Entropy is Winning

 

Shim Marom posted an interesting metaphor using the Second Law of Thermodynamics recently to describe how tendency towards disorder is the norm.

I am also reading "The Black Swan" by Nassim Nicholas Taleb at the moment and am finding some interesting thoughts running both ways through my brain.

One one hand I see the evidence of self-organizing teams as a real phenomenon with the challenge of being able to use these dynamics of a social species to move towards a [predefined] goal.

On the other I am starting to see Taleb's point about how utterly terrible we are at predicting the future and planning for it due to our living at least sometimes in "Extremistan" although all of our models assume only "Mediocristan" exists.  Our expectations mess up project estimates and we are overconfident in our ability to plan.

Taking Shim's metaphorical lead, perhaps it can be said our goal as project managers is not to simply fight disorder by expending energy towards control.  Perhaps it is to find other forces available to us and use the natural order instead.   The curvature of space-time (gravity) and the electromagnetic and strong nuclear force can be used to naturally overthrow entropy, if only for a finite amount of time.

The shared goals and common interests of a team, desire to do good work, and a myriad of other factors common in the psychological makeup of most people of our social species can be facilitated and reinforced through the removing of interference.

By removing interference and leveraging the properties already inherent in a team of individuals, we enable the best qualities to surface and the most extraordinary results to be achieved.

Image by jurvetson via Flickr