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Category: Learning in complexity

  • Entrepreneurship and Synergetics

    Synergetics is an interdisciplinary theoretical approach that studies self-organization in complex systems(systems that are characterized by openness, dynamics, and complexity). It was developed by physicist Hermann Haken(1969) through his research experiments on laser light. He noticed unpredictable patterns emerging that cannot be explained by linear models. The properties of light change in a self-organized manner when the laser reaches a critical point or “laser threshold”, and such emergent order sets the control parameter which enslaves the system.

    (This is an updated post)

    For a real explanation, listen directly from the master: Hermann Haken

    Synergetics and Entrepreneurship

    My initial exposure to synergetics from an entrepreneurship related scholarship started with reading Jeffrey Goldstein’s article(attached) in which he stressed his radical construction point of view that paints a negative picture. He argues;

    “Although these connotations of self-organization have provided a corrective to the outdated belief that novel order in a system can only come about through the imposition of external order, a careful inspection of research in complexity theory reveals that the emergence of new order is more appropriately constructed rather than self-organized as such (Goldstein 2003).”

    EMERGENCE, CREATIVITY, AND THE LOGIC OF FOLLOWING AND NEGATING by Goldstein’ 2015

    Goldstein further specifically pointed to Haken; in that he adds;

    “An example is that much touted emblem of self-organization, the laser with its property of ultra-focused coherence (see Haken, 1981). In actuality, though, laser light hardly comes about either spontaneously or through inner direction. On the contrary, it requires the most stringent of laboratory manipulations and constraints (see a list of these in Strogatz, 2003). An examination of other examples of self-organization reveals a similar constructional nature of emergent phenomena (see, e.g., Nicolis, 1989)”

    EMERGENCE, CREATIVITY, AND THE LOGIC OF FOLLOWING AND NEGATING by Goldstein’ 2015

    I definitely don’t buy this argument by Goldstein. I believe as always that self-organization is a ubiquitous feature of all open complex adaptive systems.

    Andreas Liening of TU Dortmund

    In entrepreneurship, a pioneering effort to apply Synergetics is coming from Prof Andreas Liening and colleagues of TU Dortmund. The top reads are;

    1. Complexity and Entrepreneurship: Modeling the Process of Entrepreneurship Education with the Theory of Synergetics
    2. Synergetics—Fundamental Attributes of the Theory of Self-Organization and Its Meaning for Economics(OPEN Access)

    Although I am extremely interested in reading anything relating to entrepreneurship and complexity, I totally disagree with the “Entrepreneurship Mindset” as the purpose of Entrepreneurship Education promoted by Liening. To see my reasons check this, this, this, this, this and this

    It is very easy to fall into the trap of traditional representational cognitive psychology and its lazy dependence on decontextualized hard or impossible to define concepts like Mindset.

    Some potential issues with application of self-organization and synergetics in education

    It is confusing when an outsider looks at education and learning science for the first time to find application ideas. It is very easy to be trapped in a cultish eco-chamber. Even though I agree that It is essential to read people whom we disagree with, a serious issue arises when we start to blindly believe everything they say. This is especially true if one doesn’t have the necessary expertise and diversity in their system to figure out the flaws of the argument. 

    Example; Paul A. Kirschner who is one of the most reductionist of all the education scholars with his famous works like, “Why Minimal Guidance During Instruction Does Not Work”  is also famous for his work on learning in complexity, ” Ten steps to complex learning”.  A new observer might be mistaken to believe that Kirschner is the go to authority in complexity in education. This is a huge mistake. This points to serious issues with the application of synergetics in particular and complexity science in general without any understanding of domain epistemology.

    1. Those with domain expertise may use complexity theory to fit in with their long-accumulated path dependency.
    2. They may use a complexity tag to avoid being called a reductionist.
    3. Those with complexity background may fall for the obvious and visible part of domain knowledge.
    4. Those with ideas and tools to sell may try craft a much less uncertain version of complexity;.
    5. As often pointed out by people like Dave Snowden, those with a complexity background, especially those associated with mathematical modeling and Santa Fe may assume that they can model human complexity by developing agent-based models as they do for some idealized version of Ant behavior. This can be viewed as a reductionistic tendency inside the complexity sciences (http://www.human-current.com/archived-episodes/tag/anthrocomplexity)

    All the above can be viewed as going against the ethics of complexity, especially when proposed as solutions for other people and other people’s children.

