I was exploring critical works on Herbert Simon. In domains like entrepreneurship Simon is rarely observed under critical lens. Prof Antony Chemero suggested literature about connectionist networks from the 1980s because the proponents often thought of themselves as demonstrating problems with Newell and Simon’s physical symbol system hypothesis.
I found the following work which is open access by David A. Medler; “A Brief History of Connectionism” Or this or this as alternative access.
Nash Ashur shared the following video @ Twitter that I have retweeted. It is an extremely interesting dig by Kelso on reductive cartesian understanding of human systems, specifically naming Herb Simon since he is the complexity theory face of economics.
Here is the transcript;
“Babies …..have spontaneous organization. That’s a very nice thing to have for a living thing…. if you tie a ribbon to its toe and the toe is connected to a mobile…the baby suddenly realized–you know, “this is me kicking” ….”I’m changing the world here”….this is the orgin of agency
The coupling between what the baby is doing, and its effect on the world, ‘the mobile moving, and the world’s effect on it creates the notion that “hey this is me, I am doing that, not some mechanical engine”.
And it’s because of the collective state, the collective pattern. It’s not just the agent, not just an agent kicking and it’s not the…what the Herb Simon “the world is complicated that the human is simple”..Come Ooon !!.
So there’s coupling at all scales, bi-directional, that’s the key aspect.
It’s no longer ‘I think, therefore I am’ — “Cogito, ergo sum. It’s ‘I link, therefore I am’…think about it“
What Scott Kelso is talking about is the following comment from Herbert Simon.
“Human beings, viewed as behaving systems, are quite simple. The apparent complexity of our behavior over time is largely a reflection of the complexity of the environment in which we find ourselves.”
The above clip is an excerpt from the following YouTube video captioned: “New Foundations for Social Cognition and Strategic Interaction: Coordination, Anti-Coordination and Innovation”, a presentation given by Scott Kelso to economics audience.
Watch the comment at minute 25 of the following video
Progogine won Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1977 for his contributions to non-equilibrium thermodynamics, particularly the theory of dissipative structures.
His work become one of the core foundations of modern understanding of self-organization theories.
Back up video from Vimeo attached
The concept of “constraints” is built into the construct of creativity itself
.
Constraints in a general sense may be taken as restrictive. But in a complexity perspective constraints have a different understanding. Here, it is important to understand constraints are enabling too. They create opportunities for action, thoughts, and creation. Order in human life is primarily created through constraints. “It is not something which merely limits possibilities, constraints are also enabling. By eliminating certain possibilities, others are introduced” (Paul Cilliers, 1998). For example, take the case of road traffic. Without conventions that shape how we drive(left or right), as well as our expectations of other drivers, smooth road transport will not be possible. Take the example of HTML, a constrained protocol that allows us to use the web. A cricket game works as a game because of various constraints like cricket ground, various constrained roles like a bowler, batsman, fielder, keeper, etc, and various associated rules that govern the game. Without this, we wouldn’t have cricket as a game. Therefore, constraints not only remove or limit options but also create or enable order and new possibilities.
The mentioning of constraints as enabling can also be found in mainstream entrepreneurship research, for e.g. The idea of entrepreneurial Bricolage (Baker and Nelson, 2005) shows how entrepreneurs exploit opportunities despite resource constraints. Further, constraints have found an important place in the research on creativity, in that the concept of “constraints” is built into the construct of creativity itself (Sternberg and Kaufman, 2010). Research also has consistently found that without constraints, there can be no creativity (Dyer, Gregersen, and Christensen, 2009; Johnson-Laird, 1988). Both theoretical and empirical contributions investigating the entwinement of creativity and constraints exemplify the dual role of constraints, as constraints can be both limiting and enabling in creative processes.
Excerpt from;
Sternberg, Robert J., and James C. Kaufman. “Constraints on creativity.” The Cambridge
handbook of creativity (2010): 467-482
If it was for the academicians to decide entrepreneurial outcomes, they would have done it already with Psychometric MCQ tests. Luckily, that is not the case and will never be the case. But unfortunately there are many enthusiastic chaps.(not meant for Prof Mollick if you ever see this).
