Chapter 5 - Survival of the Connected
One of the greatest benefits of the Internet is in empowering people to connect to one another, particularly in instances in which there is one group of people who need something, and another group of people to have it. She describes a few examples: a site that allows people to list rooms for rent, a site that allows people to borrow money from one another, a site that allows commuters to share rides, etc.
(EN: None of this is new behavior - these and many other things used to take place in the classified advertising section of newspapers. The main benefit of the internet is that it is easier to do and data can be updated in real time.)
Darwin Misinterpreted
She refers to the popular misinterpretation of Charles Darwin, who indicated that the "fittest" of a species will survive. Most people take this out of context and interpret it to mean that the strongest survive, in a form of brutal competition. What Darwin was speaking about at the time, however, was adaptability: those creatures who were specialized in doing only one thing become exceedingly good at it, but their inability to do anything else leads to their quick demise when the environment changes.
This theorem plays out in markets as well: companies that specialize in doing one thing and focus on doing it efficiently can be very profitable for a time - but crumble when the market environment changes and are replaced by firms that are better able and willing to change as needed to remain profitable.
(EN: This seems to be a red herring, as there is no clear connection to "connectedness" though it can be implied that the same thing that is true of individuals is true of connected groups. But I'm guessing.)
Adaptation and Mitigation
Adaptation and mitigation are regarded as critical functions of the node community, and both are related to connections.
Adaptation is the ability to make adjustments to a planned course of action in reaction to other forces. Sports metaphors illustrate this well: you may take the field with a specific defensive play in mind, but when you notice how the other team is positioning itself, you have to quickly change because the plan you were setting up to execute will no longer be effective.
Catastrophe scenarios are also tests of the ability of an individual, or an entire community, to adapt to a dramatic change in their situation when life as usual is interrupted and they must survive until normality can be restored, or when a new normality can be defined.
The author does not define mitigation particularly well - her metaphor of disaster relief (how to move food and supplies to people who need it when the roads are unusable) is really just another example of adaptation. (EN: The actual definition of mitigation involves reducing the negative impact of an inevitable disaster - which is not quite the same as being able to achieve success by alternate means.)
(EN: neither of these two topics seems to be correlated back to the original topic of connections or peer networks.)
Protective Processes
In terms of species survival, human beings have remarkable ability to respond to circumstances because the methods by which they survive are linked to a logic that is far more flexible than the hard-wired instincts of animals. When the type of plant we typically eat is no longer available in our environment, we may find another source of food. The survival of the species, and the manner in which we adapt to a broad range of environments, demonstrates the degree of our resilience and adaptability.
The traditional approach to management favors tradition itself - to defining a process and executing on it efficiently, and to follow these rules flawlessly, without adapting. It is problematic because competent individuals resist control, wishing instead to apply their intelligence to analyzing situations and solving problems rather than mechanically following procedure. Hence the greatest concern of the traditional manager is employees who are resistant to control.
Solving Problem Solving
The longer an organization has been in existence, the more complicated its problem-solving mechanisms have become. When a problem is solved for the first time, the solution becomes a standard. When a standard solution fails, it is assumed that the process is good and merely needs to be modified to suit different conditions. Over time, this becomes a very elaborate system of analyzing problems and applying standardized solutions. These tools can be very efficient and effective in diagnosing and solving mechanical problems.
However, the problems of the modern organization are rarely mechanical - but are very often complex problems with interrelated causes, and the solution is not to restore the machine to its previous condition, but to adapt the machine to operate under different conditions. That is, we are not looking to restore the organization to its previous functions, but to discover new functions for the organization.
The author provides an account of a merger at a company she worked for, which more than doubled the size of the organization. The most difficult problem was that each organization had its own problem-solving mechanisms, and integrating the two seemed an impossible task. The solution in this instance was to shift the perspective to consider the problems, rather than the mechanisms for solving them. Rather than determining how the existing organizations could be made to operate together, they built a new organization leveraging the combined assets.
The notion of the peer network facilitates this process, as it enables nodes (people) to arrange themselves as needed to attack a problem, rather than attempting to create an arrangement without the context of a problem.