    According to Synergetics Philosophers Helena Knyazeva and Sergey Kurdyumov, “The synergetic assertions can apply to many scientific disciplines. They are functioning on the level from which a great scope of scientific disciplines can be embraced. However, such an approach has also a negative side. The higher the level of the view is the less concrete details can be distinguished. On the other hand, the deeper we penetrate particular details the less place seems to remain for synergetics itself” They adds; “Synergetics can provide us only with general frames of consideration, a mental scheme or a heuristic approach to a concrete scientific investigation. Concrete applications of synergetic models to complex human or social systems presuppose further detailed scientific investigations. Such investigations can be carried out only by the use of a profound knowledge of a certain disciplinary field and/or with a close collaboration with specialists in a corresponding scientific discipline. Thus, synergetics gives a certain approach or a direction of research, or, to put it in terms of psychology, a scientific attitude. The rest is the matter of every concrete investigation”

    Some interesting articles by Russian philosopher Helena Knyazeva on synergetics are attached

    Synergetics: New Universalism or Natural Philosophy of the Age of Post-Nonclassical Science?

    ARBITRARINESS IN NATURE: SYNERGETICS AND EVOLUTIONARY LAWS OF PROHIBITION(Co-authored with Haken)

    SYNERGETICS OF HUMAN CREATIVITY; HELENA and HAKEN

    The Synergetic Principles of Nonlinear Thinking

    Synergetics and the Images of Future

    THE COMPLEX NONLINEAR THINKING: EDGAR MORIN’S DEMAND OF A REFORM OF THINKING AND THE CONTRIBUTION OF SYNERGETICS

    Nonlinear synthesis and co‐evolution of complex systems

    NONLINEARITY OF TIME IN THE COMPLEX WORLD

    The Synergetic World View and Its Synthetic Value

    FIGURES OF TIME IN EVOLUTION OF COMPLEX SYSTEMS

    Recent works

    Virtual Reality from the Standpoint of Complexity Science

    Paradigm Shift in the Understanding of the Creative Abilities of Consciousness

    Strategies of Dynamic Complexity Management

    Active Innovative Media as Co-Evolutionary Landscapes

    Cognitive Networks: Interactivity, Intersubjectivity, and Synergy

    Complexity Studies: Interdisciplinarity in Act

    The Idea of Co-evolution; Towards a New Evolutionary Holism

  • Olli-Pekka Heinonen discusses Finland education system with a complexity perspective

    Former Minister of Education of Finland Olli-Pekka Heinonen talk with Toby Lowe about Education system of Finland with a complexity perspective.

  • Scott Kelso Trolls Herbert Simon

    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

  • Ilya Prigogine; The End of Certainty (Interview 1997)

    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

  • ESOLoop: An Entrepreneurship Self-Organization Framework for a Complex, Dynamic and Interconnected world.

    ESOLoop: An Entrepreneurship Self-Organization Framework for a Complex, Dynamic and Interconnected world.

    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.

    Read the full work and citations @ Esoloop-framework.github.io

  • A Complex Ecological Worldview Of Entrepreneurship

    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.

    What is Ecological Worldview

    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

  • What should be in a complexity friendly design solution for entrepreneurship

    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;

    1. Homeostasis.
    2. Membranes
    3. Specialization
    4. Near-Decomposibility.

    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.

  • From Representation to Emergence by Osberg, Biesta and Cilliers

    From Representation to Emergence by Osberg, Biesta and Cilliers

    A complexity critic of cognitive reductionism.

    In the paper “From representation to emergence: complexity’s challenge to the epistemology of schooling” Deborah Osberg, Gert Biesta and Paul Cilliers challenges the ‘spatial epistemology’ of representation by using ideas from complexity.

