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October 22, 2001 (Computerworld) -- The Internet, so relentlessly hyped in the late 1990s, may actually be doing more to boost U.S. productivity than most people have imagined. Its unique ability to foster human interaction may prove to be a hidden catalyst for solving some of society's toughest problems.
Scientists have viewed evolution as a process of natural selection resulting from competition. But recently, some have argued that cooperation and symbiosis are really the dominant forces in nature.
An academic argument of no practical importance? No, says Norman Johnson, a computational physicist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. Johnson, who leads the Symbiotic Intelligence Project at the lab, says an emerging understanding of how people interact in informal groups to solve complex problems may profoundly influence how we organize and manage corporations, how we hire and train people and what technology we equip them with.
Johnson argues that self-organizing groups of "average" people can solve complex problems better than experts can. Challenges today—such as managing a global economy, fighting terrorism or optimizing supply chain operations—are more complex and more distrib- uted than problems were 20 years ago, and so they are less amenable to top-down solutions by "experts," he says.
In a U.S. Department of Labor survey, employees at several large companies said that 70% of the information they need to perform their jobs comes from informal sources, not from training courses, manuals or instructions from their bosses. Computer networks, acting in symbiosis with groups of people, facilitate the flow of this informal information and help create knowledge, Johnson contends.
70%
Employees at several large companies say 70% of the information they need to perform their jobs comes from informal sources.
"The big 'Aha!' for the Internet is that it has become all about a social process," Johnson says. "Every major technological success in the public in the last 50 years—cars, phones, beepers, cell phones, Internet—has been about social connection. They all enhance our ability to connect in some way and are successful because they contribute to the symbiotic intelligence process. But because we do not view society as a self-organizing entity, we only see the advantages to the individual, not the whole."
Johnson says U.S. intelligence agencies invested heavily in IT in the 1990s, believing that tools such as data mining were the key to solving complex intelligence problems.
"But it was generally a failure," he says. "They were always surprised by events, when in hindsight, the danger and players were clear.
"What the intelligence community forgot—possibly even to this day—was that humans are the best processors of complex information," he says. "Only the combination of a human/computer symbiotic system can solve large problems of high complexity."
Johnson says the U.S. shot forward economically during the 1990s while Japan stagnated because the U.S. has a much higher implementation of IT. The worker productivity increases that have driven the U.S. economy can't be easily explained by academics and economists because traditional models see the world as a top-down-driven place operating on known rules. The Internet provides a hidden but vital mechanism that the models overlook, Johnson says.
Managers can stimulate the creation of symbiotic intelligence by becoming enablers more than decision-makers, he adds. They can do so by encouraging the use of the Internet, especially e-mail; by flattening the organization while relying less on formal training and expert advice; and by encouraging expression and risk-taking. Managers also should define groups of people with highly diverse personalities and experiences, because diversity accelerates the creation of symbiotic intelligence, he says.
Adele Howe, a computer science professor at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, says Johnson's ideas have practical implications in numerous realms. For example, she says, the best solutions to complex problems in computer science—such as sorting or scheduling—are usually a hybrid of algorithms cobbled together from various sources, not a monolithic approach dreamed up by a single expert.
"The lesson for IT managers is to invite diversity," Howe says, which means taking chances on job applicants with nonstandard credentials. She also advises managers to provide work environments that promote informal interaction.
"With the increased use of the Net, many of the problems that have challenged traditional forms of management and organizations may now find solutions," Johnson says. "The importance of this alternative will become more significant as the complexity of our world increases and our traditional ways of solving problems fail."
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