Hierarchy

Discussion

How Hierarchy hinders Complexity

From the article:

COMPLEXITY RISING: FROM HUMAN BEINGS TO HUMAN CIVILIZATION, A COMPLEXITY PROFILE. by Yaneer Bar-Yam.

Excerpted from the article at http://necsi.org/projects/yaneer/Civilization.html

1.

In human hierarchies the collective behavior must be simple enough to be represented by a single human being.

2.

"Distributed control over collective behaviors can result in larger complexity of the collective behavior than the behavior of any single individual. Networks are also quite distinct from independent individuals. Networks require that coordination of the behavior of groups of individuals are achieved by mutual influences."

Main thesis:

"Hierarchical organizations are designed to impose correlations in human behavior primarily through the influence of the hierarchical control structure. In an ideal hierarchy all influences/communications between two "workers" must travel through a common manager. As the complexity of collective behavior increases, the number of independent influences increases, and a manager becomes unable to process/communicate all of them. Increasing the number of managers and decreasing the branching ratio (the number of individuals supervised by one manager) helps. However, this strategy is defeated when the complexity of collective behavior increases beyond the complexity of an individual. Networks allowing more direct lateral interactions do not suffer from this limitation" (http://necsi.org/projects/yaneer/Civilization.html)

Detailed argument:

"This section focuses on internal interactions that at any one time give rise to collective behaviors. In human organizations coordination occurs because individuals influence each others' behavior. The influence is often called control. It is not necessarily coercive control, though coercion may be an aspect of control. The objective of this section is to understand the relationship between control structure and the complexity of collective behavior.

Real human hierarchical organizations are not strict hierarchies, they contain lateral interactions that enable control to bypass the hierarchy. However, by focusing on an idealized control hierarchy it is possible to understand the nature of this structure. Such a focus will help in understanding the nature of dictatorships and hierarchical corporationsthe relationship between these control structures and complex collective behavior. In an idealized hierarchy all communication, and thus coordination of activities, is performed through the hierarchy.

To concretize the discussion, consider two paradigmatic examples: military force and factory production. Conventional military behavior is closer to our discussion of coherent behavior. Similar to coherent motion, in the military the behavior of an individual is simplified to a limited set of patterns. The behavior patternssuch as long marcheshave a high degree of repetition and thus can have impact on a large scale. Then, many individuals perform the large-scale behaviors coherently. While this model continues to apply to some examples of modern military activity, the diversity of actions of a modern military makes this model better suited to understanding ancient armiesRoman legions, or even U. S. Civil War armies.

While the actions of the military are designed to have impact on a large scale, they must still be performed in response to specific external conditions. As the conditions change, the actions must also be changed. There is need for a response mechanism that involves communications that can control the collective behaviors. Such a response generally involves direct action by the control hierarchy.

A conventional industrial production line also simplifies the behavior of an individual. Each individual performs a particular repetitive task. The effect of many individuals performing repetitive tasks results in a large number of copies of a particular product. This repetition increases the scale of impact of an individual's behavior. However, unlike coherent behavior, the behavior of different individuals is not the same. Instead, the activities of the individual are coordinated to those of othersthe coordination exists so that the larger-scale behavior can arise. The coordination means that the behaviors of different individuals, while not the same, are related to each other. When compared to the coherent motion, this increases the complexity and decreases the scale, but much less so than would be the case for fully independent individuals.

The need to ensure coordination of different individuals when the collective actions being performed have an inherently higher complexity increases the demands upon the control hierarchy. In particular, it is significant that the behaviors of all parts of a production line must be coordinated, even though actions being performed are different.

The similarities and differences between the factory and the military models are relevant to an understanding of the role of hierarchical control. A military force, a corporation, or a country have behaviors on various scales. At larger scales, many of the details of the behavior of individuals are not apparent. Intuitively, a control hierarchy is designed to enable a single individual (the controller) to control the collective behavior, but not directly the behavior of each individual. Indeed, the behavior of an individual need not be known to the controller. What is necessary is a mechanism for ensuring that control over the collective behavior be translated into controls that are exercised over each individual. This is the purpose of the control hierarchy.

A hierarchy, however, imposes a limitation on the degree of complexity of collective behaviors of the system. This can be understood by considering more carefully the processes of coordination. The hierarchy is responsible for ensuring coordination of various parts of the system. Lower levels of the hierarchy are responsible for locally coordinating smaller parts of the system and higher levels of the hierarchy are responsible for coordinating the larger parts of the system. At each level of the hierarchy the actions to be coordinated must be transferred through the controller. Thus, the controller's behavior must itself reflect all of the impacts that different parts of the system have on other parts of the system. This implies that the collective actions of the system in which the parts of the system affect other parts of the system must be no more complex than the controller. In human hierarchies the collective behavior must be simple enough to be represented by a single human being.

In summary, the complexity of the collective behavior must be smaller than the complexity of the controlling individual. A group of individuals whose collective behavior is controlled by a single individual cannot behave in a more complex way than the individual who is exercising the control. Hierarchical control structures are symptomatic of collective behavior that is no more complex than one individual. Comparing an individual human being with the hierarchy as an entirety, the hierarchy amplifies the scale of the behavior of an individual, but does not increase its complexity.

The existence of lateral influences counters these conclusions with respect to real human organizations. These lateral controls are similar to the conceptual networks that are used to model the interactions between neurons in the brain. Distributed control over collective behaviors can result in larger complexity of the collective behavior than the behavior of any single individual. Networks are also quite distinct from independent individuals. Networks require that coordination of the behavior of groups of individuals are achieved by mutual influences." (http://necsi.org/projects/yaneer/Civilization.html)