6.1. Introduction and general considerations: what’s new behind life?

Although people are sometimes frightened by the discontinuities of concepts such as life and death, it should be noted that life is not a beginning and death is not an end. These are simply steps in a never-ending process. Each of them has its own characteristics and usefulness. In fact, one main concern is related to the notion of uncertainty; here, the distinction must be made clearly between discontinuity and uncertainty because the notions are not involved in the same way in a sustainable process. Now let us see how in life, birth and death are involved in this framework, and why they are so useful. The “survival of fittest” notion is widely misunderstood. Many scientists wrongly assume its meaning to be that evolution always increases the chances of a species surviving and growing ever stronger in a more sophisticated way, but sometimes a population may become less fit and lead to extinction [NS 07].

Indeed, in nature, any complex system is always a nonlinear dynamic system (NLDS) and comprises positive feedback loops as well as negative ones. This means that equilibriums are difficult to achieve and may converge, according to very sensitive conditions, either toward an attractor increasing the fitness of a species or toward a speciation including a major deviance which will be fatal when the environment changes. As for the structuring laws in physics, if a system generally evolves toward more fitness, and a better structure, this is because there are some asymetries which force the system to converge toward a given attractor type.

In this subject matter dedicated to the evolution and survival of species, we can state that biologists have determined a science of biological purposes (the so-called finalism) in less than a century. This teleology is based on transmission errors of genetic information. In fact, the information contained in DNA (or deoxyribose nucleic acid, the hereditary material in humans and other organisms) is transmitted from generation to generation of a species, but this information is subject to change:

• – gene permutations;
• – errors in recombination during replication of DNA, despite error self-correction capabilities included in the basic DNA program/capabilities, etc.;
• – genetic mutations (whose origins are very different).

Indeed, detrimental mutations can reduce a species’ chances of survival. Mutations provide the vital raw material and diversity for natural selection:

• – if the mutation rate is too low, a population will not be able to evolve fast enough to keep up with environmental changes;
• – if a population’s mutation rate is too high, detrimental mutations may accumulate faster than natural selection can eliminate them. Eventually, when the number of mutations exceeds the “error catastrophe threshold”, a population can be led to extinction.

In this theory, sexually reproducing species are mainly involved since the exchange of genetic material between chromosomes can separate good and bad mutations and foster the diversification process. Also, a “mutation catastrophe” can occur as a result of sensitivity to initial conditions (SIC) in NLDS and, ultimately, change the evolution trend through disastrous consequences.

But … all these direct and indirect changes and mutations can be characterized at “random”. This indicates some important facts as follows:

• – evolution is never oriented and directed toward a given expected result. Designed solutions are sorted out by some specific selection mechanisms (natural or unnatural);

• – the direction in which adaptation occurs is only given, afterward, by the selection process;
• – structures and organizations randomly occurring after some mutations are, still at a microscopic or local level, always effective prior to their use in a macroscopic and a more global level.

Thus, in nature, an organization permanently continues to evolve toward a greater complexity; as a result, this complexity requires new management and control systems. This is reflected (according to several successive selections–reproductions cycles) by the emergence of innovative proposals, a tendency to seek improvements or enhancements and, at best, the optimization of a function. According to this view, “the function is not the organ but the organ makes it”; in other words, the eye is not meant to see, but the function of the eye is seeing. Then we have to adapt and evolve with such properties and behaviors.

Just to return to the above main comment: everything in nature is not always optimized (as done, for instance, in operations research) on the other hand, nature is trying to find good compromises and to “do its best”. This can be easily understood if we analyze some biological facts as follows:

