This guest blog is by my friend Ryan Hollingsworth from Chicago. I LOVE this topic for so many reasons, not least because it is so provocative! ;) We had some great conversations about the relevance of these issues for the church when he and his wife Andrea visited us over the summer. I'm eager to see where the conversation goes from here. From Ryan:
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Next June, I will graduate with my Master
of Divinity degree and hope to become a Christian pastor. 
So I have a
professional interest in the church. But I also have a personal passion—an
almost visceral obsession with the church. So it is no surprise that things I
learn and encounter in a variety of settings tend to coalesce as
ecclesiological musings. “What does this mean for the church?” is a common
question that frames and propels my thoughts.
It is this question that I hope echoes in
the background of your mind as you read the rest of this post. As we explore a relatively
new trend that is finding its way into many fields of study and application—history,
sociology, communication, biology, computer science, leadership, criminology,
filmmaking, and politics—I hope we ask what implications (if any) this has for
the church. Let us propose adding Christian theology, specifically ecclesiology
to the mix and see what it has to contribute to and learn from the dialog.
The trend I refer to has no name of its own.
It is actually a cluster of inter-related thoughts, each with different terms.
But it has a common thread: the move from centralized to decentralized; from
stability to fluidity; from controlled hierarchy to networks of autonomous
groups or agents.
Some biologists like Deborah Gordon at
Stanford noticed that certain creatures demonstrate complex behaviors as a
group (e.g. building elaborate nests, allocating workers to tasks, finding the
shortest route to the best food source, mounting military defense against other
ant colonies, etc.), even though they are not particularly smart individually. “‘Ants aren’t smart,’
Gordon says. ‘Ant colonies are.’” How is this possible with no one agent in
charge? This question has led to recent developments called swarm intelligence.
Instead of a leadership structure we would expect, they rely on a
self-organizing system utilizing countless interactions between individual
ants. These interactions are based on remarkably simple rules. Cumulatively,
however, they create the complex and sometimes unpredictable behavior seen in a
swarm.
Flocks of birds and schools of fish don’t
run into each other, even though they move together so closely, wheeling around
in a seeming demonstration of a group mind. However, these critters are just acting
on simple rules. In 1986, a computer graphics researcher named Craig Reynolds
created a computer simulation that moved like a flock of birds (“boids” in his
program). He used only three rules. “1) avoid crowding nearby boids, 2) fly in
the average direction of nearby boids, and 3) stay close to nearby boids.”
The technology has developed and was
recently used to marvelous results in the Lord
of the Rings movies. Steve Regelous wrote a software program he called
Massive. “I believe we need to simulate the interactions between individuals
realistically to get decent crowd behavior.” The “decent crowd behavior” they
were looking to create was warring elves and orcs on a huge scale! Instead of
trying to animate tens of thousands of orcs (which is an impossibly daunting
task), Regelous developed a single artificially intelligent agent who could
make decisions for itself. The agent had the ability to attack, defend, run,
turn, and stop. The team at Weta Digital then created adjustable 3D bodies for
the agents and used motion capture to animate the movements in the agent’s
“library” of actions. Once they had a realistic orc, they just multiplied the
whole thing by however many thousands and they had an army of orcs who fought
their own battle. You just had to record it, perhaps tweaking the behavior with
certain environmental factors or other motivations. It was so realistic that in
early tests, some soldiers ran away from the battlefield!
This trend is not just a boon for the
silver screen, but in the business world as well. Eric Bonabeau, a leader in
the field of swarm intelligence, thinks that the world is becoming so complex
that no single human being can comprehend it. He recommends imitating ants and other
social insects. This has inspired him and others to use swarm intelligence to
help solve complex problems. Computers using swarm intelligence models for
their AI are optimizing shipping schedules, and being used to coordinate rescue
and reconnaissance robots. Instead of solving a problem directly, this approach
creates a swarm that will organically solve the problem itself. “Solutions to
problems are emergent rather than predefined and preprogrammed. The problem is
that you don't always know ahead of time what emergent solution will come out
because emergent behavior is unpredictable. If applied well, self-organization
endows your swarm with the ability to adapt to situations that you didn’t think
of.”
But what about mistakes? Bonabeau says, “In
social insects, errors and randomness are not ‘bugs’; rather, they contribute
very strongly to their success by enabling them to discover and explore in
addition to exploiting. Self-organization feeds itself upon errors to provide
the colony with flexibility (the colony can adapt to a changing environment)
and robustness (even when one or more individuals fail, the group can still
perform its tasks).”
All of this discussion is arguing for using
artificial swarms as human tools such as a computer program that can
continually optimize computer networks. But can this trend of decentralization
be applied to people directly? Does it have anything to say to human behavior?
Should it?
Swarm intelligence—or at least
decentralization—does have some intriguing benefits for leadership. After all,
with any hierarchy, the person or persons “at the top” face huge pressure to
make good decisions. Yet, the bigger the organization, the farther from the
actual knowledge the person who makes the decisions becomes! Leadership and management
gurus work to help the leader get better information quicker, make clear
decisions, communicate those decisions back down the line, and motivate the
workers to follow those decisions. One can see why methods of getting and
receiving information, and motivation figure prominently in leadership
research. However, the potential for error and miscommunication is great. We
can all recall specific examples of bureaucratic stupidity where information is
lost or garbled, or when leaders make bad decisions because they really don’t
understand the situation. Furthermore, hierarchical systems’ most important
(and usually most vulnerable) person is the one at the top. Just like in chess,
take out the king and the game is up.
