Category Archives: Complexity

The Humans Who Will Kill the Google Machine?

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A mild-mannered British physicist is trying to render Google irrelevant. Stephen Wolfram, the creator of Mathematica, a grandiosely ambitious piece of software, has come up with Wolfram Alpha, a grandiosely ambitious engine of knowledge.

Grandiosely ambitious, and grandiosely inexplicable. Put simply, Wolfram Alpha, due to launch in May, will “compute” answers to questions, where Google and other search engines merely trawl the Web for pages which might hold the answer.

To do this, Wolfram has had a small army of researchers working on systematically analyzing and structuring the corpus of human knowledge so that a computer might be able to answer questions with concrete answers, such as, “How far will the Earth be from the Sun tomorrow?”, a question Google completely fails to answer.

Er, this human-centred extract from Valleywag reminds me of a quote from Wolfram ‘A New Kind of Science’ from 2002 which I used in a short paper I wrote on the fight against terrorism:

“For our everyday experience has led us to expect that an object that looks complicated must have been constructed in a complicated way…(but) at least sometimes such an assumption can be completely wrong…unlike engineering nature operates under no such constraint.”

Hence humans (complex) vs computer algorithms (complicated) alright? The joke is I actually met some guy at Jane’s Information Group and tried to convince him of the power of complexity; I’m not sure he was that impressed but it was good of him to hear me out;-)

PS: C1E8844DA8344058820E1B0044CB5042

Conversations, complexity and business change

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For no reason except I was trying to help Shirley figure out the week ahead I started thinking about the value of conversations, specifically using online communities to full effect, as part of a practically-minded ‘complexity’ approach to business. Then I did a Google search on complexity and conversations and came up with Dr Patricia Shaw’s book on the subject, with the following customer recommendation which is a useful starting point for further thought:

At last, recognition that real change doesn’t happen purely because of top-down, management dictats, but is embodied by real people having real conversations that are not structured by clear objectives, goals and processes. Inherently scary for all those who rely on management as a control process in their organisations and change as a corporately-guided process, this instead looks at the informal organisation and how creating spaces for conversations between like-minded change agents can be the most effective.

This veers slightly too far into complexity and informal processes only for me – I believe that a balance is required between formal change and informal conversations, but this is still an important broadening of the discussion on corporate change.