Information dynamics, self-organization and the

implications for management

IS4IS 2015 ViennaJohn Collier

Philosophy, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban 4041, South Africa

E-Mail: collier@ncf.ca

Outline Part 11. Some major classes of information used in science form a hierarchy.2. Within each level of the hierarchy are further hierarchies of

organization. These originate by self-organization (of two distinct types, reorganization through dissipation and self-organization through the promotion of perturbations).

3. The same basic systems principles apply across all levels, but new properties appear at higher levels due to new possibilities created at lower levels.

4. These principles are grounded in growth and self-organization, but an important aspect is that there are natural system resonances and it is easier (requires less energy) to form and maintain these resonances than others. Preferably through self-organizing processes. These resonances are typical larger scale and often irreducible.

Outline Part 2

1. I will give some examples from physics on up through biology. The explanation will be clearest for the physics case, and I will apply it by analogy to other cases.

2. I will argue (speculate in the social case) that the same principles apply for energy decoupled information systems.

3. I will draw (speculate on) some consequences for social level management.

4. The most significant of these is that the management technique most likely to be effective if enough time is available to use it is facilitation.

Information and Boundary Conditions• In standard Hamiltonian mechanics of conservative or near

conservative systems, boundaries are not time dependent (the systems are holonomic)

• This fails in many types of systems in which the boundary conditions interact with system laws in a mathematically inseparable way. These systems are radically nonholonomic.

• I have argued elsewhere that such systems can show emergent properties, but my concern here is that boundary conditions deal with forms, and are best described by information methods.

• So the dynamics of information become important for systems with dynamical boundary conditions.

Energy and information budgets

• If the information budget of such systems is largely decoupled from the energy budget, then we can deal with information dynamics separately.

• This occurs notably in biological systems, but also in such basic physical systems as black holes, the study of whose boundary conditions led to the “it from bit” view of nature, which extends an informational analysis to the boundaries of elementary particles and their consequent physical parameters, including mass.

• So information dynamics has certain general properties that apply widely.

Major classes of information

Social

Cognitive

Functional

Hierarchical

Negentropy

It from Bit

How the different kinds of information are related

• The kinds are nested, with the most basic kind in the middle.• Each successive kind introduces further restrictions, which in turn create

new immediate possibilities. This in turn feeds inwards, e.g.:1. The social requires communication between individuals, which creates new

possibilities for the individuals in addition to social possibilities. This can be further iterated within the social kind.

2. Negentropy creates possibilities for self-organization, allowing new structural information (a form of negentropy), which is new “its”. At the same time the new constraints permit variant complexions within the constraints, leading to an entropy of the structural information. This can be iterated within this kind.

• There is a general pattern of common principles applying to each kind through the expression of new information within that kind, so each kind has levels as well, constraining inwards. This basically reiterates the situation between information kinds, but within the same realm of science.

Viewed hierarchically, e.g.Major levels(examples)

Minor levels hierarchical informationMoleculesAtomsBasic particles

Minor levels Negentropy“Clumped matter”Kinds of matter – kinds of radiationMatter-Radiation

Minor levels It from bitBlack hole horizonsEvent horizon, particle horizonOrigin of universe (universe boundary)

CommonPrinciplesAcross Levels(Systems Theoretic)

Self-organization creates new information within levels.

New forms of interaction produces new kinds of information.

Universal (multilevel) processes

• Growth: Order and Entropy (disorder) can increase together. Order = Smax - Sactual

• This “overhead” permits self-organization: – reorganization to lowest energy state by dissipation – noise

dissipated, also natural selection– spontaneous self-organization (state change, bifurcation)

through continuous dissipation of free energy → new information

• Creates new possibilities for interaction (reduced abstract possibility space constrains processes, making them more immediately likely).

Entropy and information• The basic physical relation is given by Boltzmann's constant in a suitable

form, leading to measures in entropy units or bits.• Microstates, according to David Layzer, have microinformation. Part of this

is the information of the macrostate in which they are contained, called macroinformation.

