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Is Your Project Manager A Quasiparticle?
Delicate emergent phenomena in the corporate environment.
I’m a big fan of chaotic systems from way back — how delicate changes in initial conditions can lead to drastically different paths of evolution, or in particular in this case of how unexpected and quite impressive behaviour can emerge as a result of the myriad of the underlying mechanisms at work.
As any fan of fractals, or complex systems in general, will probably know at the root of such complex and chaotic behaviour can be the very simplest of equations, a smattering of seemingly inconsequential variables, and the very real passing of time which gives life to everything.
Corporate life is no different, at least in my own view, whereby the initial configuration of a startup and the subtle changes therein can lead to very different evolutionary pathways when it comes to flaming out on the runway, launching but stagnating¹ in mid-air before gliding inevitably into the ground, or launching and managing to stay aloft at varying heights.
Even the subtle interactions between management and the actual productive employees at any company gives rise both to different evolutional imperatives (something I’ve touched on previously when I wrote about forced and very unnatural selection in the Grand Game of Software Engineering) and to kinds of…
