Brian Hayes just forwarded me a great article from Nova (published by the Australian Academy of Science) about the science of complex systems. It’s written in plain English (always a delightful surprise) and covers some critical properties:

Emergence

Emergence is the formation of complex but regular patterns from the interaction of the many simple parts of a system. The emergent collective behaviour of a system cannot be predicted merely by understanding its individual elements, or from understanding the interactions between these elements, but it can in principle be predicted by seeing how all the elements work together. It is this element of regularity in the emergent behaviour that distinguishes complex systems from complicated and chaotic systems.

You may recall this concept from a previous post about the difference between complex and complicated. A complex system is one in which the very interaction amongst its constituent parts creates characteristics (the ‘emergent properties’ referred to above) that wouldn’t otherwise exist.

This concept is key to anyone looking to take long-term, strategic views involving human behavior, which means anyone driving the vision of a company, an organization or a government. It’s why macroeconomics and microeconomics are distinct disciplines, because the way we behave in our one-on-one purchase decisions changes radically once we factor in societal interactions.

Self-organization

Self organisation is closely related to emergence and refers to the ability of the system to organise itself. The emergent features of the system appear spontaneously. There is no one in control of the system.

…Connect up a few computers, as happened when the internet was born, and you have a simple system that’s predictable and controllable. Connect up several million computers around the planet and you have a complex system behaving in ways no one could have imagined – and nobody is in control.

Self-organization is why social media panels don’t like questions about ‘viral’: nobody wants to admit that they can’t control how the system will react to a given bit of content. Self-organization is why it is more effective to get your customers talking to each other than to keep them separate. Self-organization is why something like Wikipedia can exist at all, let alone be highly effective.

Local interaction

The parts of a system tend to only interact with a small subset of the whole system, known as a local neighbourhood. For example, during our everyday lives we interact with friends, neighbours and work colleagues, as well as people on the street, but never everyone in the world. If a flu outbreak reaches a country via an infected tourist arriving at the airport, it’s unlikely that you will be infected by direct contact with that person. If the disease spreads, and you become infected, it will probably be via people you are regularly in contact with.

What really bakes my noodle about local interaction is that it is infinite and recursive. We tend to think of six degrees of separation as a flat model, but if I connect to the person on my right and on my left, and each of them do the same, where does our network begin and where does it end?

More on this later…

Digital Outsider reported today on AdSense, which offers a network of 65-inch plasma screens mounted in eight-foot panels in the most highly trafficked areas of shopping malls in 39 of the top U.S. media markets. The plasma screens display the best retail offers available in that mall at that moment.

Sounds pretty straightforward, but the bit that caught my attention was buried close to the bottom:

Given this type of programming model, you’d think that AdSpace sells its advertising inventory — 11 15-second ad units per six-minute programming loop — to mall retailers, but it doesn’t. The “Today’s Top 10? programming is free to any retailers that legitimately qualify as the best deals of the week. So who buys the AdSpace ad units? Big brand marketers like Coca-Cola, AT&T, Verizon, Macy’s, Ford Motors Co., Sony Pictures, KAL brands, some of which aren’t even physically offered in the shopping mall.

…“We’re like Lucky magazine for the mall,” [AdSpace representative Dominick Porco] says. “Here’s a great cell phone at the Verizon store. It’s 50% off today. Or Ann Taylor has a great cashmere sweater and it’s 50% off today. That’s our editorial content.”

I can understand why the likes of Coca-Cola and Sony Pictures are using this opportunity to target consumers. The ones who really win the lottery here, though, are the ‘Top 10′ retailers, who—get this—often complain about selling out of their inventory too quickly when they get a slot on AdSpace.

The fact that retail promotions constitute valid editorial content is not new, but it should be the mantra of all marketers in the digital age. Relevance opens the doors to anything. The same consumers who would TiVo right past the Ann Taylor commercial at home are the ones who are screaming, “Ohmigosh, a cashmere sweater!!!” when they’re in the mall.

If you are delivering the right message at the right time, your customers will fall on their knees with gratitude.

Consider, for example, my high school classmate Dany Levy, whose what-to-buy fashion site Daily Candy sold a majority interest to Bob Pittman in 2003 for $3.5 million, and then a minority interest to a private equity firm in 2006 for $130 million. Consider, on a vastly smaller scale, the locally-ubiquitous Entertainment Books, for which people shell out $65 in exchange for a book full of ads. Yes, there are coupons in there, too, but you get my point. People will pay to be advertised to, if the ads are special and unique and relevant and help them get into the inner circle.