• – It is said that altruistic behaviors promote the survival of a whole species (as does selfishness in some specific cases to enable the strongest individuals to survive from a disaster). Similarly, in our organizations and industrial companies, we learn that selfish individuals may thrive at the expense of altruistic individuals in a team based on cooperation and collective working (we are strongest together and we produce less negative decisions). But, making the group the “fittest” one, temporarily, in terms of efficiency and effectiveness, this can make it as a less competitive whole: on a mid-and long-term range, such cheaters can have disastrous consequences when faced with hostile uncertainties.
• – The death of a living being or living organism is due to the fact that it consumes too much energy for some given functions provided within a given context: it must give way to youth. It is the same in a company when some people are incited to retire because a young employee is working harder with a reduced salary. This is against the general interest of a society. This is also a big problem since eusociality cannot apply (eusociality is a quite sophisticated social mode where (1) older people can help younger ones, (2) the continuous overlap of two generations of individuals can exchange informational assets and help together in fastidious tasks and (3) polyethism, with quite diverse skills and fertile individuals, reduces the bias during the production/reproduction processes).
• – Sexual reproduction allows us to introduce more diversity within a species, but not necessarily in the desired direction initially. Indeed, there are several ways in which evolution can reduce the overall fitness of individuals or populations. For instance, natural selection can take place everywhere – in genes, individuals and groups – in the economy level. What promotes the survival of a gene or the funds given to financial banks (when involved in a subprime crisis) does not necessarily increase the fitness of the individuals carrying it, or the society of these individuals subjected to this unexpected event. In the same way, there are parasitic DNA elements, or transposons, able to spread through a population even though they make their host organisms less fit. Transposons are one cause of genetic diseases such as hemophilia and may cause the disappearance of an individual/species. Genes capable of driving populations to extinction might have a practical use, however. Biologists are exploring the possibility of releasing engineered parasitic DNA into populations of malaria-carrying mosquitoes. It is the same in the information systems where viruses are introduced by IS specialists in order to “condition” the Web and associated computing systems toward a given goal.
• – In case of loss of the habitat or food reduction, some species are able to modify their reproduction rates and limit the number of individuals to save the species. In 1932, J.B.S. Haldane suggested that this could even lead to the extinction of populations: it is a kind of evolutionary suicide – for instance, when nutrients run low, individual myxobacteria (slime bacteria) may come together to form a fruiting body to produce spores. Laboratory studies showed that cheating myxobacteria that only produce spores and never help form the non-spore producing parts of the fruiting body can drive populations to extinction.

In each case, a need coming from a so-called “higher order” is sought and tends to words the survival of the species, in a short-medium horizon. Due to this concept of “survivability”, the characteristic of “life” is to select improved (or better adapted) solutions and make species evolving toward innovative patterns and viable strategies, then to ensure reproduction, not genes, but organizations and strategies.

In this context, is survival in the direction desired by our changing and evolving environment? Probably not: if we could go back, following the “trace” of our evolution, and restart forward, the evolution of each species would be very different, far from the image now observed, at a given time.

Do we have to talk in terms of improvement or survival of species? A species is the product (sink or result) of a specific biological evolution and not its source, or the origin of a mutation. Moreover, the goal being sought and carried on, in a complex system, is not the element (or agent) that directs the adaptation of a structure, organization or behavior. It is only a resulting feature or behavioral function or characteristic since any order emerges from self-organization.

In the next section of this chapter, we are going to present a more in-depth study of the impact of these facts and proposals to better understand and provide solutions for some engineering or reengineering problems.

6.2. Life survival: introduction and model transposition

In administration and industry, we often talk about life. In the previous section, we talked about life. It is a main concern and we always try to understand how we could benefit from this unique experience to enhance our management and control systems. Also, in many published papers, whatever the field considered, people involve the so-called “system complexity”, but their way of thinking is not “complex” at all and a paradigm change is still required and expected in the way we define and design the governance, management and control of such systems.

Roughly, what characterizes the life of a species or a complex system is a set of three properties:

• – autonomy, which allows an organization not only to feed itself (hunting, fishing, eating, etc.), but also to manage energy (e.g. make fire, build devices for photosynthesis, etc.) and then to elaborate actions;
• – reproduction corresponding to an increase in terms of diversification and diversified potentialities;
• – adaptation or selection of “well-fitted” strategies to ensure the future of the species. Thus, life is not just information that we duplicate: it is a set of reactions to information that we try to replicate and disseminate.

Some of these principles are already applied in devices (robots, artilects or “artificial intellects”, etc.) designed by scientists and biologists. Generally speaking, we talk about life just because we intend to emulate human behavior and replace it, possibly in special situations (war, polluted areas, difficult access, etc.), or develop a so-called “augmented human being”.

The question, however, is never to know what is the purpose of life, or if our creations are in agreement of the purpose of life?

Are we violating the basic principles of life? As Gödel said, are we sure that, going toward more complexity, we are not digging our own graves? Quite often, our society is only involved in basic/material contingencies and concerned with short-term goals. In reality, we can pose the following questions:

• – Is life intended to ensure the adaptation, development, multiplication or the endless complexity of a species or a system, and how?
• – Is life, through the reproduction process, intended to ensure the survival or continued existence of a species via its progeny or generated descendents, whatever their level of adaptation?
• – Life as we know, is it intended to accelerate the creation of new and better living species and avatars, able to dominate our “next” world?
• – Nature, for instance, here the evolution of Nature, our mother, is it a source of life in the global sense of the word?

