Emergence is not a strategy
I keep reading that the best systems emerge from the bottom up. Top-down design is rigid, fragile, doomed. Just create the conditions for order to arise and get out of the way.
I work with systems that people actually use. Here's what emerges when you get out of the way:
- Fifteen different abbreviations for the same part number
- A folder structure that mirrors the org chart from 2019
- Three spreadsheets tracking the same data with different values in each
- A naming convention that works great until someone joins who wasn't in the room when they invented it
Everyone loves the ant colony example. No central planner, complex behavior from simple rules, beautiful. Ant colonies also don't innovate. They don't redesign themselves. They run the same behavioral program they've been running for millions of years. When the environment shifts faster than evolution can keep up, the colony dies. Ants are a terrible model for information systems.
"Let it emerge" has become a thought-terminating cliché that lets people skip the hard work of actually making decisions and writing them down. Design means someone can look at your system and understand why it's shaped the way it is without having to find the person who built it. Because that person will leave. They always leave. And then you're me, staring at a SharePoint site with 4,000 files and no map.
The worst systems are the ones that claim to have no structure. They always have structure. It's just invisible, undocumented, and about to walk out the door.