I seem to be reading a lot of books lately about solving problems and how this is done in other ways than traditional rationality. Spock (the First Officer, not the Doctor) would have us believe that by applying rationality and logic to a problem it may be simply and unemotionally solved. In many ways my previous history in this field in Cognitive Science predisposes me to think this way. Cognitive Science is based on a belief that you can model thought and reason. My early works with Phil Johnson-Laird on Mental Models (thats 1983) was all about how we might model intelligence, and then hypothesize and test by experiment. Artificial Intelligence (AI) then emerged from Cognitive Science with it emphasis on ’search’ - in fact AI was once described to me as search algorithms, nothing more. So logic is just search? Didn’t seem quite right, but it was an exciting time none the less.

Out of the flush of excitement of all the AI stuff, you get to see that there was more going on, and that the ‘more’ was also exciting. That man Don Norman popped up with Don Broadbent with Neural Networks. What was that all about? Santa Fe with Complexity Theory, and, groundbreakingly Kevin Kelley with Out of Control to bring it all together, subtitled “The New Biology of Machines”. Fascinating, Captain.

And these odd emergent systems made decisions too, but the decisions ‘emerged’ from their organisation rather than having to be sought out. And there was no ‘why’, there was only the answer.

Sometimes it could go badly wrong. A neural network was trained by the military using photographs to distinguish US tanks from the then Soviet tanks. It did, but only afterwards was it realised that the neural network had made its discrimination on the basis of lighting conditions - the US tanks had been photographed in the morning, the Soviet at night! Thats the thing, you never know with a neural network, its decision is never justified, it just is.

The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowieki is about this stuff too. Do I like it? Well, kind of, but next to the Tipping Point or Blink by Malcolm Gladwell, its a bit lightweight and way too observational, with very little analysis. What I did like about it though is the way that it defined what crowds do well and what they don’t. My recent piece about leadership in Interactions sets me up as very ‘anti-crowd’, but I am absolutely resolutely not. I believe that the crowd can create the best decisions, but the right questions need asking and answers coordinating and that was clear from the book, and I appreciated that. Making a film, designing an experience, is not a single problem with a single solution, like guessing the weight of a bull (a Wisdom of Crowds example) but it is a project that requires that many ‘weight of bull’ (!) problems to be posed and then solved simultaneously. Making a film, designing and experience by crowd-committee is like waiting for the monkeys to come up with Hamlet

So, rationality and logic - rip it up and start again? Nope, we need right brain and we need left brain. The time has come to weigh both with equal measure. Let’s take note of Spock when he says “”Logic is the beginning of wisdom; not the end.”

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