Page 15 - The Complexity Perspective 20 02 18

research on termites. Grasse showed that a particular configuration of
a termite’s environment triggered a response in a termite to modify its
environment, with the resulting modification, in turn, stimulating the

response of a second worker to further transform its environment.

Thus the regulation and coordination of the building and maintaining
of a nest were dependent upon stimulation provided by the context,

and adaptations made to the context by others, as opposed to an
inherent or acquired knowledge of nest building on the
individual termite’s part. There are no nest architecture

schools for termites!

A highly complex nest simply emerges due to the collective input of

large numbers of individual termites performing extraordinarily
simple actions in response to their local environment.

Business people, used to managing processes, can find it confusing
that the underlying driver of adaptation and change in the context is

simply individuals (or systems) doing their own thing in an
undirected fashion that is inherently unpredictable!

After all, most large firms have their R&D departments and
universities have highly credentialed researchers, all pursuing the
purposeful creation of new functionality. From a complexity viewpoint,

these are all agents pursuing their own local interests and contributing
to the global body of (technical) knowledge; part of the great tide of
stigmergic action that drives historical progress.

Stigmergy is not 'Teamwork'

Stigmergy is about collaboration in large groups (roughly 25-n), as

opposed to small-scale teams. This is what characterizes such ventures
as Wikipedia.org and the Open Source software movement.

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