… aka the story on how things come to be, at least the things that work properly and more or less successfully, since most of the things ever undertaken in the history of undertaking, ideas and actions have been failures. Just ask evolution how long it took her to develop something we now take for granted as an eye?

So straight to our Wednesday afternoon story time, which now delivers a parabola by Herbert Alexander Simon (BTW the same guy that coined the term “satisficing“). Mr. Simon was shooting from all barrels, viewing the world and it’s inherent rules from a standpoint of economy, political science, cognitive psychology and computer science that was in its infancy back then. He was very much a man ahead of his time, and we’re just begging to catch up and understand the validity and depth of his theories although many of them are from the 60’s.

In an attempt to explain the functioning of large structures and how complex things came to be, he told a story of Tempus and Hora, both extraordinary watchmakers meticulously assembling clocks of a thousand parts each. Both watchmakers became famous for the quality of their work and were constantly interrupted in this delicate precise labour by demands from new customers. As a result of these interruptions Tempus went out of business and Hora flourished.

What accounted for such divergent outcomes although the starting condition, materials and skill were the same? Well Tempus had to finish a watch in one stroke when he started as a liner thing and any interruption would send him right back to the start, no matter at what part he was. Every part was a discrete separate to be added to the whole. Hora, on the other hand, had a different system with exactly the same parts. Her approach was modular, using subassemblies meaning  she chose to put together about ten pieces at a time and they were stable enough not to fall apart without the whole. This is how evolution of anything with many moving parts works. This is how things get built. Not as uninterrupted linear progression, since a world free of all interruption to the processes at hand is a nice utopia to daydream about. Instead, a road to something complex that works is, in Simon’s words, an aggregation of subassemblies, the smallest possible stabile forms that can stand on their own, sort of intermediate forms which strive to be compiled into a larger functioning expanded whole, but are not brittle so brittle to instantly fall apart without the whole.

According to Simon, all growth and change behaves like this, going from one stable useful step to another and gradually putting the working parts together. So if Tempus was interrupted at part 999, he’d have to go right back to the start, if Hora was interrupted on the other, she would at worst lose only this current 10 piece assembly. Other, already put together, functioning fragments would be left intact and she could complete the entire watch much sooner, having had to redo only a few pieces here and there and not the whole thing.

We see this principle being applied everywhere we look – From the functioning of a body, societies, of businesses and organizations. Not everybody in a company can be concerned with all moving parts – nothing would get done. There are subdivisions and departments and teams of people working on specific tasks, organs have specific functions and function separately yet to the same superordinate purpose of keeping you alive, societies have segments dedicated to attending to its various needs…

Outcome is not just “I have these resources and want to get to there“ because the same initial states may have wildly different outcomes depending on internal organisation and the path to the goal also referred to as “path dependence”. It’s not just about smaller subparts; it’s about having the small parts assembled correctly so that they allow integration into a larger system. In accordance to the symbolism of their names, Tempus tried to do it as time does, one tick following another, Hora took it hour by hour, with a shrunken timeframe and fragmenting the workload into smaller manageable increments that assemble the final product. Complex working systems emerge much faster when there are stable intermediary forms to be assembled than when you’re starting from scratch.