Cause-alities

Why Complexity Science?

Why should complexity science models be part of your business analytics toolkit?  Because, uniquely, they usefully describe how the future can emerge from the present.

Complexity science recognizes that the future is in part dictated by "the physics of the situation" and in part created by our decisions.  And, crucially, it describes how and to what degree which is which.  Because of this, not only can we get a grasp of the likely outcomes of our decisions but also the amount of risk we are assuming.

Extending "Predictive Analytics" Using Complexity Science Models -- Part 1

"Predictive Analytics" is the "next generation of data-mining" according to  Forrester Research. The promise of significant bottomline benefits is making it big business with most enterprise software vendors participating.  I believe that complexity sciences modeling has a generally unrecognized potential to play an important role in the development of this capability.

Bacterial Chemotaxis

This blog has been a little too serious and so I have prepared a "buggy" little model that you can run in your browser.  To a large extent the complexity sciences have been developed to explain natural systems.  Recently, I had the opportunity to sit in on a class about "systems biology".  As my contribution I developed a multi-scale based simulation model of Bacterial Chemotaxis. 

By multi-scale I mean that parts of the model use "Systems Dynamics" modeling and other parts are agent based. In this model each bacteria is an "agent" that encapsulates the structure that causes the chemotaxis behavior. 

Clicking on this link will open the model as a Java Applet that will run inside your browser.  I hope you enjoy running experiments on the little bacteria inside your computer  Please don't let them out!  Be sure to try the drop-down window to drill down into a bacteria and see how it's innards are constructed.

It's About Time

What's about time? Readers of this occasional blog are thinking "Yeah, its about time he posted something!" True, but not the answer I'm thinking of:)

The practice of management is about time. It is about making a decision in the present that will affect results at some time in the future. Peter Drucker used a somewhat unusual word for this in his famous tome "Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices." He wrote about the "futurity" of decisions. If you look up futurity you will mostly read about horse racing. However, the definition that I think Drucker meant is "state of the future." According to Drucker, to manage well is, in part at least, to have a good grasp of what the future state of the business system will be as a result of a decision taken today.