I sat down earlier today with Eric Bonabeau, one of the presenters speaking at Tuesday’s opening Supernova session on the Theory and Practice of Networks.

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Eric Bonabeau is the founder and Chief Scientist of Boston-based Icosystem Corporation. Icosystem creates customized tools that replicate the detailed behavior of real systems—be they companies, processes, physical systems, or social networks—whose complexity pushes them beyond the reach of traditional analytical approaches.

Eric is one of the world’s leading experts in complex systems and distributed adaptive problem solving. He co-wrote the book Swarm Intelligence - From Natural to Artificial Systems, a scientific bestseller for eight years and provided the inspiration for another bestseller, Michael Crichton’s Prey. His articles in Harvard Business Review (Swarm Intelligence, May 2001; Predicting the Unpredictable, March 2002; Don’t Trust Your Gut, May 2003; The Perils of the Imitation Age, June 2004; You Heard It Here First, February 2005; What Is Luxury Without Variety?, February 2006; The Two Faces of New Product Development, November 2007, to appear) and MIT Sloan Management Review (Understanding and Managing Complexity Risk, Summer 2007) have all been exploring the limits of human decision making in a complex, decentralized and unpredictable world.

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Icosystem’s and Eric’s work focuses on understanding and analyzing network activity for clients in specific realms, primarily in order to be able to predict better (uptake of new products or services, distribution and dissemination of critical information, etc.) and, as he wryly noted, “preferably before rather than after the fact“.

I asked Eric to help me “build” the interview because frankly when faced with the task of interviewing someone who has been breaking new ground in complex systems and adaptive problem-solving, I was afraid that I might not know enough, or how, to ask useful questions. Eric graciously agreed to help me out.

So, I started off by asking Eric to elaborate on something he said earlier this morning that I thought was central to his presentation:

“When considering how networks behave and how we might use them, we should decouple structure and function.”

I was hoping that in elaborating, Eric would make it clear what he meant by focusing on the decoupling. He did, and here’s how he made it clear.

He began by noting that thus far roughly 95% of network science has been focused on the structure of the networks, and that much of the analysis about the implications of network activity has suffered from “leaps of amateurism”. And while he suggested that we should decouple structure and function, he went on to say that people should not get bogged down in trying to understand the structure of networks. Different networks operate in different ways, depending upon purpose, size, components and other variables. Thus, when considering them, one must consider function and what kind of constraints are in operation or may be needed.

Initially, as we began to use the Web to interact and participate in networks, there was a significant emphasis on the ways use of the Web amplified our human activities. The amount(s) of communication and connectivity were just a quantitative increase. However, he feels that we are now beginning to see / experience a qualitative phase transition, wherein the shapes and forms of human expression are changing. He offered the oft-cited example that the purpose and dynamics of social networking platforms is different between generations and from culture to culture, which is leading to the likely redefinition of the concept and definitions of friendship.

Eric also suggested that if we look at the operation of networks connected by information technology over longer time frames, you can predict pretty well how the technology will evolve … what you can’t always predict well are the uses to which people will put the technology or the ways in which they use it. You can predict what will come out of the evolutionary path of technology, you just can’t predict well how people will use it …. so to paraphrase a point made by Lily Cheng in the discussion of the Publius Project later in the morning, the community of users will be the ones who provide the key design points about what a technology really should be used for, and why.

Decoupling the structure and function of networks will help to understand better, and perhaps predict better, what will happen in a given network. The better understanding has led to the emergence of the term “architecture of participation” for thinking further and deeper about the interactive environment the Web affords. Decoupling structure and function is likely to lead to better analysis, better understanding and ultimately purposeful and informed-by-design-constraints shaping of network dynamics rather than imposing or forcing defined behaviour derived from structurally-derived assumptions about how and why networks operate as they do. This is NOT to say that there should not be rules for individual and group behaviour but that, as in real life, the minimum necessary rules will emerge and be used based on understanding the purpose(s), components and functions of networks as decoupled from their structure.

Eric and I termed this shaping “social engineering”, for lack of a better word … which lead us to a brief discussion of Brave New World, Revisited, an essay written by Aldous Huxley 20 years after he publishing of his iconic book Brave New World).

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Tags: Supernova 2008, Eric Bonabeau, Icosystem, complexity, network theory