    Key takes

    1. In this paper they explore possibilities for an alternative ‘temporal’ understanding of knowledge in its relationship to reality.
    2. In addition to complexity, It takes inspiration from Deweyan ‘transactional realism’ and Derrida’s deconstruction.
    3. They suggest that ‘knowledge’ and ‘reality’ should not be understood as separate systems which somehow have to be brought into alignment with each other, but that they are part of the same emerging complex system which is never fully ‘present’ in any (discrete) moment in time.
    4. This points to the importance of acknowledging the role of the ‘unrepresentable’ or ‘incalculable’. With this understanding knowledge reaches us not as something we receive but as a response, which brings forth new worlds because it necessarily adds something (which was not present anywhere before it appeared) to what came before.
    5. This understanding of knowledge suggests that the acquisition of curricular content should not be considered an end in itself. Rather, curricular content should be used to bring forth that which is incalculable from the perspective of the present.
    6. The epistemology of emergence is introduced as a complexity alternative to representational epistemology. It calls for a switch in focus for curricular thinking away from questions about presentation and representation and towards questions about engagement and response.
    7. In contrast to this representational epistemology—which could also be called a ‘spatial epistemology’ since it depends on a correspondence between knowledge and reality—they propose that complexity suggests a temporal epistemology which implies that the quest for knowledge is not in order that we may develop more accurate understandings of a finished reality, as it is. Rather, the quest for knowledge is about finding more and more complex and creative ways of interacting with our reality.
    8. This paper also views the presentationalist view(situated, real world learning) critically and point out some of its weakness. It brings up two critical dimesntions initially, ie. conservative and radical. From a conservative viewpoint, that a ‘decent’ education is not merely about practical work or apprenticeship, but one in which children get access to all the great works of a particular cultural tradition. Secondly, from a radical viewpoint, it is argued that participatory or presentational forms of learning end up in socialisation and adaptation and make it difficult to create critical distance and therefore result in one-dimensional ways of learning.
    9. A third critique is pointed from the work of Jacques Derrida—in particular, his critique of ‘the metaphysics of presence,’ more familiarly known as ‘deconstruction’. According to this line of thinking, both presentational and representational pedagogies rely upon the idea of a world that is simply present and can simply be represented. Both presentation and representation can be seen as examples of the ‘metaphysics of presence’—the idea that there is a world ‘out there’ that is simply ‘present’ and to which all our understandings (meanings) are in relation. In contrast to this position, deconstruction resists being drawn into and subsumed by any relationship with presence.
    10. Authors cites themselves @ Biesta and Osberg, 2007 to show that eventhough ‘representational’ and ‘presentational’ pedagogies are somewhat (although not completely) opposed to each other—both strategies are still the two main approaches to education, and perhaps becoming increasingly intertwined.
    11. The authors argue that ‘relationality to the radically non-relational’ could be considered key to the logic of complex systems. They point to Prigogine, who insists that although new order (emergence) results when a complex system explores and finds new ways of working with the initial conditions, and that these initial conditions are provided by the lower hierarchical level—and are ‘causal’ in this regard—the elements making up the lower level do not provide everything necessary for order of a particular kind to emerge at the higher level. In his words: The system ‘chooses’ one of the possible branches available when far from equilibrium. But nothing in the macroscopic equations justifies the preference for any one solution. (Prigogine, 1997).

  • Why expertise theory applied in entrepreneurship is flawed?

    This is an updated version of my previous blog post that explored the flaws of effectuation.

    The series has two more posts which you can read here and here (Effectual Self-Organization: Could it be a mindful praxis for self-organization).

    The empirical evidence for effectuation came from the study of expert entrepreneurs conducted by Saraswathy. She contrasts her study on entrepreneurial expertise with entrepreneurial performance which has been traditionally studied either (1) as a set of personality traits of the entrepreneur that explains the success or failure of the firms he or she creates (Llewellyn and Wilson, 2003), or (2) as a set of circumstances or attributes of the project and its environment that contains the seeds of its success or failure (Thornton, 1999). In that, she conducted a cognitive science-based study of entrepreneurial expertise using think-aloud verbal protocols. Included in that, was a 17-page problem set of 10 typical decisions in a startup firm and had a representative sample of 27 expert entrepreneurs.

    I claim that this expertise framing of effectuation is flawed and counterproductive. I propose a much more scientific way of approaching or using effectuation, i.e. Effectuation as a praxis/logic/heuristics for self-organization in complex domains, not just as possessions of expert entrepreneurs.

    Following are some reasons why I consider the expertise theory of effectuation flawed;

    Firstly, entrepreneurship is a low validity domain (Kahneman and Klein, 2009) with extreme levels of complexity. To have genuine expertise to develop, the domains must be of high validity. i.e. “Skilled intuitions will only develop in an environment of sufficient regularity, which provides valid cues to the situation” (Kahneman and Klein, 2009). This was also previously spotted in a review by Shanteau(1992), in which he confirmed the importance of predictable environments and opportunities to learn them, in order to develop real expertise. To Kahneman and Klein(2009) prolonged practice and feedback that is both rapid and unequivocal are necessary conditions for expertise, provided by predictable environments. To be more specific about the contrast, Immediate Feedback, Repeatability & Regular environment are the fundamental conditions to develop expertise. Entrepreneurship is characterized by the opposite; Delayed feedback, Non-Repeatability, Irregular complex, and an emergent environment.

