Unravelling the Complexity of Teams via a Thermodynamics Perspective
Abstract
In its simplest terms, teams and firms operate thermodynamically far from equilibrium, requiring sufficient free energy to offset the entropy produced as a byproduct of their activities (Nicolis & Prigogine, 1989). If social reality was rational, a model of team thermodynamics would have been discovered and validated decades ago. However, teams are interdependent systems (Conant, 1976), and interdependence creates observational uncertainty and incompleteness which manifests as potentially irrational behaviors. Multitasking (MT) is an unsolved but key theoretical problem for organizing teams, organizations and systems, including computational teams of multi-autonomous agents. But because MT involves interdependence between the members of a team, until now it has been too difficult to conceptualize and adequately address. Exceptional and talented humans intuit most of the organizational decisions that need to be made to self-organize a business or organization, except possibly when faced with the challenge of decision making in the context of big data. But transferring that knowledge to another generation, to business students, or to partners has proved difficult. Even in the case of big data where interdependence can increase uncertainty and incompleteness, unless scientists can construct valid mathematical models of teams and firms that produce predictable results or constrain them, computational teams of multi-agents will always be ineffective, inefficient, conceptually incomplete, or all three.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Oct 01, 2014
- Accession Number
- ADA619111
Entities
People
- Ira S. Moskowitz
- Ranjeev Mittu
- W. F. Lawless
Organizations
- United States Naval Research Laboratory