Returning to school for three weeks after 25 years in business .. it certainly is a bit unusual. But in the case of the Santa Fe Complexity Science Summer School (CSSS2010), I strongly believe it will be more than worthwhile.
On Monday, June 6th, I entered, together with 45 other participants, the Grand Hall of Saint Johns College in Santa. Mostly young - PhD and post doc - people working in disciplines as different as sociology, theoretical physics, biology, psychology, also some experienced business people, coming from all around the globe : the Santa Fe Institute, certainly has international attraction power. The summer school's CSSS2010 wiki proves that down in New Mexico, they do understand the importance and possibiliies of technology. On this open wiki you can find a lot of information on the participants, the program and many selected readings.
So what did we cover the first day?
* Liz Bradley explained the basics of Non Lineair Dynamics, for discrete as well as for continuous time systems. The most know example of complex continuous time systems is the Lorentz attractor, resulting from research on predictability of the weather. The iconic example of a complex discrete time system is the "foxes and rabbits" problem, or the logisitics model. This model originated from biological population research but was taken over quickly by complexity mathematicians.
* Iain Couzin lectured on Collective Behavior, like swarming and flocking. This sub-discipline in Complexity Science tries to explain why insects, animals and people show emerging behavioral patterns like swarming and flocking.
Finally we were asked to self organize, in order to come up with a number of summer school projects. The "smart leadership" project that I proposed, got selected and will be executed by myself in collaboration with 4 participants: Giovanni working in a large Itailian Telecom company, Shiva having his own company in biofinance, Lee a Chinese Phd student in Strategy Development and Andreas a Dutch post doc in network management. Together we have drafted the project on a flip-chart paper. The objective of the project comes down to defining the possible use of complexity based approached in managerial and leadership context.
All feedback and input on this summer school project is more than welcome.
Regards,
Erik.
Comments
re: First Day of the Complexity Science Summer School
By Paul Valckenaers 06/02/12 (1 year ago)
Erik,
please consider the following "Gedankenexperiment" as they say in Germany.
You are in charge of a large organization somewhere in the year 1374. Your organization has a long tradition and excellent departments that perform calculations in roman numbers (you know MCDXX, IV, XII, ...) both for internal use and external customers. Somewhere in that organization, Marco P. returns from a trip to India and noticed arabic numbers (you know 21100, 443, ...) and some clever procedures for multiplication, division, ... Marco is pushing for your organization to adopt this new technology.
Challenge: how will your leadership capture this opportunity against the inertia within your organization? Possibly destructing the existing one and bringing a new organization onto center stage. Possibly identifying new types of organization that are capable of doing this where current ones would fail (making a case for SME networks?).
How does leadership bring the 'exceptional' to the surface when it is in danger of being smothered by 'excellence' ?
- Paul.