• Not all microinformation is accessible to a macroscopic entity (2nd Law of Thermodynamics)

• Macrostates, to be real, must be cohesive, binding over space and time.• The same statistical principles apply to any system in which the microstates

are not constrained by anything but the macrostate, so we can apply the related principles generally.

• In particular, we can talk of the macrostate of an information that has informational microstates. An example is the gene pool of a population or species. (Variation of the gene pool is taken to be random with respect to the properties of the species – in fact this is not always true and must be controlled for.)

Rhythmic Entrainment• Rhythmic entrainment is a ubiquitous phenomenon that produces large scale

coordination either through the elimination of interfering factors (re-organization) or through the emergence of higher level order (self-organization).

• It produces new macrostates.• In both cases the result is a sort of harmony at a larger scale while permitting

variations at lower scales. Both produce new possibilities, as above.• Entrainment can be produced either by forcing (constraining the system at a

large scale), or spontaneously.• The former requires more work (energy expenditure) to produce and

maintain than the latter.• It is worth noting that entrainment produces symmetries, and it is the

symmetries that reduce the amount of work required. Externally forced systems are typically in more asymmetric states.

PART 2 EXAMPLES AND APPLICATIONS

Physical systems

Forced Harmonic Oscillator

Some other physical cases

• Bénard cell convection and other vortices• Planetary resonances – Earth-Moon, Mercury-

Sun, Jupiter’s major moons, Pluto and Neptune.• Japanese satellite to the moon• Various climate phenomena (el Niño, North

Atlantic Oscillation …)• Old Faithful• Geochemical differentiation

Jeremejevite Al6(BO3)5(F,OH)3

Chemical systemsBenzene

Chemical systems

Ethylene Butadiene

Biological systems (evolution and development)

• D. R. Brooks and E. O. Wiley, 1988, Evolution as Entropy, argued that far from being close to equilibrium and under control of environment and or genes, biological populations are far from equilibrium (panmixis), a condition maintained by growth in their phase space (Smax ) faster than the phase space is filled out (Sactual). The microstates are variant gene distributions and the macrostates are the gene pool determined by species cohesion (usually interbreeding connections).

• This allows further self-organization between the diversity achieved and maximum possible diversity. This can lead to speciation, which increases the system entropy (as defined).

• Furthermore, this allows the formation of layered or hierarchically organized nested self-organizing systems.

• So Brooks and Wiley generalized to development, historical ecology and other areas.• Such systems are highly self-regulating, while remaining flexible, unlike “optimally

evolved” systems that are likely to end up on local maxima, making further adaptation difficult of not impossible.

Biological systems (ecosystems)• R. E. Ulanowicz, Ecology, the Ascendent Perspective, 1997, argued that

overhead, similar to Brooks and Wiley’s system diversity, and ascendency, similar to Brooks and Wiley’s potential diversity, combine to define ecosystem capacity.

• Ascendency corresponds to ecosystem stability at a given time. It is produced by dominance of more efficient interactions between nodes of the ecosystem.

• A healthy ecosystem must have a good deal of overhead, or else it is too committed to present trends to be flexible in the face of new factors.

• Ascendency in one factor (e.g., nitrogen) can be isolated to some extent, but it is overall ascendency that matters.

• Importantly, the ecosystem ascendency rises due to internal features of the system itself, so it is self-stabilizing towards the most efficient exchanges.

Human systems (begin speculation)

• The general principles should apply to human systems, especially social systems, but the problem is to find proper analogues of dissipation, energy, information and other properties essential to self-organizing systems.

• The basic issue is communication of ideas and behaviours and how these can self-organize.

• In general, there must be excess (unconstrained) diversity in the system and a sink (exit) for diversity in order to allow self-organization.

• Forced order and organization (external constraint of diversity) will be relatively costly in comparison to self-organization.

