The Untamed Frontier of IT: Can We Find Order in the Chaos?

By: Joseph Provenzano, JDP Solutions

Information Technology (IT) is a thrilling and undeniably complex landscape. Exponential growth in applications and technological mechanisms further fuels the fire, leading some to declare that the US policy of ‘permissionless innovation’ is a success (where anyone can innovate without seeking permission from the government or other agencies). It has certainly propelled huge earnings in the US technology sector. Likewise, the mantra of "fail fast" can dominate business strategy-speak, encouraging rapid experimentation over structured improvement. But recent antitrust suits may swing the pendulum toward sensible controls.

As an ITIL Expert, I firmly advocate for controlled introductions of new products and services. Effective governance ensures stability and mitigates risks, which aligns with my philosophy of addressing problems iteratively and proactively. However, I recognize the valid concern that drove "permissionless innovation" as a way to address overly restrictive, outdated, or technically irrelevant regulations.

**Therefore, I'm curious to explore this potential dilemma: Can other disciplines offer insights into balancing the risk of stifling innovation with the undeniable need for good governance? Have other fields successfully navigated this challenge, finding a middle ground that fosters responsible progress without compromising stability?

Eureka! Potential Answers for These IT Challenges

Mathematics has a long history of innovation and sustained progress; can we learn from its interesting parallels? My gut concern, looking in that direction, is that mathematical "improvement" focuses mostly on quantification, and that is arguably simpler than the abstract improvement cycles in IT, where business improvement takes precedence over pure quantification goals. Engineering, too, focuses on technique advancement and often aligns with business needs, yet its challenges seem distinct from those faced in IT as well.

Interestingly, diverse fields like economics, finance, medicine, marketing, and even art, readily leverage IT to unlock new approaches and outcomes. Yet, for business analysts, reengineers, and continuous improvement professionals, guidance is scarce outside of already established frameworks like ITIL, Lean, Six Sigma, and Agile.

This was the difficulty swirling in my mind when I stumbled upon a book tackling this very challenge. The answer, seemingly obvious in hindsight, was evolutionary biology. These experts delve into the incredible diversity of life, exploring how species successfully evolved in complex environments to produce not just survival, but astonishing cooperation, symbiosis, and, ultimately, minds of mind-boggling complexity. Here, I felt, lay potential insights to business improvement challenges particularly relevant to the environments we deal with in IT.

With this hope, I dove into "This View of Life" by David Sloan Wilson, a renowned evolutionary biologist. He promised to unravel the advancements in evolutionary thought since Darwin, especially in the decades since many of us first encountered this fascinating science in school.

IT Learns from Life: How Evolutionary Insights Drive Progress

The parallels between biological evolution and the competitive landscape of IT are undeniable. While embracing randomness isn't the answer, evolution turns out to be more than pure randomness and offers a fascinating case study in navigating complexity and chaos. It presents a vast arena where we can directly observe the "winners" of countless trial-and-error competitions within intricate ecosystems, with high stakes for every participant.

The world of IT services and practices mirrors this competition. We fight for resources, with alternatives vying for lasting value (survival) over those destined for extinction. This is where insights from evolutionary science become truly valuable. By studying the victors and losers throughout the food chain, and within cooperative ecosystems, IT improvement efforts can glean fundamental principles for success. As life itself demonstrates, these principles offer an alternative to pure randomness and reveal the underlying mechanisms that lead to victory.

For IT business improvement, key questions arise:

• What differentiates successful services/practices from their competitors?
• How does our external environment foster a diversity of successful offerings that seem to operate harmoniously?
• How do seemingly unconnected, incremental changes culminate in long-term solutions for co-existence and progress?
• When is enforcing rigid rules beneficial, and when do guiding principles offer better progress?

Looking to Nature for Guidance: Evolution as a Teacher

Nature, with its 4-billion-year head start, boasts an invaluable library of success stories. From single-celled organisms to bustling ecosystems, nature has mastered the art of cooperation and adaptation. Our own species, Homo sapiens, arrived mere seconds ago on this evolutionary clock, inheriting this rich tapestry of winning strategies but acting for the most part, without a deep understanding of the inherited gifts.

While celebrating our 200,000-year segment of that journey, humility is crucial. We hold tremendous power over future landscapes yet attempting to "proscribe" the future through rigid, human-made controls often proves futile. Nature's success secrets, when provably uncovered, offer a far wiser guide.

Ethology, a branch of biology that studies animal behavior, shines a light on these very secrets and does the science to demonstrate their effectiveness with data. When applied to our challenges, these "winning strategies", and uncovered principles, demonstrably outperform our human attempts to create what we thought were highly logical alternatives. ITIL, for instance, acknowledges this wisdom with its "non-proscriptive" approach to detailing best practices, as do others. Ethology’s deeper level of study can unlock more significant progress for IT innovation and improvement.

