Kauffman's investigations into biological complexity offer insight into managing organizational complexity. There are those who think the insights are far reaching. The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World, in part about the future of organizations. As natural selection is necessary, but insufficient, to create biological complexity, similarly optimization is necessary but insufficient to create products in complex environments. There has been a growing emphasis on collaboration, but just maybe, collaboration is really more important than we realize.
Many software engineers feel un-alone time is mostly wasted.
I send you something. At its best, collaboration produces more than the sum of the parts. For other than trivial products, collaboration is not an option. How well we collaborate is the variable. This raises a variety of very interesting questions about collaboration.