What is the currency?• Economics gives a clear currency.• Neoclassical economics assumes a sort of neoDarwinian optimality

leading to equilibrium in the market.• However incomplete information, variations in trading times in the

market, “animal passions”, and most importantly, unequal information, distort the market so that the optimality assumption fails.

• In general, the market changes faster than it can equilibrate. So self-organization should be expected. That is all I can say right now about economics.

• But in general the currency of social systems is information, and it is passed more or less efficiently by communication. Money is a special case.

Management desiderata

• Productivity – the system should produce useful results relatively efficiently. These might be:– Sales (industry)– Societal benefit (governments, social agencies)– New ideas (think tanks, research units)These will require different focus (on results) but it isn’t clear that different management organization is required. However, different time scales for returns might justify different management methods.

• Minimization of unexpected (crises, disasters, externalities producing antagonism)

What is to be managed?

• System organization (productivity is a result of this, and cannot be ensured directly): determines to some degree information flow and dynamics

• Information flow: each unit must have the information it needs, and provide information other units need. Some units can produce information themselves, others cannot, and others are mixed.

• Information flow cannot be demanded effectively, it can only be encouraged.

Top down hierarchical management

Central Management

Local or task management 1

Production 1

Production 2

Local or task management 2

Production3

Usually a control structure where top determines lower level behaviour.Advantages Can get results quickly Perhaps good for emergencies if

lowest level is well trained (eg emergency services, military)

Focussed tasks work best

Disadvantages Results limited to constraints

central management can apply Unintended consequences likely

both internal and in externalities Ensuring results is difficult (and

typically costly) Enforcing the order is typically

costly Lack of flexibility

Problems with top-down control as a form of governance

• Authoritarian and totalitarian states put a premium on top-down control.• This will work better if there is a clear focus or a small set of ideological goals.

A sense of emergency also helps justification.• Requires a large concentration of political, economic and social power, since

driving a system artificially always requires a lot of power and waste of energy.• A more efficient but less reliable method is propaganda and advertising, which

attempt to drive or create resonances through subtle forcing (constraints on what is acceptable to do or say. (Chomsky)

• But this method still requires a concentration of power to exclude competitors.

• Such a social system is always fighting a gradient towards more efficient organizations.

• This is one of the primary social lessons we can derive from complexity theory: forced control is unstable and expensive (wasteful).

What about “flat governance”?

• The idea is that everyone makes their own decisions, so “flat”.• A form of radical libertarian anarchism in its most extreme

form but also compatible with some forms of democracy.• Not all democracy, since there might be a vote for a central

authority with no limits on its power and we are back at the previous case.

• Representative democracy comes someplace between, closer to the top-down model, and direct democracy with votes required on all decisions comes closer to the flat model.

• But it is unclear how any of these involve room for the production of new social information, new ideas or visions.

Consensus?

• Consensus governance requires full agreement on any group issue.

• It can work well with small groups with largely common beliefs, but the worry is always what to do about holdouts.

• Furthermore, common beliefs constrain possible solutions, perhaps overly (e.g., the Amish).

• So consensus seems to be either overly restrictive or else to difficult to achieve.

Facilitation rather than control or chaos

• The management model that best fits the self-organized complexity model of social systems is to encourage diversity with minimal top-down control. I call this facilitation.

• Facilitators concern themselves with attaining group agreement, and focus on the whole. There role is to suggest, not demand.

• They need not be a single person or the same people throughout. It is largely a voluntary role.

• When a facilitator finds themselves being treated as an authority, it is best they step back.

Some features of facilitative governance

• It is a variation on anarchism, but could be applied within many different management systems.

• Facilitators should encourage diversity while still helping to maintain focus, permitting self-organized solutions. Too much diversity “saturates” the system, whereas to little, or too little communication, makes it unstable (recall Ulanowicz)

• Often the introduction of a novel point will lead to reorganization of discussion around that point. This tends to be temporary unless resolution is reached.

• A disadvantage is that its gentleness implies that it is slow (recall Japanese satellite).

Thanks for your attention.Questions?

John Collierhttp://web.ncf.ca/collier