That is the question that Kauffman and other theorists have struggled for many years to answer, and their ideas are finally seeping into the business mainstream. Complexity theory was born in 1984, when brainiacs from the Los Alamos National Laboratory founded the Santa Fe Institute. The SFI remains a cauldron of Ph.D. sorcery, where physicists and biologists consort with psychologists and anthropologists, all in pursuit of the patterns that underlie the adaptive systems around us. Individual ants set out randomly to find the closest food source, each emitting pheromones to mark its trail. Other ants sniff out the pheromones, follow them to the food and all the while leave additional markers for their colleagues.
More pheromones mean more traffic and thus a better route.
In this way, ants, each working alone, collectively build the most efficient routes. With the advent of microprocessors in the '80s, complexity took off because programmers could do such things as pour in and manipulate an unlimited number of variables in agents' behavior. We have here the beginning of a science that would make 'social science' no longer an oxymoron. Unlike traditional engineering thought, complexity acknowledges that the whole of a system surpasses the sum of its parts, that agents' interactions cause developments that are not accountable by analyzing individual components. The trick will be to harness this interaction.