Here is the problem: marketers and product developers and publishers think new media is different, it’s game-changing, we don’t know how to handle it. But the rules are actually simple, and they’re no different to the marketing mantras of a century ago. Put yourself in the consumers’ shoes. Think about what they care about, what problems they have, what they’re afraid of. Then help them achieve, solve, and alleviate. Whether you are doing this virtually or physically makes no difference.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again:

It is always, and only, about people.

Your feedback is welcome!

I can’t remember where I heard that one. It’s from a parable or fable or anecdote or some such thing. You are asked to fill a jar with rocks and sand. If you put the sand in first, you won’t have room for the rocks. But if you put the rocks in first, the sand can fill in the spaces around the rocks.

It’s a great story because it is so universally applicable: at the highest levels of your life and at the lowest. Examples:

• What is the most important thing to you in the world? Put it first. Make time for it now, because by the time you finish filling the jar with all the minutiae that comprise our daily lives, you won’t have time for that big rock.
• Working on a project and worried about the ‘triple constraints’ of time, cost and quality? Work out the ‘big rocks’ in your deliverables and focus on those.
• Studying for a test? I recently took the test to become a Project Management Professional (hence the reference to the triple constraints). Some of my fellow students spent hours memorizing the 44 project management processes. It sounds good in theory, but here’s the thing: there were only one or two questions on them (out of two hundred), and all of the project managers we know look them up in books whenever they need them. So why spend so much time studying them? Why not spend that time with your parents or your significant other or your children or building houses for people in need?

Putting the rocks in first isn’t the same as saying that sand doesn’t matter, because it does. The willingness to take the time to get the small things right can be the difference between mediocrity and greatness. You can’t make an epic movie like Lord of the Rings if you ignore the sand. Seven-time Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong is famous for his attention to sand. But you can be sure those rocks were taken care of.

In every endeavor, there are some things you may be able to get away without and some things you just can’t ignore: those things you can’t ignore are the rocks.

Classical economics treats us as if we were rational creatures, performing explicit cost-benefit analyses for every action we take. We know the reality to be somewhat different: we do what we do, and then fabricate explanations afterwards. Putting the rocks in first is a reminder of our priorities in this precious life.

Do you put the rocks in first? Or do you have any other guiding principles to share with us?

Thanks to a hemorrhagic stroke, my father suffered from aphasia in the last years of his life. He struggled to find and pronounce words, and we struggled to interpret what he said.

During that time, we learned some interesting things about the way the brain processes language. Sometimes, for example, he would start a word correctly but finish it incorrectly. “It’s diplomatic,” he would say—instead of difficult—when he explained that he had a hard time getting from his wheelchair to his bed.

Sometimes he would come out with an entirely unrelated word: “I like to read the flowers,” as he indicated a copy of the New York Times.

And sometimes he would be so close, so very close, and yet still miss the mark. One day he left me a phone message: “This is your son, this is your son,” he chanted. This one short message revealed volumes to me about the unheralded complexity of our language.

He knew who he was. He knew that I was related to him. He knew we had a parent-child relationship, and he knew that he was a male relative. It was the very last piece, the information about whether he was the male parent or the male child, that eluded him.

I understood him, of course. I understood him because I knew him and I loved him and I cared enough to decipher what he was trying to say.

My ability-impaired father was not, of course, the target market for the many semantic technologies being dangled in front of us like virtual carrots. But his is not the only situation that requires human attention, presence or love to understand.

Consider my project manager friend, who confessed to me, “The problem is that I responded to the client’s expressed need rather than to the client’s actual need.” What we need and what we explicitly seek are often two different things.

When someone whom you love has had a stroke and tells you that getting into bed is diplomatic, it’s pretty easy to figure out that there’s something else going on. In the absence of such obvious signs, however, it’s easy to make assumptions about how well you understand someone or how well you are understood.

Do not close your ears to those around you. Give them your attention, your presence and your love. Listen with your ears, with your eyes, with your mind, and with your heart, so that you will know if a wayward flower has crept in where a newspaper ought to be.

Please believe me when I say you will never regret the effort this sort of communication requires.

Summary: In part I of this series, we discussed the seven variables that comprise the seven-digit VortexDNA intention genome. In part II, we discussed the way the boundaries of happiness, respect, relationships, community and society interact with each other. In this blog post, we’re going to look at interpreting your intention genome.

The position of each digit in the intention genome indicates what variable it corresponds to. The first digit is position A, the second is position B, and so on.

Each digit has a number that ranges from 1 to 5, where 5 is the strongest expression of that variable. So an intention genome might look like this:

In the above example, ‘3′ is in position A, ‘5′ is in position B, and so on.

