This post on a new kind of group performance art gives a good example of how emergence can work in groups of humans. Key here, again, is that the players have no clear sense of the larger emergent pattern, i.e., there is no “learning” on the part of individuals, though there may be adaptation by the group as a whole.
How might this be useful? Imagine situations where the individuals can’t know what their counterparts are doing. The first (and scariest) example that springs to mind is al Qaida. We don’t know what their communications are like, but the typical structure of a guerilla or terrorist group is around cells that don’t know even about the existence of other cells. That protects the organization should one group get caught. The down-side, of course, is lack of the ability to coordinate. Unless, that is, you engineer in some behaviors that only require each cell to respond to simple cues from easily observable actions that other nearby cells are taking (e.g., terrorist attacks). I’m not sure what those rules would look like (and I’m not sure that I would post them on the Internet even if I did), but the idea is that emergence is a useful tool where coordinated global information sharing is not practical.
Another more mundane example would be inside a modern large corporation or govermental agency. While global communication is often highly desireable, it rarely happens in a consistent and coordinated manner. If workers (and even workgroups and offices) follow rules that mandate behavior changes based on relatively simple and easily obtainable cues from their local environment about what their immediate neighbors within the organization are doing and experiencing, it’s possible that you can have the entire organization respond as if there were global communication and coordination.
I realize this is all vague; I’m thinking out loud at the moment. But this idea of engineered emergence in communication-hostile environments is how I’m thinking that emergence will ultimately be a useful concept in knowledge management.
