Strategic knowledge sharing: a small-worlds perspective - Information Systems Foundations: Constructing and Criticising - page 120

a driver to act. Therefore, in human self-organising systems it may be necessary to em-
phasise why people should act if it is not otherwise obvious to them that they should.
However, Camazine et al. (2001) understate the influence of purposeful activity, even
those of genetic survival, for insects compared to group interaction influences of humans.
They place much more emphasis on the insects' response than to their driving forces
for achievement. The genetic drivers of gene survival are not emphasised, possibly be-
cause most of the insects never see or come in contact with the young.
Decentralised control and dense heterarchies
The decentralised control attribute identified by Camazine et al. (2001) is defined as a
particular 'architecture of information flow'. Each insect responds to other insects imme-
diately around it to learn what is to be done, rather than from messages from well-in-
formed individuals (leaders) in the upper echelons of a control hierarchy. The organisation
chart is one of small clusters of interacting insects responding to one stimulus, such as
a half built arch in one part of the nest, or a food retrieval clique at another location in
the nest. There is no tree of hierarchical knowledge flowing up and down; rather the
structure is more a series of independent clusters of workers who, ninety percent of the
time, only communicate directly with the other members of their cluster (described as
cliques, or small-worlds ). Only when they are unable to solve a problem with local
knowledge sharing will they venture out to ask another cluster. The dense heterarchies
attribute reinforces the image of a series of separate yet connected small clusters, each
focusing on different but loosely interconnected tasks. Heterarchies are inter-independent
groups; they are neither hierarchical and nor totally independent clusters. This raises
concerns about how a strategic response from these roughly independent responding
clusters is possible. The small-world literature may help here.
Small-worlds
The previous section briefly introduced some of the findings from empirical biological
research as presented by Camazine et al. (2001). The next thread of the synthesis
presented in this paper is that derived from the sociometric literature. In order to develop
some appreciation of the knowledge sharing system considered so central to insect nest
life, it is perhaps necessary to discuss this literature, or at least one part of it: the small-
worlds literature.
The small-worlds phenomenon emerged as a result of Stanley Milgram's experiments
(Milgram, 1967), and was later captured in the play and film 'Six Degrees Of Separation'
(Watts, 1999). The idea proposed is that it appears that any two people picked at random
are connectable via a chain of, on average, six intermediate acquaintances. This seems
counter-intuitive given that, for most of us, frequent direct two-way conversation only
occurs with fewer than 20 people; our small- world cluster. In sociometric network
terms, this suggests an overall population network that can neither be described as
'everyone knows everyone else', nor, at the other extreme, one where local clusters of
socially interactive persons have no means of contacting other clusters. The reality is a
mix of the two, with imperfect knowledge shared between clusters. In rather simplistic
terms, a small world network can be illustrated as in Figure 10.1. If one cluster were
pressed to send a message to another, it would be possible to find a 'weak link' between
the clusters; someone who can carry a message between them. In Figure 10.1, if A wants
to send a message to F, whom he does not know, then first he would ask friends in cluster
1. B says she knows someone, C, in cluster 2, who may be able to pass the message on.
When C gets the message, she asks her friends, and D suggests E, who does know F.