Emergence/demergence

Behavior of folks in a company, or people on the outside interacting closing with them, determine information services needs. Emergence and as flyingsquid said on Slashdot demergence can be a very strong factor of what works and what doesn’t.

• When there are simple rules governing a system, intelligent behavior usually emerges.
• Systems that are governed by complex rules usually lead to stupid behavior.

Emergence…. and demergence (Score:5, Interesting)
by flyingsquid (813711) on Friday April 22, @12:21PM (#12314167)
I recently read a book about “emergence”: the idea that simple rules of interaction between unintelligent subcomponents of a system can lead to emergent behavior which is surprisingly complex and intelligent. In short, the whole is more than the sum of its parts; for instance, ant colonies, where the behavior of the colony is more intelligent than any given ant.

It then occurred to me that many groups and institutions exhibit the reverse of emergence: you have complex, smart people making up your system, but when you get them together you get stupid decisions. In this case, the whole is less than the sum of its parts, sometimes less intelligent than any one individual. The obvious name for this phenomenon is “demergence”.