As I have discussed elsewhere, GRE’isation of entrepreneurship is an unrealized dream for the academic community who lived through many GRE’s and GMAT’s thinking that MCQ tests is equal to generalized intelligence. They will never give-up so easily and this study shared by Prof Mollick is a good example; “What matters more for entrepreneurship success? A meta‐analysis comparing general mental ability and emotional intelligence in entrepreneurial settings”
If it was for psychometric tests Richard Branson as a dyslexic wouldn’t have made it to become a billionaire entrepreneur;
Richard Branson writes
“When I was in my fifties, I was sat in a board meeting being taken through some financial figures when the subject of net and gross came up. I must admit I was quite confused – I didn’t know if the results were good or bad news.”…”As a dyslexic, I thought I’d been hiding my muddling of words and numbers well for years. But I’d been rumbled. I couldn’t tell the difference between net and gross.”
Branson Blog
Accumulated advantage matters :
On the other hand accumulated advantage matters. Those with accumulated advantage might provide their kids with all kinds of resources to get admission to elite universities. This can give a false sense that because of higher education they become successful. This is wrong because they already are filthy rich and that’s why they got-in in the first place.
I am ending this point with a Nassim Thaleb BS expose or Exposayyy. He writes(blogpost)
“When the results come from dealing directly with reality rather than through the agency of commentators, image matters less, even if it correlates to skills. But image matters quite a bit when there is hierarchy and standardized “job evaluation”. Consider the chief executive officers of corporations: they not just look the part, but they even look the same. And, worse, when you listen to them talk, they will sound the same, down to the same vocabulary and metaphors. But that’s their jobs: as I keep reminding the reader, counter to the common belief, executives are different from entrepreneurs and are supposed to look like actors.”
Prof Alfonso Gambardella of Bocconi University and co-authors discuss Scientific Approach to entrepreneurship and Strategic Decision making in the following videos
Introduction To EsoLoop Framework YouTube Playlist
Abstract
Entrepreneurship is a complex decision domain. It is essential that solutions designed for complex domains like entrepreneurship must consider dynamics of complexity like non-linearity, inter-relatedness, emergent property, etc. Regardless of this, most of the dominant entrepreneurship perspectives still assume that entrepreneurship is the same all over the world. The proposed solutions and methods are often developed without any consideration to many of the non-linear dynamics that are inherent to complex domains like entrepreneurship. They usually ignore the massive diversity and uniqueness of personal, historical, cultural, institutional, social, and spatial contexts. While entrepreneurship operates at the evolutionary edge of social emergence, most of the current thinkers and their models never truly acknowledged its massive uncertainty and complexity. Further, the need for appropriate methods is neglected in favor of reductionistic one size fits all prescriptive models, cliche advice, and incrementalism.
In the following part, I am introducing a complexity science-informed design solution to aid entrepreneurial actions. This is based on the scientific understanding that open complex adaptive systems like entrepreneurship have a tendency to self-organize under various constraints (Kauffman, 1995). Deriving from that, the framework is built on the premise that self-organization and design are complementary pairs (Kelso et al, 2016; Gershenson,2007 & 2020; Prokopenko, 2009). In the first part of the presentation, I will discuss complexity, the nature of entrepreneurial complexity, and the implication of complexity on human decision-making and expertise. Then I will discuss why existing entrepreneurship prescriptive models are inadequate for dealing with complexity. After that I will introduce three important components of the framework; The first is about setting the right complexity-based world view (Dent, 1999), for which an Ecological world view is adopted (Ulanowicz, 2009; Gibson, 2014; Capra, 1996). The second is about the idea of effectual self-organization, a primary enabling constraint (Simple rules or heuristics) for entrepreneurs to deliberately act like self-organizing systems. The third is about constraints and the role of constraints in shaping self-organization. Here I use Constraints-based design, an idea inspired from the Constraints-Led approach in sports coaching (Davids et al, 2007) to design and introduce various constraints that can shape entrepreneurial exploration and self-organization. Alicia Juarrero’s(1999) conception of Context-free and Context-sensitive constraints is used as a fundamental frame over which various constraints are introduced.
The right worldview is a necessary precondition for sustainable and effective design. If the world view is reductionist or simplistic, ignoring important unknowns, the design will reflect this weakness. As entrepreneurship is a naturally complex system, it is necessary to study entrepreneurial phenomena by applying the frame of complexity science. Despite this reality, most entrepreneurship models and perspectives are reductionist in their origin, prescription, or omission. To solve this weakness it is necessary to adopt an ecological worldview, i.e a complex, dynamic, connected, and evolving ecology.
