Cities as Information Management; Management as Information Management

I’m finally getting around to reading Steven Johnson’s Emergence. I understand I’m late to the party here but I figured Emergence would be something that I would agree with too much for me to learn anything from. I tend to agree with (though not always follow) the Jason Pettus Healthy Reading Pyramid (TM) in this regard.

Emergence has turned out to be very agreeable reading. Not just because I agree with most of it intuitively already, but because it’s so well written and the examples it uses feel classic and timeless.

There are also lots of things in the book that relate to ManageWithoutThem core principles. In fact, back when I was tinkering with these ideas from a management perspective, Johnson was actually writing his more general book on Emergence!

I want to quote a couple of paragraphs from Emergence. They are not the most interesting or enlightening but they are the most related to ManageWithoutThem. Specifically they relate to:

• Organisational Usability. This come from idea that people need to use the resources provided by the organisation just as much as the organisation uses the people in the organisation. This applies to both people using the organisation externally and internally. Organisational usability takes the metaphor of good web design (for example) and apply them to the organisation. Use or frame, consistency of branding, ‘related items’ links, recommendations, etc all have a metaphor in actual organisation of companies.

• Information management IS management. This refers to the fact that while we tend to trying to find new things that we need to manage all the time – i.e. WHAT we manage (people, risks, issues, knowledge, customers, supply chains, etc) - we don’t often change HOW we manage. ManageWithoutThem focuses exclusively on that transformation of HOW we manage. One important component of that is the need not to manage information but to manage BY information.

The passages below, taken from Emergence, touches on both of these ideas from the perspective of cities. They also show how Emergences is all about the same self-organising forces that drive the ManageWitouthThem model.

There are manifest purposes to a city – reasons for being that its citizens are usually aware of: they come for the protection of the walled city, or the open trade of the marketplace. But cities have a latent purpose as well: to function as information storage and retrieval devices. Cities were creating user-friendly interfaces thousands of years before anyone even dreamed of digital computers. Cities bring minds together and put them into coherent slots. Cobblers gather near other cobblers, and button makers near other button makers. Ideas and good flow readily within these clusters, leading to productive cross-pollination, ensuring that good ideas don’t die out in rural isolation…

And another from the same chapter...

The nieghtboorhood system of the city functions as a kind of user interface for the same reason that traditional computer interfaces do: there are limits to how much information our brains can handle at any given time. We need visual interfaces on our desktop computers because the sheer quantity of information store on our hand drives – not to mention on the Net itself – greatly exceeds the carrying capacity of the human mind. Cities are a solution to a comparable problem, both on the level of the collective and the individual. Cities store and transmit useful new ideas to the wider population ensuring that powerful new technologies don’t disappear once they’ve been invented. But the self-organizing clusters of neighbourhoods also serve to make cities more intelligible to the individuals who inhabit them – as we saw in the case of our time-travelling Florentine. The specialisation of the city makes it smarter, more useful for its inhabitants. And the extraordinary thing again is that this learning emerges without anyone being aware of it. Information management – subduing the complexity of a large-scale human settlement – is the latent purpose of a city, because when cities come into being their inhabitants are driven by other motives, such as safety or trade.

Emergence is recommended reading for any manager.