Duncan J. Watts, author of the forthcoming book "Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age," has a great essay in the new Chronicle of Higher Education, introducing the new science of networks. There's a growing canon of modern works that seek to apply predictive and analytical science to collective behavior, from Smart Mobs to Emergence to Linked — and let's not forget classics like Death and Life of the Great American Cities and Out of Control.
In 1997, for example, a fire destroyed a key plant of the Toyota company, halting the production of more than 15,000 cars a day and affecting more than 200 companies whose job it is to supply Toyota with everything from electronic components to seat covers. Without question, this was a first-class catastrophe. But what happened next was every bit as dramatic as the disaster itself. In an astonishing coordinated response, and with very little direct oversight by Toyota, those same companies managed to reproduce — in several completely different ways — the lost components, and did so within three days of the fire. A week after that, the volume of cars rolling off the production line was back at its pre-disaster level. Because Toyota managed to escape the crisis relatively unscathed, the whole incident was largely forgotten. But it could easily have failed, as could the next company faced with a similar crisis. By accounting for the networks of connections between individual decisions or events, we can see that predicting the future based on previous outcomes — even in situations that appear indistinguishable from those in the past — is an unreliable business.
(via Smart Mobs)