In order to understand the ecological view, let’s first go through some of the possible world views or alternatives. After that, I will try to highlight how an ecological view is different from other world views.
1. Single Model world view:
This is the world view based on a single model, tool, or method which assumes superiority over all others. This can be equated to what Charlie Munger calls, “Man with a Hammer” syndrome, which is the idea that if an individual has only one tool or model(e.g. hammer), he’ll approach all of his problems with the same solution, i.e. a hammer. For a man with a hammer, everything around him will seem like a nail. Most models in entrepreneurship come under this category. They are proposed as solutions for the problems of the existing one and are pitched as better than the previous one. E.g. Lean startup Vs Business planning or any other model that is proposed as vastly superior to others.
2. Multiple-Model Ensembles:
This worldview suggests the complementary use of multiple models or methods. This is the same idea as suggested by Scott Page(2018) and the ensemble forecasting model (Leutbecher and Palmer, 2008) used in weather prediction. In entrepreneurship, multiple model worldview can be found in many scholarly works. For e.g. Sarasvathy(2001) stressed the importance of both effectuation and causation. Mansoori and Lackéus(2019) and Grichnik et al. 2017 suggested using multiple methods complementing each other. This worldview is by default inclusive of the previous one. A very commonplace in which multiple models are used in this way is the university curriculum.
3. Cognitive-Diversity world view:
This world view suggests using not only formal models or methods but all kinds of cognitive diversity. E.g. Models, methods, theories, heuristics, etc. Scott Page defines Cognitive Diversity as “Differences in information, knowledge, representations, mental models, and heuristic, to better outcomes on specific tasks such as problem-solving, predicting, and innovating (Page, 2017,14-15)“. To me, the weakness of this view is in its cognitive reductionism. Even though this world view is by default inclusive of all the previous ones, any cognitive alone worldview can be criticized for lack of ecological basis (Gibson, 1979; Varela et al., 1991; Clark, 1997).
4. Holistic Diversity worldview:
Apart from cognitive diversity, Page(2017) also talks about identity diversity, i.e. the differences in race, gender, age, physical capabilities, and sexual orientation. There are other frames to view diversities like; Biodiversity, which can be defined as variety in all forms of life—from genes to species to ecosystems; Cultural diversity, which can be defined as differences, such as in language, religion, dress and moral codes that exist between people according to race and ethnicity. Tool diversity suggesting for the use of multiple tools for the same task to increase output accuracy by reducing systematic errors. Artifact diversity refers to the number of different classes of artifacts and their relative proportions. In short, this world view suggests the existence of not only Cognitive-Diversity but also, all other kinds of diversity, i.e. diversity in people, biology, identity, networks, information sources, relational-expertise, institutions, culture, location, specialization, artifacts, tools, etc. This world view is by default inclusive of all the previous ones.
Ecological View to me includes a continuous effort to capture the true ecological reality in its dynamics. In addition to the previously listed holistic diversity, this view is inclusive of realities like complexity, dynamics, evolution, connectedness, interaction, etc. Complexity involves features and interactive dynamics as in a complex adaptive system. The idea of evolution suggests that existing elements interact, evolve, co-evolve into new diversities, variations, etc. It must also involve cumulative cultural evolution(and intelligence) as proposed by human cultural evolution studies (Tennie et al, 2009; Mesoudi and Thornton, 2018). In addition, an ecology is connected, hence no clear local-global separation is possible. This is particularly significant in human social ecology. Finally, the ecological view involves the use of contextualized sense-making that suggests that every human context is an emergent property and hence each context has unique types of characters.
This ecological worldview is by default inclusive of all the previous ones.
Part of ESOLoop: An Entrepreneurship Self-Organization Framework
Previously I have written a critical review post(Link: Constructivism vs Direct Instruction) on the article “Why Minimal Guidance During Instruction Does Not Work: An Analysis of the Failure of Constructivist, Discovery, Problem-Based, Experiential, and Inquiry-Based Teaching BY Paul A. Kirschner, John Sweller & Richard E. Clark.
