Balancing through stored energy from absorptive capacity

Axelrod and Cohen refer to the three elements of emergence as: Variation, Interaction and Selection. These map nicely with those identified by Adam Smith, which were specialization (variation), trade (interaction) and free choice (selection). This also is consistent with my previous descriptions of heterogeneity (variation or specialization), interdependence (interaction or trade) and choice (selection or free choice).

However, as I focus on tensions, what I have come to believe is that Axelrod and Cohen's labels are useful at a meta level, while my are more useful as descriptors of the tensions between stability and variability. For example:

Variation represents the tensions between homogeneity and heterogeneity
Interaction represents the tension between independence and interdependence
Selection represents the tension between compulsion and choice

A swing in the balance to those on the left pushes an complex adaptive system (CAS) to stability, while swing in the balance to those on the right pushes a CAS to variability. Too much stability and an CAS implodes due to its own weight, too much variability and its explodes as there is too little holding together.

The cues that emerge and that are perceived as possessing significance and challenge the status quo create uncertainty. In this manner, cues represent a catalyst for the creation of energy by the CAS for change. It is not necessarily true that the energy for change comes from the cue or the environment, but the cue is much like a defibrillator that provides the spark to jump start the system that then provides its own energy to balance the system.

Once the cue sparks the system to perceive some level of uncertainty, this creates the perception of disequilibrium due to an imbalance in the three elements of emergence. The CAS then begins a process through leadership and structuration to put the system back into balance. This imbalance represents the adaptive tensions that are triggered by cues and created through uncertainty.

To dissipate these adaptive tensions the system begins to search for existing schemas to rapidly return to balance, to combine existing schemas in innovative ways to return to balance or to create new innovative alternative schemas to do the same. More often than not, an innovative solution is created to adapt to these tensions since in a CAS the same thing never happens twice. For by definition, a CAS is highly dependent upon initial conditions, is path dependent and is non-linear in nature, which means that you will never be in the exact same position twice. Which means that all balancing is done by innovatively using existing schemas in new ways by linking cues to existing schemas in new ways or by creating new schemas through combination or through new learning.

The search and development of the appropriate schema requires foresight or foreseeing in order to develop a plausible probability that you are going to be taking a prudent risk to move the system back into balance. The foreseeing activity is foreseeing how leadership processes interact to adjust the tensions present in variation, interaction and selection to create new structural outcomes through a structuration process. This foreseeing must not only see how these two processes, leadership and structuration, bring the CAS into balance, but also must foresee how the emergent new possible (for there needs to be foreseeing of multiple possible and plausible structures) will ensure a structural tension so as to enable the emergence of new adaptive tensions in the future. Structures that minimize rather than optimize adaptive tensions will end up causing an system to fail to survive.

Once foreseeing provides some level of confidence that prudent risks can be taken to balance the tensions, then risk is taken. This risk taking is the force that brings the system back into the balance as this is the action that enables the adaptation necessary for survival.

From an energy management perspective you can think of it this way. Cues provide a spark that initiates the adaptation process. Three leadership processes work in tandem to assign significance and to perceive the importance of the cue and interpret the level of uncertainty that this cue represents, the imbalancing in the elements of emergence that this will lead. In this way, the system creates its own energy catalyzed by a small spark from the cue. This energy results in a force we call adaptive tension that then provides the energy necessary to search for innovation alternatives, foresee possible plausible outcomes and then take risk to achieve them. To do all this, the CAS must have a store of energy reserves that it can tap. There must therefore be slack in the system, which Cohen and Levinthal have characterized as absorbtive capacity. This capacity is a spare energy source that can be tapped to rebalance the system to go through the adaptive process to return to balance through risk taking.