The Evolutionary Guide to Shared Resources and Human Behavior

"This View of Life" explores fascinating parallels between evolutionary biology and our daily lives. Two of the areas covered: managing shared resources and understanding human behavior expose some key takeaways.

Let’s start with the first, managing shared resources, which received a Nobel prize (see footnote). After all, IT must grapple with shared resources like PCs, Servers, Storage, etc., within a company (or as a company), or for access to technology and funding. Below is what Ethologists have adapted from Elinor Ostrom’s Nobel Prize in 2009 for her “analysis of economic governance, especially the commons”.

The 8 Core Principles:

Managing shared resources effectively can be a complex challenge, prone to internal and external pressures. Yet, eight core design principles emerge as a reliable guide, for when applied correctly, these principles ensure equitable benefit, responsible use, and overall efficiency of use and stakeholder satisfaction.

1. Strong Group Identity & Purpose: Clearly define the group, the resource, and who can use it.
2. Proportional Benefits & Costs: Ensure fair contribution and distribution of benefits, avoiding "free rider" situations.
3. Inclusive Decision-Making: Involve all stakeholders in decisions, fostering support and trust.
4. Monitoring & Accountability: Track agreed-upon behaviors and address deviations fairly.
5. Graduated Sanctions: Implement progressive responses to encourage compliance, from reminders to penalties.
6. Fast & Fair Conflict Resolution: Provide a neutral platform for resolving disputes within the group.
7. Local Autonomy: Empower subgroups to manage their resources when appropriate, preventing overly centralized control.
8. Polycentric Governance: Ensure alignment with core principles across all levels, including external authorities.

The Key: Applying these principles effectively overcomes common challenges and leads to shared success for all stakeholders. They serve as a yardstick to measure the effectiveness of your resource management systems.

Beyond the Core: While the core principles are universal, complex systems sometimes require additional support. Some straightforward examples of using the 8 principles are found in the book, for instance for open grazing lands or water access management. A tougher challenge was highlighted in education, which brings forward much more complex issues – yet showed how adherence to these principles demonstrated improvements in a properly controlled scientific trial. The example presented showcased how a school district addressed high dropout rates among ‘at-risk’ students. By creating special class environments with secure social settings and short-term reward structures, they achieved success where the traditional system failed.

Education presented a unique challenge due to its inherent complexity, and to address this, two additional auxiliary design principles were implemented:

1. Safe and Secure Social Environment: Recognizing that fear hinders learning, a safe and secure environment was created. This fostered trust and allowed students to focus on their studies without fear or distraction.
2. Short-Term Reward Structures: Traditional curriculums often lack immediate gratification, which can be demotivating. By providing short-term benefits the team could sustain motivation for achievement of the longer-term objectives, such as future education and career opportunities.

The education challenge demonstrated an important insight: the core principles provide a strong foundation but, adapting them to specific contexts by adding auxiliary principles for unique challenges is key to unlocking their full potential.

Understanding Human Behavior: Evolution's Insights for Business Culture

The evolutionary perspective offers valuable insights into how individuals behave within groups, which has profound implications for company and departmental cultures. While business leaders aim to shape behavior toward strategic goals, the question remains: how does this happen naturally?

Evolutionary biologists view behavior not as purely logical, individual choices, but rather, as decisions influenced within a social context. While we make daily decisions seemingly based on logic, our actions are unconsciously shaped by deep-rooted evolutionary tendencies.

This prompts biologists to ask different questions when assessing how individuals respond. For example, an evolutionary biologist might ask: "Given the environment and group dynamics context, what decision would best serve an individual to adapt behavior to this situation?" This creates a valuable starting point for analyzing behavior.

Humans evolved to make trade-offs, and prioritizing one need often means neglecting another. Much of this decision-making is hardwired, operating outside conscious awareness.

Furthermore, as individuals evolved to cooperate within groups, we have a strong tendency to prioritize our group's needs. Businesses, being groups themselves, face situations where one group’s internal need will impose costs on other internal groups. This triggers an inherent resistance as individuals subconsciously prioritize their affiliated team's needs over external demands.

Expecting people to readily go against these fundamental tendencies is unrealistic. As the saying goes, "Man makes plans, and god laughs!” (or evolution laughs as the case may be)

Numerous researchers, including behavioral economists, have studied how people deviate from strictly rational decision-making. However, a deeper understanding, as outlined in the book, requires exploring Tinbergen's four questions: function, mechanism, development, and history. Exploring these questions (further explained below) reveals that our brains make decisions in ways that are not purely rational, regardless of how well-designed and communicated the logic behind them might be.

Many processes we create in a business or community setting operate with an optimistic expectation of how people will behave. For example, expecting someone to readily dedicate time to supporting a "continual improvement concern" when their most pressing priorities lie elsewhere. However, the 'normal case', biologists show, is to prioritize one's immediate responsibilities.

The same likely applies to various forms, surveys, and requests designed to collect feedback or improve efficiency. While the intended benefit may be clear, the immediate cost falls on the individual, who often prioritizes their immediate needs over the intended (abstract, future) benefit.