I have also posted a Guy Claxton playlist in which Claxton questioned the core ideas over which the Neo-Traditionalist view(Cognitive-load, Direct instruction, Knowledge rich curriculum) is built-on. This includes fundamental assumptions about Computer analogy(+boxology), Evidence(evidence in health Vs education), False binaries, Contextually divorced ideas, etc.
This post is about a 2020 article titled “A Problem for Cognitive Load Theory—the Distinctively Human Life-form”, by Professor Jan Derry of UCL. She used Philosopher Robert Brandom’s Inferentialism to directly question the representationalist world view presented by Cognitive load theory, and to some extent Constructivist thinking. “She challenges the presuppositions involved not only in arguments for guided instruction by those supporting cognitive load theory, but also in opposed pedagogic approaches involving discovery and inquiry learning”. According to her, Both approaches are in danger of presupposing what C.B. Macpherson criticised as ‘possessive individualism’—i.e. capacities, beliefs and desires viewed as possessions of an individual. As a result, they fail to pay attention to mediation and normativity, both of which are distinctive aspects of human action.
In the Cognitive view, mind is distinct from world, and representations depict states of affairs; in the Inferential view, mind and world are not separated, and inferential connections, arising through human activity, constitute representations in the first place. Thus the role of representations has gone down one level. She adds, “the forging of the connection between word and object involves reversing the conceptual framework of much conventional pedagogical practice and placing the emphasis on bringing the learner into the inferential relations that constitute a concept prior to its acquisition.”
For me, This is an amazing perspective to have. Since I am in a quest to explore the maximum of diversities of ideas in education and learning, what I really like to further explore is–How does inferentialism fit with ecological and enactive perspectives, which also may stress the need to have a purpose, intention, and meaning, etc.
Video: Knowledge in education: Why philosophy matters
(Jan Derry talks about the core themes mentioned in the paper)
One key experiment noted in the paper
One of the highlights of the article is the example of an experiment conducted by Martin Hughes and Margaret Donaldson, in order to put the original findings of Piaget and Inhelder’s mountain task experiment (Piaget and Inhelder, 1967) to the test(Donaldson, 1978).
It demonstrated the importance of the purposes and intentions behind human action, which according to the author, very much relates to inferential thinking than just a representation of one mental item to another in the brain.
Since entrepreneurship is a complex domain, proposed design solutions must recognize complexity as a core design challenge. It must also consider the disposition and bounded rationality of the decision-making agent in question.
I have recently read an article by Herbert A. Simon “Can there be a science of complex systems?” in which he listed 4 principles of complex system design. (Meanwhile, the article is freely available Here online). They are;
Reading it inspired me to post an aggregate of ideas that I have assembled for an ongoing project. In my literature review, I have found the following features that might help in a sustainable complexity-friendly design.
They;
*Must begin with the right view: The right worldview (Dent, 1999) is a necessary precondition to effective design. If the world view is reductionist or simplistic, ignoring important unknowns, the design will reflect this weakness.
*Must acknowledge and promote self-organization: Self-organization (Heylighen, 2008) refers to the feature of systems that appear to organize themselves without external direction, manipulation, or control. This promotes ecologically grounded evolution and dynamics. A sustainable, complexity-friendly model must promote self-organization instead of one-size-fits-all models, rigid prescriptions, or top-down order.
*Must promote exploration: While self-organization may promote local optimization, the dispositional capability for exploration (Gupta et al, 2006) is necessary to facilitate the journey towards global optima. A sustainable complexity friendly model must have the capability for continuous multidimensional exploration.
*Must promote diversity (Page, 2010) integration (Martin, 2009), and inclusiveness (Pless and Maak, 2004): Decisions in a complex domain like entrepreneurship cannot be understood with linear thinking or binaries. Since it is impossible to know various emergent decision contexts beforehand, it is always ideal to design solutions for such variables and contingencies. That means a design must promote diversity and not exclude ideas, models, theories, etc., by prescription or omission.
*Must be contextually adaptive: Every context is unique, and thus we need solutions that are adaptable and usable for various contexts, as it emerges. Adaptive systems involve designing the elements of a system to find by themselves the solution of the problem. Like this, when the problem changes, the elements are able to dynamically find a new solution. We can say that such a system self-organizes (Gershenson, 2007).
