Page 15 - Complexity Perspective_Neat

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.

The ideal size for teams (where technology is not being used in any
way) is 2-8, with an upper limit of around 25. In these smaller groups,
successful collaboration is generally reliant upon (often face-to-face)
social negotiation (discussion) to evolve and guide the development of
the group’s creative output.

In Wiki-style collaborations, there is simply so much information to be
negotiated if people communicate directly that the negotiations would
collapse under their own weight without the mediation of an
administrative/stigmergic platform.

This is not to say that social negotiation (discussion) does not take
place in stigmergic collaborative contexts, but rather that such

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