Evolutionary biology’s explanation for why this happens is quite insightful and highlights how individuals balance the cost of engaging with external requests. Remember, this behavior is not a conscious choice but a natural, hardwired response to perceived costs and benefits. In that regard, behavior has many features that are emergent aspects of evolution. Before cooperation and adaptation, which are examples of high-level emergent ‘secrets of success’, lower-level trade-offs and cost-benefit behaviors were powerfully set within the collection of subsystems that make us who and what we are.

Understanding these deep-seated human tendencies allows us to design processes and communication strategies that resonate with how people naturally operate within groups. It's an improvement in our ability to design and align with inherent decision-making processes.

Can We Design Our Practices, Services, and Cultures to Account for Evolved Behaviors?

Yes, we can! But it requires understanding how our minds and emergent behaviors evolved. Evolutionary Biologists use what they term “Tinbergen’s Four Questions” to do just that, and we can leverage those same questions to design better solutions as we focus on improving new technology and artificial intelligence (AI).

Tinbergen's Four Questions:

1. Function: What purpose does a behavior serve? What triggers it?
2. History: How did this behavior evolve?
3. Mechanism: How does it work biologically?
4. Development: How does it change throughout life, development, and changing goals?

An example of behavior: Sleep

Function: Energy restoration, metabolic regulation, thermoregulation, boosting the immune system, detoxification, brain maturation, circuit reorganization, synaptic optimization, and recovery.

History: Sleep exists in invertebrates, lower vertebrates, and higher vertebrates. NREM and REM sleep exist in all mammals, including marsupials, and also evolved in birds.

Mechanism: Mechanisms exist to regulate wakefulness, sleep onset, and sleep. Specific mechanisms involve neurotransmitters, genes, neural structures, and the circadian rhythm.

Development: Sleep manifests differently in infants, adolescents, and older adults. Differences include the stages of sleep, sleep duration, sex differences, and goal-directed behavior.

How to Factor the Above into IT and AI Future Development:

• Consider evolutionary insights: Don't just rely on "logical" decisions.
• Ask Tinbergen's questions: Understand the function, history, mechanism, and development of target behaviors.
• Review AI policy with these same lenses: Ensure AI doesn't exploit our biases or lead to unforeseen problems.

The book made a strong point about policy creation as well, which is often an attempt to influence behavior without such a deep understanding of its evolutionary roots. That approach substitutes what we ‘think will be logical’ instead. This can lead to unintended consequences and that is another reason why Tinbergen’s four questions are important. The book discussed a tragic case of cataract surgery in newborns which was the result of well-meaning attempts to ‘take action’ before understanding the full picture as Evolutionary Biologists and Tinbergen’s four questions would have approached it. The deeper understanding, in that case, would have avoided the tragic outcomes if first, the four questions above were discussed and explored.

The Time is Now:

As AI rapidly advances, applying evolutionary insights becomes crucial. It's no longer just about automating tasks; it's about shaping the future of technology alongside our own, highly-dependent futures.

Will IT and AI Development Benefit from Evolutionary Insights?

There's a compelling argument for considering evolutionary biology's latest understanding when examining AI and IT advancement. The very fabric of life, honed over billions of years, offers invaluable lessons for shaping technology, living or not, responsibly.

As we take the reins of technological evolution, this question becomes even more crucial. My exploration of "This View of Life" aimed to glean such insights from the life sciences, drawing parallels to IT's own journey. While my grasp of AI, natural language processing, and their learning processes is limited, the rigorous application of evolutionary principles feels inherently more trustworthy than other approaches.

The current lack of AI governance is concerning. From an ITIL Continual Improvement, Lean, and Six Sigma perspective, I've always focused on understanding the principles of success. Learning how life itself evolved its own set of emergent principles, how evolved mechanisms impact our behavior, and how cooperation and symbiosis proved to win, is not only exciting but also reassuring, especially given their apparent triumph over chaos over the past 4 billion years.

This realization undermines "manmade" approaches like laissez-faire or command and control, which seem incongruent with, and ultimately less successful than, what evolution has achieved. Instead of attempting to control every aspect of progress or access to materials, I align with the author of "This View of Life" and numerous practitioners who demonstrably showcase how leveraging evolutionary insights might work.

The timing couldn't be better. While my early career tasks like programming, and developing ERP and PLM solutions seemed to mirror within-organism evolution, things have become immensely complex. IT is now interwoven with critical processes, instrumental in every product and service development (and outside of the business context, much more), and drives most all key differentiators in the market. This is the perfect moment to join hands with evolutionary biology and co-evolve responsibly.

Footnote:

1. Nobel Prize in Economics in 2009 for Elinor Ostrom. Elinor's theory stated that local communities are the best at managing their natural resources as they are the ones that use them and that all regulation on the use of resources should be done at the local level, as opposed to a higher, central authority that does not have direct interaction with the resources.