*Must provide evolvability to the agent and must have evolvability of its own: Evolution and evolvability (Pigliucci, 2008; ScienceDaily, 2013) are a fundamental feature of nature, biology, and human social life. A sustainable entrepreneurship framework must have the evolutionary potential of its own, and also must enable evolvability to the entrepreneurial agents.
*Must protect agency from hijack: Prescriptive models have agency of their own, and are designed to hijack entrepreneurial agency by providing a model-centric view of the world. Commitment to one-size-fits-all models may result in the agent’s evolutionary, learning, adaptive potential being seriously compromised. Thus, a sustainable complexity-friendly model must protect and promote appropriate levels of entrepreneurial agency (Garud and Karnøe, 2003) and autonomy.
*Must acknowledge the dispositional state, including ignorance and weaknesses: Most of the existing entrepreneurship models reinforce and augment bounded rationality. A sustainable complexity-friendly model must acknowledge the possibility for bounded rationality, ignorance, and weaknesses. It must have inbuilt dispositional capabilities like distributed sense-making (Weick, 2005; Fisher, 2012) and descriptive self-awareness (Snowden, 2002), etc. to continually scan inwards and outwards for issues like ignorance, weakness, or bounded rationality.
*Must encapsulate various complexity-friendly functional dispositions: A complexity-friendly model must also be designed with a usability perspective in mind. It must encapsulate various complexity-friendly functional dispositions(above listed) into a single framework so that an ecology of ideas, in its dynamics, will transfer to the users, not just one or two ideas.
*Must acknowledge provisionally imperative nature of solutions, models and frameworks: This means no one-size-fits-all solutions can exist in complexity. According to Cillers(1998), In complexity, interpretations are contingent and provisional, pertaining to a certain context and a certain time frame(p. 121-122). This leads to the idea of Provisional imperative (Preiser and Cilliers, 2010; Woermann and Cilliers, 2012).
*Must strive forward as a continuous work in progress in a perpetual construction (Prigogine, 1997): Once proposed and written down, most models or prescriptive methods never change. This is a weakness when considering the speed of radical changes happening around us. Even with this vulnerability, most ideas and models in the entrepreneurship domain are designed to be self-aggrandizing and self-perpetuating. A sustainable complexity friendly model must have the capability to change itself according to challenges.
Part of Esoloop Framework series
Citations
Dent, Eric B. “Complexity science: A worldview shift.” Emergence 1, no. 4 (1999): 5-19.
Heylighen, Francis. “Complexity and self-organization.” Encyclopedia of library and
information sciences 3 (2008): 1215-1224.
Gupta, Anil K., Ken G. Smith, and Christina E. Shalley. “The interplay between exploration
and exploitation.” Academy of management journal 49, no. 4 (2006): 693-706.
Page, Scott. On Diversity and Complexity. Princeton University Press, 2010.
Martin, Roger L. The opposable mind: How successful leaders win through integrative
thinking. Harvard Business Press, 2009
Pless, Nicola, and Thomas Maak. “Building an inclusive diversity culture: Principles,
processes and practice.” Journal of business ethics 54, no. 2 (2004): 129-147.
Gershenson, Carlos. Design and control of self-organizing systems. CopIt Arxives, 2007.
Pigliucci, Massimo. “Is evolvability evolvable?.” Nature Reviews Genetics 9, no. 1 (2008):
75-82.
ScienceDaily. “Evolution Can Select for Evolvability, Biologists
Find”(https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/11/131114193434.htm)ScienceDaily, 14 Nov.
Garud, Raghu, and Peter Karnøe. “Bricolage versus breakthrough: distributed and embedded
agency in technology entrepreneurship.” Research policy 32, no. 2 (2003): 277-300.
Weick, Karl E. “5 Managing the unexpected: complexity as distributed sensemaking.” In
Uncertainty and surprise in complex systems, pp. 51-65. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2005
Fisher, Kristie, Scott Counts, and Aniket Kittur. “Distributed sensemaking: improving
sensemaking by leveraging the efforts of previous users.” In Proceedings of the SIGCHI
Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 247-256. 2012.
Snowden, David. “Complex acts of knowing: paradox and descriptive self-awareness.”
Journal of knowledge management (2002).
Prigogine, Ilya, and Isabelle Stengers. The end of certainty. Simon and Schuster, 1997.