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insects to make a strategic response to unpredictable large scale problems that suddenly
impinge upon their world.
There is an extensive literature (e.g. Mingers, 1997) on self-reproducing, self-replicating,
and similar systems. This paper will bypass revisiting these and merely synthesise from
two other related areas. The first is the empirical scientific biological literature about
what insect colonies do to share knowledge to provide an effective strategic response
to problems. The second is the small-worlds literature, which has recently moved from
the sociometric to the sciences, as more and more biological systems are seen to use the
small-worlds structure to share knowledge. These will be discussed in terms of a story
from the crisis management literature, which tells what actually happens in response to
a rapidly changing, community-based problem, in particular when the strategic response
has voided any pretence of controlled top-down knowledge sharing.
The insect literature
There has been a lot written about self-organisation in the biological and related sciences.
Much of this literature is presented as a mathematical analysis of patterns that emerge,
e.g. waves, sand dunes, tree structures and the markings on animals. Camazine et al.
(2001), however, provide an empirically based explanation using insect systems. This
paper's interpretation of what is meant by self-organisation draws heavily on this, and
thus draws on analogies from the world of the insect nest. Camazine et al. (2001) observe
that some complex actions emerge through simple interactions internal to the system,
without intervention by external directing influences. More formally they define self-
organisation as:
… a process in which pattern at the global level of a system emerges solely
from numerous interactions among the lower level components of the system.
Moreover, the rules specifying interactions among the systems components
are executed using only local information. [p8]
Camazine et al. (2001) do not accept that the queen insect in an ant's nest or beehive is
somehow 'giving instructions' to the millions of insects who have never been near her.
The term 'queen' is misleading; the term 'womb' would be more acceptable from a
knowledge sharing perspective. Each individual ant or bee bases its behaviour on its
perception of the position and behaviour of its nearest neighbour, rather than on
knowledge of the global behaviour of the whole group. Local dynamic knowledge
sharing is all that is present, yet the insects are able to make strategic responses to a
global threat to the whole nest. A strategic response somehow 'emerges' from lower
level actions, evidenced by the very existence of a nest that has specialised integrated
operations. The individual ants, for example, are not even thinking about this higher
order purpose; rather they are only concerned with their own small function in the nest.
If this emerging strategy appears different to the actions of lower level activities, then
the system may be described as complex. Individual ants forage for food, build the nest,
care for the eggs and milk the queen, yet somehow these activities have become coordin-
ated to produce a species that has survived, and very successfully, for millions of years.
Camazine et. al. (2001) summarise the now significant amount of empirical research that
has been conducted on insect nests to better understand how a strategic response can
emerge. For example, a few ants placed in a Petri dish were found to move sand around
in a random fashion, achieving nothing. But when enough ants were added, the probab-
ility of the production of a randomly constructed shape that the ants recognised and
would respond to, increased. The presence of these particular shapes then acted to
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