life of its own. It feels as though, instead of them playing the music, the music, Zen-like, is playing them.

This is largely the experience I have making music when I gather with others to play traditional Irish tunes. In the traditional Irish session, the players sit in a circle, and call out tunes on the fly, changing from one to another as the tune sets evolve. It never takes long to get to the flow state described above, where small variations in the tune suggest other things.

When the session is really humming there is a chemistry that arises between the musicians. I have often thought of this state as one in which all the individuals in the group take a significant emotional investment in the music and place it outside of themselves, in the middle of the circle, like a glowing ball of energy that we all try to keep aloft. It feels on the one hand solid and on the other delicate and vulnerable. It can trigger powerful emotions, and I remember one session where, in the middle of the tune Over the Moor to Maggie (mp3 here), I had a sensation of 1000 suns exploding in my chest. I was weeping tears of joy at the immensely generous space that had opened up in between us.

This is one reason why I think that music, even played by people with a most elementary of technique, is a wonderful practice ground for all of the other areas of collaboration we face in life.

Tomorrow: the things you have to do to invite other to improvise.