I spent three days last weekend at the magnificent WOMAD festival in Wiltshire, England, sitting in the sunshine listening to some of the world's best musicians doing their thing. It was a wonderfully therapeutic thing to do, leaving everyday worries and responsibilities behind.
But one thing none of us can leave behind is access to a toilet, and over the course of the weekend I started to become an observer of (largely) British toilet behaviour. If you have never been to a music festival I should explain that toilets are provided in specific areas, in a three-sided rectangular area. An occupied toilet is shown by a red indicator on the door and an empty toilet by a green indicator.
I started to watch how people behaved when approaching the toilets. At quiet times people could see a door with a green indicator and would go straight to one: at such times the toilet area would seem to be full of people moving in random straight lines. But when things got busier queues would form: in moderately busy times there would be a single queue and the first person would go to the next cubicle to become free, but at very busy times there would be separate queues in front of each cubicle. My wife also observed single queues forming in front of small clusters of toilets.
What was interesting to me were the transition points. When did a person or small group decide that the best strategy was to form a queue? When did queue formation stop? I reasoned that there were various factors such as the number of toilets, British social habits regarding queueing and so on.
It seemed to me that I was witnessing a complex adaptive system in action. How people behave in a situation that seems to be related to phenomena like birds flocking (which can be represented by a simple algorithm, such as in the various implementation of boids, e.g. http://processing.org/examples/flocking.html). Without any conscious decision-making, people change their behaviour in a way which suits the new situation that faces them.
Unlike me, most people were very happy in their unconscious decision-making and continued to enjoy the world music, untroubled by concerns about complexity and adaptation. What lucky people.
Tuesday 29 July 2014
Sunday 13 July 2014
West Side Story - a parable for all times
Last night I went to see a stage production of "West Side Story". Although I seem to have known most of the songs throughout my life it was the first time I had actually seen it, either on stage or as a film, which was pretty surprising for someone of my generation.
Although it dates from 1957, its story is timeless. Racially-divided New York gangs fight over a small area of the city, one death leads to another and the cycle of revenge starts. It was relevant then, it was relevant to Shakespeare when he wrote the original 'screenplay' as "Romeo and Juliet", and it is relevant now.
When you think in systems and see a situation which never changes you recognise that there are systemic factors in play that are maintaining some sort of status quo. It then becomes possible to see the futility of many actions which are taken to try and stop the violence.
As the second act moved towards its tragic conclusion I started to think about the news I had heard earlier about another escalation of violence in the Middle East. Israeli youngsters kidnapped and murdered, tit for tat murder of an Arab youth, more rockets coming out of Gaza, Israeli tanks massed to invade Gaza. Such has been the story of my life, it seems.
So what are the systemic factors going on here? In 2002 David Peter Stroh wrote an interesting article for "The Systems Thinker" magazine (Volume 13, number 5, "A systemic view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict"). Using a system dynamics approach, he identified an endless cycle:
1. Both sides fight for the right to exist - each side denies the right of the other to exist, so coexistence cannot be an option.
2. Tension escalates - retaliation becomes the strategy, as each side sees itself as a victim, and in the short term retaliatory activity seems to justify the right to exist.
3. Pressure leads to negotiations - at some point in violence becomes unacceptable, internally or to the external international community and peace talks start.
4. Peace efforts break down - extremists on either side take some action calculated to provoke a reaction, and the peace talks break down.
The overall result is that actions intended to create peace (negotiations) actually have the opposite effect, and provoke violence. To a systems thinker, this is not unusual.
Stroh captures these dynamics in a causal flow diagram (here, clipped from the PDF of his article).
He uses this to identify leverage points, where changes in strategy could actually lead to progress in reducing violence. For example:
Disputes over land have always been problematic, whether it be in the Middle East or in the fictional New York of the 1950s. The deaths of Tony, Riff and Bernardo can serve as a parable to help us understand what we might be able to do better rather than embark on an endless cycle of violence.
Although it dates from 1957, its story is timeless. Racially-divided New York gangs fight over a small area of the city, one death leads to another and the cycle of revenge starts. It was relevant then, it was relevant to Shakespeare when he wrote the original 'screenplay' as "Romeo and Juliet", and it is relevant now.
When you think in systems and see a situation which never changes you recognise that there are systemic factors in play that are maintaining some sort of status quo. It then becomes possible to see the futility of many actions which are taken to try and stop the violence.
As the second act moved towards its tragic conclusion I started to think about the news I had heard earlier about another escalation of violence in the Middle East. Israeli youngsters kidnapped and murdered, tit for tat murder of an Arab youth, more rockets coming out of Gaza, Israeli tanks massed to invade Gaza. Such has been the story of my life, it seems.
So what are the systemic factors going on here? In 2002 David Peter Stroh wrote an interesting article for "The Systems Thinker" magazine (Volume 13, number 5, "A systemic view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict"). Using a system dynamics approach, he identified an endless cycle:
1. Both sides fight for the right to exist - each side denies the right of the other to exist, so coexistence cannot be an option.
2. Tension escalates - retaliation becomes the strategy, as each side sees itself as a victim, and in the short term retaliatory activity seems to justify the right to exist.
3. Pressure leads to negotiations - at some point in violence becomes unacceptable, internally or to the external international community and peace talks start.
4. Peace efforts break down - extremists on either side take some action calculated to provoke a reaction, and the peace talks break down.
The overall result is that actions intended to create peace (negotiations) actually have the opposite effect, and provoke violence. To a systems thinker, this is not unusual.
Stroh captures these dynamics in a causal flow diagram (here, clipped from the PDF of his article).
He uses this to identify leverage points, where changes in strategy could actually lead to progress in reducing violence. For example:
- Each side should think about what it can do to initiate change by reducing threats to the other side.
- Administrations on each side need to take risks to stop the actions of extremists.
- Each side should affirm the goal of peaceful coexistence.
- The international community should not take sides and should come together to support both Israel and the Palestinian Administration to make the necessary internal changes.
Disputes over land have always been problematic, whether it be in the Middle East or in the fictional New York of the 1950s. The deaths of Tony, Riff and Bernardo can serve as a parable to help us understand what we might be able to do better rather than embark on an endless cycle of violence.
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