    Secondly, the effectiveness of deliberate practice as claimed by effectuation will not work in complex domains like entrepreneurship. There is no scientific evidence of it. Saraswathy(2008) defines an expert as someone who has attained a high level of performance in a domain as a result of years of experience and deliberate practice (Ericsson et al, 1993). Against this, Baron (2009) raised the important problem, ie “In what tasks or activities do successful entrepreneurs demonstrate expert performance?”. Advancing that point, Baron and Henry (2010) argued that deliberate practice may not be possible in entrepreneurship and that entrepreneurs instead either learn vicariously or transfer skills learned through practice in other domains into their new ventures. Frankish et al(2013) specifically questioned the idea of learning from experience. They pointed to the lack of repetition opportunities (owing to task diversity) and the difficulty of interpreting the various causes of new venture survival, suggesting that entrepreneurs improve performance only partially based on their experience in running new ventures. Further, in recent scholarly works, it has been demonstrated that deliberate practice may not guarantee better performance in extremely complex domains. A 2014 meta-analysis (Macnamara et al, 2014) has shown that deliberate practice only explained 26% of the variance in performance for games, 21% for music, 18% for sports, 4% for education, and less than 1% for professions. This further demonstrates a low connection between deliberate practice and performance in complex unstructured domains.

    Thirdly, expertise in complex social domains are distributed (Edwards, 2010). It is not necessary that an entrepreneur must be an expert in finance, accounting, programming, law, etc. Such expertise is distributed(and or extended) across various individuals(lawyer, doctor) institutions(law enforcement, companies) and artifacts(tools, software). etc. It is not even necessary that the entrepreneur has to know the entrepreneurial core activities. He or she can still win in case she or he is in the right high network place(e.g. Harvard, Stanford, etc.), get good people to mentor and work with (e.g. Facebook case of Sean Parker, Peter Thiel), get access to specialized institutions(e.g. YC in the case of Dropbox), have a rich family to support, etc. He can also fail despite all of this(see next).

    Fourthly, complex domains like entrepreneurship are subjected to various complexity laws like power laws, Mathew effects, reputation effects, ecosystem-embedded-preferential-attachment, etc. This invalidates success as a metric of expertise. Core events in complex systems like entrepreneurship never repeat in originality(strange attractor effect), feedback is delayed, and since complex systems are governed by power laws, small things(e.g. Harvard dorm Facebook) can result in huge success, and resource-rich interventions can fail(google plus). A tangent is that the emergent property of a system may not be the result of the expertise of a particular agent or agents, but because of the dynamics of the whole system co-evolving with the ecosystem as a whole. This may prevent us from establishing any valid causal relationship between expertise and performance in a domain like entrepreneurship. Thus in complexity, high performance may not guarantee success, in that, the success of an individual does not depend uniquely on the quality of performance (Barabási, 2018). 

    Fifthly, I believe that, like the personality view of entrepreneurial achievement (McClelland,1951, 1961; Llewellyn and Wilson, 2003), the expertise view may also have some unintended counter-productive effects. It can legitimize the hubris among successful entrepreneurs, and at the same time make the aspiring entrepreneurs think that they may require deliberate practice to become a successful entrepreneur, while in-fact success could be the result of complexity-effects like Mathew effects, reputation effects, preferential attachment, etc.

    Sixthly, A very important question to ask here is; Is it even desirable to start multiple ventures than make one single venture successful. Why do people start multiple ventures? Is it because they see it as playing chess or golf? Will they start another venture if they are incredibly successful in the first business? Will a few outlier cases like Elon Musk ethically suffice us to prescribe it as a standard scientific way of thinking about the world? Do multiple successful marriages make someone a marriage expert, or unlucky and bad at marriage?. The key point I am trying to make here is that in domains like chess, multiple success may be a sign of expertise. In many extremely complex questions of life, it may be undesirable.  

    Seventhly, as I have demonstrated, most effectuation principles correspond to the dynamics of self-organizing complex system. This means it must not be limited to entrepreneurs. Herbert Simon also hinted at this aspect and suggested that there might be a connection between effectuation and Near Decomposibility (Sarasvathy and Simon, 2000). According to him (Saraswathy, 2008), Near Decomposibility is an astonishingly ubiquitous principle in the architecture of rapidly evolving complex systems, and effectuation appears to be a preferred decision model with entrepreneurs who have created high-growth firms, we should be able to link Near Decomposibility to the processes these entrepreneurs use to create and grow enduring firms–whether in an experimental situation or in the real world (Saraswathy, 2008, p.163). But instead of trying out a more fundamental complexity science-based explanation of entrepreneurial behavior, Saraswathy used the expertise theory to build the theory of effectuation. 

