Tue 8 May 2012
Biomimetics and evolutionary thinking on the rise?
Posted by Mikkel Holm Sørensen under Biomimetics | [2] CommentsI’ve noticed several examples of evolutionary thinking recently. Some of them explicitly so and others simply taking basic evolutionary premisses for granted. And funnily enough the paradigm seems to blend in with core ideas from my other passion namely cognitive theory (that indirectly let me to biomimetics back then). Let’s take a look at the 10 most interesting examples I’ve stumbled across lately.
- McKinsey affiliate Eric Beinhocker’s The Origin of Wealth. Evolution, Complexity and the radical Remaking of Economics A hardcore evolutionary argument on how creating value in general depends on complex thinking, dynamics and adaptivity rather than traditional static dynamic models.
- Yahoo’s chief scientist, former Columbia professor in sociology and PhD i network theory Duncan Watts’ latest book Everything is Obvious: Once you Know the Answer claims that long-term strategic thinking have to be replaced by an iterative data-driven approach. Common sense is not just sometimes off but ALWAYS wrong when it come to fairly complex matters and several steps of causality.
- The economist Tim Harford have just made a similar argument although more explicitly darwinistic in Adapt: Why succes always starts with failure. We need to be ‘always in beta’, to conduct ‘disciplined pluralism’ (variation + selection) and delegate power to the frontline.
- Gary Hamel, perhaps the most influential managerial theorist right now claims in What Matters now – rather radically – that management is broke and we are better of with informed decision making in the front line. Why? Well, because of the dynamics and complexity of the modern world.
- Then we have the whole Nudge-trend. Thaler and Sunstein argues that we need to compensate for our insufficient cognitive capacities by designing the decisional context to ‘nudge’ us in the ‘rational’ direction without undermining liberty (or changing the incentives – too much).
- Like Watts, Thaler and Sunstein is building on psychologist Daniel Kahnemans thinking that gave him the nobel prize in economy in 2002 and created the field behavioral economy. The basic argument is that our cognitive system was developed for and most constructive when dealing with well known and ‘simple’ decisions. We simply deploy our fast, spontaneous, associative faculties much more than we think – even when dealing with quite complex and important decisions. Kahneman’s latest book Thinking fast and Slow is a must read for everybody who new that Freud, Nietzsche and later embodied cognitive science was right about the hierarchy between rationality and emotional thinking.
- Something that even McKinsey is now warning top management and boards about by arguing for ‘behavioral strategy‘. Their version of depotenzising management is even mentioning future ‘automated’ (read AI) decision processes to compensate for our lack of cognitive ability when faced with complexity. Quite extraordinary.
- And practitioners such as designers have simply just started to deploy evolutionary thinking. Tim Brown of IDEO is now also proposing some sort of ‘Darwinism‘ as a design approach.
- Browns counterpart in Frog Design, Rob Girling, is arguing that ‘designing for preferable outcomes’ (what we call behavioral engineering i /KL7) is the prime concern of 21′st design. Again the reason being our new knowledge on how challenged we are cognitively in a complex world stemming from cognitive science and behavioral economy.
- Lastly, the implicit theoretical foundation of A/B testing that e.g. Wired Magazine just covered is evolutionary to its bone. Google, Yahoo, eBay, Amazon and even the Obama campaign does nothing without systematically testing variations and selecting the best performing variants whether is the color, wording, placement, size or shape of the button.
- Bonus track: Harvard Business Review, September 2011: Embracing complexity Featuring i.e. an investment strategist using complex adaptive systems theory as model for his work.
What do think is going on? Has evolutionary thinking fallen pray to fashion, is it a sign of basic triviality with or has the time simply come for me to write that ultimate book on biomimetics as the panacea for all challenges in this world?
May 9th, 2012 at 5:36 am
Well, fashion might not be the best analogy, since the broader popularity of evolutionary arguments may largely come from the nice explanatory strategies these offers for many types of problems. However, I also think that these strategies too often are used uncritically. So please, write the book:)
May 11th, 2012 at 7:12 am
Hi Pelle
Well it’s fashion in this exact sense I was thinking of (hype). I just read this (lengthy) relevant quote:
“In her book, Philosophy in a New Key, Susanne Langer remarks that certain ideas burst upon the intellectual landscape with a tremendous force. They resolve so many fundamental problems at once that they seem also to promise that they will resolve all fundamental problems, clarify all obscure issues. Everyone snaps them up as the open sesame of some new positive science, the conceptual center-point around which a comprehensive system of analysis can be built. The sudden vogue of such a grande ideé, crowding out almost everything else for a while, is due, she says, “to the fact that all sensitive and active minds turn at once to exploiting it. We try it in every connection, for every purpose, experiment with possible stretches of its strict meaning, with generalizations and derivatives.”
After we have become familiar with the new idea, however, after it has become part of our general stock of theoretical concepts, our expectations are brought more into balance with its actual uses, and its excessive popularity is ended. A few zealots persist in the old key-to-the-universe view of it; but less driven thinkers settle down after a while to the problems the idea has really generated. They try to apply it and extend it where it applies and where it is capable of extension; and they desist where it does not apply or cannot be extended. It becomes, if it was, in truth, a seminal idea in the first place, a permanent and enduring part of our intellectual armory. But it no longer has the grandiose, all-promising scope, the infinite versatility of apparent application, it once had. The second law of thermodynamics, or the principle of natural selection, or the notion of unconscious motivation, or the organization of the means of production does not explain everything, not even everything human, but it still explains something; and our attention shifts to isolating just what that something is, to disentangling ourselves from a lot of pseudoscience to which, in the first flush of its celebrity, it has also given rise.”
Given I’m, still quite intellectually curious about the bearings (and philosophical implications) of evolutionary thinking I probably have to seriously considering the book.