What if leaders didn’t need to have all of
this stress? What if more decisions could be made in emergent, organic ways?
What if humans could organize themselves in ways that depended less on special
individuals (i.e. leaders)? Could it make the human system itself more robust?
I can tell you for certain that it does
make an organization more robust. Just look at organized crime and terrorists.
A few years ago, several weeks after the United States charged into Afghanistan and then
Iraq, some people wondered why we hadn’t decisively “won.” After all,
here was the most well-funded military behemoth on the planet, using the most
advanced weapons technology ever conceived being held at a stalemate by a
handful of terrorists and insurgents! Sure, in a matter of hours, the U.S.
military defeated the Iraqi military, but the war was far from won. Personally,
I wasn’t exactly surprised that the U.S. war
machine was stuck in the sand, however (our leaders shouldn’t have been either,
but that is perhaps a different blog). This kind of thing has happened often
enough in history. A strong, well-funded hierarchical force is stymied by
impoverished, diversified guerrilla cells. The Philistines vs. the Israelite
tribes, Rome vs. the Celts, the Britons vs. the Scots, the English vs. the
American colonies, and now the United States vs. insurgents in Iraq.
There are a myriad of other factors
involved in these admittedly complicated sociopolitical situations. However, I wondered
if the way the groups were organized had something vital to do with their
differing effectiveness. After minimal research, I came to realize I am not
alone in my hunch. “Unlike conventional military forces which are often
hierarchical and centralized, terrorist militant units are often small,
dispersed and seemingly disorganized. Nevertheless, they have been able to
effectively counter much larger conventional armies.”
Researchers are noting that criminal
organizations (like drug cartels, terrorists, etc) are changing. “Unlike the
top-down-hierarchical structure of traditional Mafia-type organizations,
organized crime groups such as the Colombian drug cartels and Russian-speaking
organized crime function as loosely-organized networks of cells. The cells give
organizational flexibility, reduce the possibility of law-enforcement penetration,
and provide greater efficiency. Network structures also make it more difficult
to identify leaders while reducing the size of the leadership within each
organization. As such, modern organized criminal groups and leading terrorist
organizations resemble modern, ‘flat’ business structures rather than the
multilayer organization found in older corporations such as the Ford Motor
Company and the steel industry.”
Terrorists and crime lords don’t change to
be cool or emergent. They do it to be effective. And effective they are; they
are able to halt so-called “super powers” in their tracks. They are robust;
even when key leaders are taken out, the organization as a whole suffers only
minor setbacks. Indeed, researchers (often funded by defense departments or police
forces) are trying desperately to understand and therefore destroy fluid
networks like these. In addition to the computer scientists and criminologists
I’ve already referenced, mathematicians are using their expertise to attempt to
destabilize these complex and extremely resilient networks.
What does this mean for the church? I have
come to see that the church (at least in my context) looks much like the U.S.
military: centralized leadership, clearly defined roles, pre-planned
strategies, ample funds (yet complaining of not having near enough money to do
what they feel they need to do). But should we in the church take some cues
from the insurgents in Iraq? If we want to be effective (and what does that mean?), should we take
note of the effective models demonstrated by our “enemies?”
Of course, I would not suggest that
Christians can further the cause of Jesus Christ by strapping bombs to
themselves or trafficking illegal drugs! But couldn’t we take a note of these
networks’ organizational innovation? After all, as some have said, “Were it not
for the illegitimate character of their actions, transnational criminals could
be lauded as pioneers and visionaries in the age of globalization.”
Could church leaders give up centralized,
pre-planned control of a church to a decentralized, emerging patterns based on
the cumulating of many interactions? As LeRon might say, there are promises and
perils here. The idea of no one person being in charge (or in control) is
terrifying. But is that just the kind of scenario in which the Holy Spirit can
work in our midst—in the interactions between us? If we wanted to move this
way, we would need to think more about developing individuals (“agents” in the
terminology of artificial intelligence). This seems counter-intuitive, but the
success of a swarm depends on the ability of individual agents to make decisions
and carry them out. But are Christians prepared to do that, or are we too used
to having a leader tell us what to do? Might people be too complicated for
swarm intelligence proper to work?
Just think with me a moment about the “traditional
wisdom” of church ministry done in a centralized, stable, hierarchically
controlled system. Let’s say my neighbor is elderly and can’t mow her lawn. I
could tell my pastor or small group leader. Perhaps we could set up committee
to create a Lawn Mowing Ministry. We could get the Youth Pastor involved so we
could use the youth as a labor force. Of course, policies would have to be put
in place for how we would mow and guidelines developed to weed through
potential recipients of our ministry. We’d also need to advertise it to the
church and the community. If evangelistically-minded people were involved, mowers
would probably need training on how to lead the grateful people to Christ. And
then, we’d need to work through our disappointment confusion when the ministry
fails!
I have to wonder, what if I just go to my
neighbor’s house and offer to mow her yard? What if other Christians just see
needs and opportunities and can just act? What if we were in communication with
each other—networked—so that we could collectively learn from our mistakes?
A few questions to spur the discussion:
1) Are principles of swarming applicable to
human organizations like the church? If so, are they achievable, or even
desirable?
2) If we do want to embrace ideas of
decentralization, self-organization, and emergent problem-solving, what changes
would need to be made in our conceptions of church leadership? What about the
goals and methods of Christian discipleship? Or evangelism?
3) If we want to resist this trend, how do
we do it? Why?