    Finally, I believe that effectuation if developed as a self-organization logic can be applied in other domains. It has applications in complex domains like education, learning, economics, politics, etc. Framing effectuation as a science of action in social complexity will open up a lot of possibilities. This also will make the theory more robust and useful.

    Read also: Effectual Self-Organization: Could it be a mindful praxis for self-organization

    Part of Esoloop Framework Series

    Citations

    Barabási, Albert-László. The Formula: The science behind why people succeed or fail. Macmillan, 2018

    Baron, Robert A. “Effectual versus predictive logics in entrepreneurial decision making: Differences between experts and novices: Does experience in starting new ventures change the way entrepreneurs think? Perhaps, but for now,“caution” is essential.” Journal of Business Venturing 24, no. 4 (2009): 310-315

    Baron, Robert A., and Rebecca A. Henry. “How entrepreneurs acquire the capacity to excel: Insights from research on expert performance.” Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal 4, no. 1 (2010): 49-65.

    Ericsson, K. Anders, Ralf T. Krampe, and Clemens Tesch-Römer. “The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance.” Psychological review 100, no. 3 (1993): 363

    Frankish, Julian S., Richard G. Roberts, Alex Coad, Taylor C. Spears, and David J. Storey. “Do entrepreneurs really learn? Or do they just tell us that they do?.” Industrial and Corporate Change22, no. 1 (2013): 73-106.

    Kahneman, Daniel, and Gary Klein. “Conditions for intuitive expertise: a failure to disagree.”American psychologist 64, no. 6 (2009): 515.

    Llewellyn, David J., and Kerry M. Wilson. “The controversial role of personality traits in entrepreneurial psychology.” Education+ Training (2003).

    Macnamara, Brooke N., David Z. Hambrick, and Frederick L. Oswald. “Deliberate practice and performance in music, games, sports, education, and professions: A meta-analysis.” Psychological science 25, no. 8 (2014): 1608-1618.
    McClelland, David C. “N achievement and entrepreneurship: A longitudinal study.” Journal of personality and Social Psychology 1, no. 4 (1965): 389.

    Sarasvathy, Saras D. Effectuation: Elements of entrepreneurial expertise. Edward Elgar Publishing, 2009.

    Sarasvathy, Saras D., and Herbert A. Simon. “Effectuation, near-decomposability, and the creation and growth of entrepreneurial firms.” In First Annual Research Policy Technology Entrepreneurship Conference. 2000.

    Shanteau, James. “Competence in experts: The role of task characteristics.” Organizational behavior and human decision processes 53, no. 2 (1992): 252-266.

  • GRE’isation of entrepreneurship

    Eric Ries(2011) introduced the concept of Actionable metric and Vanity metric by taking the example of a test preparation company called Grockit. This made me think about the formidable role Lean-startup played in the matricization of entrepreneurship culture.

    According to Eric Ries, “When cause and effect is clearly understood, people are better able to learn from their actions. Human beings are innately talented learners when given a clear and objective assessment”.

    As a combo, the lean-startup has introduced many other concepts like Validated learning, Innovation accounting, etc as part of their metricization drive.

    Because of this, I thought it is more than appropriate to call the role played by the lean-startup in bringing measurement culture to the entrepreneurship domain as the “GRE’isation of entrepreneurship” (after the Graduate Record Examinations).

    The problem here is the complete ignorance of the complexity of the real world. In complex domains, you can’t have the perfect objective answer or action. There is not even an objective goal. Everything is dynamic and co-evolving.

    Secondly, In a complex domain like entrepreneurship, emergent property is a key feature. The idea you initially had can emerge into a radically new formation, an emergent property that you could have never imagined before. For E.g. Instagram was started as an HTML5 supported location-based service; Facebook was started as an app to compare two people’s pictures and the rate which one was more attractive.

    When you introduce a metric to a radically changing, complex, dynamic, and emergent system like a startup, it will amount to the manifestation of Goodhart’s Law that suggests that “when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure”. When people set an objective metric-driven goal, people will tend to optimize for that objective regardless of the consequences. It is extremely troublesome if the metric is introduced as a target in a domain that is dynamic and emergent like that in entrepreneurship. Here the measurement based on metric itself is not a problem, but the effect of such metric fixation(Muller, 2021) will stagnate the startup and uncouple the venture from ecological realities and opportunities. 

    And that is absolutely a problem.

    Part of Esoloop Framework