Jeff Vail spends hundreds of words getting at how to guide emergent thinking. In essence he argues for:
- Platforms to ‘Keystone’ ecosystems.
- Engineering by principle rather than by design (Consult Wiggins’ latest post on complexity.)
- Local systems as critical.
Sounds about right, but you have to be careful not to:
- Confuse guidance for control. In a real decentralized context (marked by an equal distribution of a critical level of empowerment) a multiplicity of goals and actions will emerge. You can call this guidance, but it will actually reflect the grounding of the system – the keystone platform and the system principle.
- Get hung up on terrorism. The test for ‘flatness’ is whether or not you can adapt to all storms – literal or not.
- Think the local community is the end game. It is all moving to one.
Tags: resiliency
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[...] had time to read all the back material yet, but Shlok’s post reminded me of another point that I took away from the symposium on complexity I mentioned in my [...]
Opposed Systems Design :: Guided Evolution :: April :: 2008 added these pithy words on Apr 17 08 at 2:25 pm
