I’ll share a few things about self-organisation, focal points and internal coherence, and how one can benefit from them.
Self-organisation is a process where global order arises from the interaction between local parts of a system. But these interactions are not influenced by an external force or body; rather the local parts intuitively know what the next move should be.
As several local parts exhibit this order, it begins to take form on a global scale within that system.
Think about an army of ants. There is no governing body that explicitly tells each one of them what to do, yet they organise between themselves. The result is what we can all observe.
Another example is a flock of birds. They don’t react to an external command to fly in a pattern; they instead fly based on interactions between individual birds that translate into the flocking order that we see
In a community I recently joined, we talked about spontaneous order. The question posed was, “how does self-organisation play out in your own life?“
An example shared by a member of the community was how communication between a group of friends seem to self-organise without someone taking charge. Everything just falls into a coherent pattern.
It’s important to note the word “coherence” because spontaneous order has that distinguishing feature. A system that should otherwise be chaotic because no one is “in charge” learns from the interactions of local components to gain a form of perspective. The system then translates this perspective into a global identifying characteristic of that group. A focal point, if you will.
But is it possible to create spontaneous order in one’s own life? Wouldn’t that go against the nature of spontaneous order–which is the absence of a controlling external force?
Maybe there is a way.
The need for self-organisation
I think it’s important to understand why spontaneous order is necessary in an individual’s life before we talk about a way to make it happen without actively ordering it.
Human lives have multiple moving parts. These parts usually have something they focus on, a goal. For each of these goals, there likely is a different way to achieve it. But for an overall coherence that sees every part of a person’s life head in one direction, spontaneous order is important.
Trying to actively reconcile your work, social, academic, spiritual and love lives on a daily basis, for example, can be a lot of work. This can drain you and ultimately make you lose sight of things that are crucial to moving forward.
Really, under pressure, a system built on micromanaging its individual moving parts will eventually collapse, and in the worst way. Because micromanaging, while it works in the short run, is not a sustainable way to maintain order in the long run.
But when a system is designed so that the individual parts interact with localised coherence, a global order can easily form on its own.
A well-predefined system
In Game Theory, Schelling point is a focal point that people tend to default to in the absence of communication. This means that when a system is well-defined, the components of that system naturally know where to converge.
A lack of communication in this sense could mean the absence of daily tuning in an individual’s life. It is when you do not have to constantly labour on organising the components.
At this point, it should have become obvious that this is about a well-predefined system. That is, the system itself must have an internal coherence for a global order to emerge.
A flock of bird, a school of fish, an army of ants, or even a sect within a larger community all have something in common – internal coherence. They are all heading towards a similar goal.
In the same way, for a person to self-organise, there can be no dichotomy; all goals must aim towards a single end. And defining that end from the beginning is very important for spontaneous order to occur.
In conclusion…
A system will self-organise only if there is that internal understanding within the component that they are heading towards the same goal. Each person must define this goal so that each aspect of their life can locally interact.
Naturally, a system that has thus defined itself will find useful ways to self-correct and interact so that they make progress in an orderly way.
Cutting out complexities and ambiguities is, therefore, important if anyone wishes for their life to self-organise.