Let’s look at each position:

	Position A: Coherence. Coherence refers to the level of internal consistency of a system. In physics, for example, coherence refers to all correlation properties between physical quantities of a wave. Life purpose is highly individual, and it is entirely up to you how you choose to define it—the mathematics simply look at how coherent you are with your chosen purpose. Does it reflect in all areas of your life? Does it contradict itself? Is it consistent?
	Position B: Optimization. Optimization refers to the level of self-renewal in the system. What are the steps you take every day to reinforce who you are and what is important to you? What efforts do you make to fuel your core purpose and values?
	Position C: Happiness. Happiness refers to how you see yourself. Do you take care of yourself? Do you behave in ways that bring you joy? The mathematics show us that this variable can’t be taken in isolation from the two preceding variables, a finding that is supported by our observable experience. For example, if you are happy right at this moment, but aren’t coherent, you may become unhappy as soon as you arrive at work. If you are happy right at this moment, but don’t practice optimization, your happiness may disappear.
	Position D: Earning Respect. Earning respect refers to how others see you. Do you take steps to make yourself valuable in the eyes of the people around you? Once again, the math dictates that this variable cannot be taken in isolation, and you can see this for yourself by looking around. If you seek respect from others but don’t respect yourself, people may take advantage of you, but if you respect yourself and then seek the respect of others, you will become more effective.
	Position E: Personal Relationships. Personal relationships are the direct connection between you and the people around you. How do you treat them? How do they treat you?
	Position F: Happiness of Others. Happiness of others refers to your relationship with your community. Unlike the one-on-one relationships in Position E, this variable looks at how connected you feel and the strength of your belonging. In mathematical terms, the community represents a larger boundary than your personal relationships or happiness.
	Position G: Making a Contribution. Making a contribution refers to your relationship with society. It is the largest boundary measured by the VortexDNA algorithm and, like all the others, must be taken in context in order to be a meaningful number.

Consistency across variables
In the last post, I touched on the complex nature of these seven variables:

If you just looked at the above graphic, you might think that the ideal focus would be obvious: simply spend all the time you can making a contribution to society. If you’ve got any time left over, give it to the community, and so on down the track. Based on the relative sizes of those circles, why would you spend any time trying to make yourself happy?

In reality, though, human beings are complex systems. You may recall our discussion of the difference between complex and complicated: the relationship amongst the components of a complex thing becomes a key ingredient of the thing itself. So it is for human behavior, and so it is for these boundaries.

They are inextricable.

This concept of interconnectedness is the reason for color-coding the example genome. You can see by looking at it that, as a whole, the colors are inconsistent and jarring. If someone behaved in a manner that was coherent and optimized, and paid similar levels of attention to herself, her friends, her work, her community, and society at large, the colors of her genome would be more consistent:

This has been a lot of information, I know, so I’ll leave it to you to absorb. I invite your comments, questions, resonances, disagreements… in short, your participation.

In the previous post, we began to explore the seven digits of the VortexDNA intention genome. The intention genome captures those variables that define the human system: coherence, optimization and boundaries. In this post, we’ll look closer at boundaries, which are further defined as follows:

• Happiness (how you see yourself)
• Earning respect (how others see you)
• Personal relationships
• Happiness of others (community)
• Making a contribution (society)

These boundaries have both relative and absolute importance. So, for example, making a contribution to society has a greater impact on an individual’s life than focusing on personal relationships. In fact, their relative importance pretty much follows the bullet list:

Complex systems

If you just looked at the above graphic, you might think that the ideal focus would be obvious: simply spend all the time you can making a contribution to society. If you’ve got any time left over, give it to the community, and so on down the track. Based on the relative sizes of those circles, why would you spend any time trying to make yourself happy?

In reality, though, human beings are complex systems. You may recall our discussion of the difference between complex and complicated: the relationship amongst the components of a complex thing becomes a key ingredient of the thing itself. So it is for human behavior, and so it is for these boundaries.

They are inextricable.

Because of their interconnectedness, the graphic is more accurately (although still simplistically) portrayed like this:

The mathematics of the complex system demonstrate that it is simply not effective to focus on one boundary at the expense of others, a finding that is borne out by our experience. If a company allows its employees to spend all of their time on charitable activities, while giving no thought to its own business activities or profit, it will not do very well at all.

This is also the concept at the heart of sustainable companies: they are companies that care for their community and society, but that do so in a way that is gratifying for employees and profitable for shareholders.

This discussion will continue further, and I welcome your input all along the way. Do these boundaries resonate with you? Does your own personal experience validate these ideas?