Nature's order | #11
Nature's order | #11
Biological systems, information theory, research updates, and leading with the heart
In 1987 London a young chef worked ruthlessly through the tiers of brigade, harnessing chaos and squeezing out order with brutal demands of perfection and timeliness. Perfectly cooked fish, cut vegetables, silky, rich sauces, six days a week, eighteen hours a day, at his newly opened restaurant Harveys. Eight years later at thirty three years old he became the first British chef to be awarded three Michelin stars, and the youngest chef ever to do so.
He was Marco Pierre White, an icon of cuisine and eventual sage of art, creativity, and human insights. This quote of what he regards the “most important knowledge in life” touches me deeply.
Great chefs have three things in common: one, they accept and respect that mother nature is the true artist, they are the cook, two, everything they do becomes an extension of them as a person, and three, they give you insights into the world they were born into, the world which inspired them, and they serve it on their plates.
Marco Pierre White
Letting nature lead the way
Marco created order in his environment by reducing all noice (except for his own) and demanding specific results over, and over again without variation. Nature creates order in more creative and often subtler ways, allowing for diversity and randomness. That is why we receive such beautiful bounty from the earth.
Though nature’s art and intelligence is not limited to food. It goes much deeper and I believe is fundamental to our universe. Once structure is given to disconnected components via meaningful interactions, something comes alive. Part of that elusive “something”, that which origins of life researchers consistently question and seek, is the way that information is shared and received within systems.
My systems research is focused on how models of information theory in biology can be extended to create order within the blurry, biased, tangled concepts of groups and human collectives. When I talk about “information” and “structure” what I mean is summarizing communications as discrete messages (“hi”, “hello”, “what’s up” → “greeting”) and using Shannon information formulas (or extensions of them) to quantify these messages. I believe that somewhere encoded in these exchanges are fundamental truths about how we collectively organize and coordinate our desires.
Through this research a small world has connected for me recently that I am very happy about. For my PhD coursework I’m doing an independent study with Dr. Hiroki Sayama to understand how centralized and decentralized systems coordinate at different scales and reach various outcomes through their interactions. He connected me to Dr. Carlos Gershenson who is on sabbatical at Santa Fe Institute before joining Binghamton University as a professor this fall.
Dr. Gershenson’s work is focused on cybernetics, artificial life, and self-organizing systems. He invited me to Santa Fe Institute twice last month for the type of meandering, scientific pondering that happen at the storied old monastery of science high in the hills above Santa Fe.
Our chats led me to focus on three specific aspects when thinking about how to quantify and analyze human collectives:
Complexity, in the organizational sense, is correlated with the quantity and variety of information that an entity can receive and meaningfully process
Quantifying information processing at different scales (individual → group → organization) requires different measurements, different language
Connecting entities at the lower scale to those at the higher scale provides a framework to understand emergence, and to try and direct it via targeted incentives
David Krakauer, president of the Santa Fe Institute, describes the foundations of this thinking in the Complexity Explorer Lecture What is Complexity? - particularly in the Framework for Emergence section I’ve linked to below.
The hard part about humans
Why are human organizations, whether it be a fine dining kitchen, or large, multinational companies, seemingly so much more complex than the digital systems and computer architectures built to process bits and run programs?
Back to Chef Marco. It is because humans have heart, spirit, emotion, and each of these creates noise in the messages we send to one another during our bids for connection and communication. Have you ever left an exchange feeling uncertain, unsure how your messenger intended you to feel by their words? Of course you have, it is human, after all. It’s what makes us beautiful.
Science gives us tools to ask questions about our surroundings, dig deep into the structures and interactions that lead to our lived experience, and help us feel a sense of place both as one and many.
How do individuals become groups? How do norms and behaviors form as groups combine, leading the emergence of culture?
I suspect the answer has something to do with the way information is shared, understood, and propagated forward through time by the entity - whether it be the individual, team, organization, or society. However, this requires some definition of “entity” at each scale. And as our focus zooms out to higher levels of human organization physical boundaries become more and more fuzzy; the individual is bound to their physical body, but membership to a specific society becomes more of a scale as the individuals within have varying senses of self-identity and belonging to the larger group.
Perhaps this fuzziness and complexity as group size increases is the reason for the management adage of keeping “two pizza teams” - teams no larger than can be fed by two pizzas. For larger groups more structure, order, and communication norms must be imposed to reduce the variety and complexity of human idiosyncrasy in order to achieve predictable results.
Why care?
Our world, and the information economy is only becoming more complex.
Information is generated at ever increasing velocity and granularity - see social media, niche blogs (like this one), apps and tools to communicate
Remote work increases some signals and decreases others - body language and physical indicators give way to digital messages and video
Formation of micro cultures and communities of self-identity that have different rules and expectations for conduct
Asynchronous communication puts increasing importance on structured, organized communication of thoughts instead of nuance - a challenge and new skillset both for the messenger and receiver
When simplifying complexity there is no free lunch - someone must do the work of reducing noise and creating signal from the bombardment of information. However, knowing how to reduce noise but retain the heart and spirit of a team is the closest thing to art I know of in management science.
Closing thoughts
Chef Marco ends the quote from the beginning of this post with this:
"And let's not forget, you don't need to have Michelin stars to be a great chef. My mother never had Michelin stars, but she was a great chef, becomes it comes from the heart. And that's what you need - heart."
I’ve written about the connection between food, kitchens, chaos, and order before. My heart lies with the topic. My years spent working in kitchens shaped my approach to management, cooperation, time management, and creativity. As my interests and career path evolved into a much more scientific, knowledge based trade of systems research and data engineering I carry forward hard earned lessons and find ways to blend my past and future.
The guiding principle of scientific management in the information economy is that while quantifying and creating bits from actions is useful to understand patterns and create predictable outcomes, a manager can never escape the heart of the team and all the irrationality that comes with it. This is a strength of human organizations that should be appreciate and utilized with care.