Self-organization prior to the advent of “Agile as a mindset”


I start this blogpost with a visual illustration of what I had seen and captured in my "then new" Nikon D750 (Full Frame), as an excellent real-life example of self-organization.

Picture credit: "Lightnlens Fotographie" by Jasdev Singh| Web: www.lightnlens.net
Picture credit: "Lightnlens Fotographie" by Jasdev Singh| Web: www.lightnlens.net

Self-organization, also called spontaneous order (in the social sciences), is a process -  where some form of "overall order" arises from local interactions between parts of an "initially disordered" system.
The process is spontaneous, NOT needing control by any external agent. 

Trigger for self-organization: It's often triggered by random fluctuations, amplified by positive feedback.

The resulting organization is wholly decentralized and distributed over all the components of the system. Such an organization is typically robust and is able to survive or self-repair substantial perturbation. 

 
“Collective animal behavior” is a form of social behavior involving coordinated behavior of large groups of similar animals as well as emergent properties of these groups.

Emergence: In philosophy, systems theory, science, and art, emergence is the condition of an entity having properties its parts DO NOT have, due to interactions among the parts.

Emergence plays a central role in theories of integrative levels and of complex systems. For instance, the phenomenon of life as studied in biology is an emergent property of chemistry, and psychological phenomena emerge from the neurobiological phenomena of living things. 
              


Emergent properties include:
  • the costs and benefits of group membership
  • the transfer of information across the group
  • the group decision-making process
  • group locomotion and synchronization

PS: Content in this article is not an original piece of research/brainstorming and -
  • It has been put together, after a lot of reading (using content from various Wikipedia pages) with the intent to get a better understanding of the subject of self-organization without any discussion or direct relation with "Agile/Agility" per se.
  • The mention of "collective animal behavior" helps realize that it's not just humans (in an organization) that may exhibit this behavior but animals as well in an ecosystem.
  • Last but not the least, by discussing "emergence", I wish to highlight the emergent properties - those that are an outcome (or benefits) of self-organization.

Hope this article helps corelate and better understand "self-organization" when its discussed "in the context of Agile". Do leave your comments if you find this useful ...

Best,
Jasdev Singh (PMI-ACP®, CSM®, CSP-SM™, ICP-ACC)
https://in.linkedin.com/in/singhjasdev

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