Re: Business orgs and Re: Decentralization

["Miklos Gyorgy" <MIKLOS@ttt-atm.ttt.bme.hu> (by way of vanessa@media.mit.edu(Vanessa Stevens Colella))]

Hej,

> I would like to extend this discussion to business organisations
> as well. I saw an MIT demo (presented by Professor Tom Malone, Sloane)
> of an audience - that acted as decentralised pilotes - guiding a virtual
> airplane through a target landscape . Each person in the audience could
> guide either up-down or left-right and this was then fed into navigation
> of the virtual airplane. The emergent behaviour - of course - was that the
> virtual aircraft was safely guided through most of the  landscape. I liked
> this analogy and it worked well as a popular demo of decentralised control.

I do not know too much about business organization structures, but the
airplane analogy makes me ask a question.
(Can we read about it somewhere?)

To me, it is not at all obvious that the emergent behaviour of the virtual
aircraft is safe. What happens if there is a mountain which must be
avoided either from the right or from the left? Isn't it too slow to wait
for the audience to decide on a solution through some kind of positive
feedback?

And similarly in a business organization, there could often be situations
where there are many good solutions, but the org must decide firmly on one
of them and drop the others. Doesn't a decentralized strategy perform worse
in this case because it is more close to trying to find a common
denominator?

Gyorgy