What is the New Science?

Plain English series of videos - various topics

Visualizing Big Data

WIRED has written some interesting pieces on Big Data and how we crunch numbers in the age of the petabyte. This image of a software bot working through Wikipedia is the kind of overview that visualizing data can give. Ambient devices connected to any number of online information sources are another way of creating our own emergent properties from unimaginably large quantities of data. Is it fair to call this artificial emergence? We are farming emergent properties from things we have created, rather than simply experiencing the emergent properties in the natural order such as the wetness of water. Maybe we can develop a new intelligence that allows us to harness our own forms of emergence to get the kind of information we need in complex situations as leaders and designers.

What a large-scale conversation looks like

Warren Sack has written a fascinating article on the 'shape' of conversations. I remember doing conversation analysis while working on my philosophy of language thesis but that was with 12 people who knew each other well. It was a highly complicated exchange but this is a whole magnitude of complexity higher. And yet, the patterns that emerge are readable, like the weather that results from countless other miniscule atmospheric interactions. Really interesting images and commentary.

Emergence and Network Building

In a recent email from the Berkana Institute, I discovered a link to a great article on the relationship of complex systems theory, emergence and social change. It's only about eight pages long and provides a great overview of very pratical ways to think through and act complexity theory applications and ideas.

If you want to read the article click here and it will take you to a PDF. If you'd like to take a look at the Berkana Institute, you can click here to get to the site and then navigate to the article that way. My leadership experience tells me that there is valuable insight in this approach, something that can increase your ingenuity index for whatever problems confront you as you attempt to change your world.