People agree on the fact that, from the beginning of the emergence of life in nature, the essential goal of any species is to ensure its survival, and hence its own existence, in a sometimes hostile world. Several approaches are identified:

• – adaptation to a given use: this requires changes in capabilities. The system involved will acquire or perfect some functional shape or pattern that allows itself to best ensure an objective;
• – coadaptation between several species (or a human being in relation with other conditions of life and functioning): indeed, the notions of interaction, cooperation and/or competition are of utmost importance to exploit the concepts of synergy, complementarity and dominance. From there, some hybrid modes of functioning called “comperation” (contraction of competition and cooperation) and “coopetition” (contraction of cooperation and competition) have been developed [MAS 06]. We will not detail them there.

The eusociality as defined by Michrner (1969) and Wilson (1975) [SHE 95] is used as the highest level of social approach in a hierarchical organization. It uses some concepts based on skills classification and also speciation to again improve the mode of functioning within a community. The term “eusociality” is well known to those who study the behavior of social insects such as ants, bees and termites. It focuses on the nature and degree of the division of labor, such as:

• – reproductive division of labor (with more or less sterile castes, workers or soldiers);
• – overlapping generations with people getting more or less experience in different areas;
• – cooperative care of young while the workers are doing something else, etc.

For what purpose? This is specific to companies and organizations which can perpetuate some specific cultural values, and also accelerate the transmission of knowledge, know-how and expertise. It is a kind of optimal problem-solving approach, since the work and actions to be done require a minimum of energy and time expenses.

Regardless of these basic mechanisms, the evolution of species also uses several organizational factors that reflect the specificities of the subject/agent itself, as well as its role in the environment. For example:

• – In the struggle for survival of a species, the concept of geometric progression, which characterizes, in general, their increase in number, always applies: indeed, it is important to compensate early life and random losses (life and death process, infant mortality, etc.), degradation or disappearances of individuals in some local areas, because in any complex system opposing forces and phenomena occur: action–reaction, creation–destruction, prey–predator, etc. Therefore, more species are borne than those required for survival and reaching a normal quantitative equilibrium. Similarly, within a company, there are always produced more products (or component sets) than can be requested for the same reasons. This is why an overproduction rate is predefined in any critical parts procurement.
• – Each system changes in order to find a more profitable way for itself, and to give itself the greatest chance of success or survival. Once the best suited prototype design is achieved, the resulting product/agent of this selection will be reproduced and disseminated in order to perpetuate and propagate the system/species.
• – Species subject to mutation and to be selected are “products” that are gradually changing; they are rarely the result of a spontaneous generation from scratch (ex nihilo). It is a process of continuous improvement punctuated (as we will see later) by breaks. However, the best-fitted patterns and structures are not immutable either: the environment with which they are in constant interaction also varies and adaptation processes are never interrupted.

In industry, as already suggested, the approach seeks the same, but the declination to know the final purpose of a business is different:

• – when asking business leaders what the purpose of their business and organization is in the current environment of the society, they usually come up with three answers: wealth creation, employment and business activity creation;
• – more rarely, the approach uses some kind of biological reasons; it is argued that the company is like a living being: without growth, it begins to decrease and dies or disappears;
• – in some Western countries, where the generosity of elected leaders and decision-makers is well developed and exploited (with the money and goods of others), the trend is quite strong to bring attention and assign funds and help to sick and weak companies rather than to innovative ones, able to generate businesses, and also creative, ambitious and promising growth. Here, this subject company has a positive social purpose.

If we give a brief history of what the concept or purpose of the business must be, we can say the following:

1. In France, during the 17th Century, the goal was the enrichment and development of the kingdom. At this period, for the Colbert era, many companies were launched and developed in new fields of activity; new businesses were funded by the nation as a sponsor but also as a buyer (e.g. the Saint-Gobain company in the glass industry). At the same time, in the 1660s at the initiative of Cardinal Richelieu, the French Indies (America and Canada), East Indies (Far East), North (Baltic), and Orient (Asia) Companies were established. This fulfilled a biological-like need, since, behind the kingdom, all the French population could benefit from this initiative.

2. From the beginning of 20th Century, industrial companies have been legally independent organizations; they combine different production means to provide goods and services that are sold on a market to make a profit. Earnings are primarily used to cover the return on invested capital. The providers in capital are quite varied: they may include independent proprietorships, partnerships, external corporations, etc. Therefore, we have moved from a biological scheme to a more individualized economic model with notions of strong returns on investment with a smaller number of recipients.
3. Today, the concept of profit earning is a major concern; because of the strong individualization of our society (due to hedonism) associated with the emergence and dissemination of the so-called greed attitude, many changes have occurred. The recipients are primarily shareholders and company executives, and to a smaller extent the employees of the company; the risk-taking, however, is only concentrated on the private shareholders. So we have switched to a “cancer” mode, which was only generated by the distortions of our society.

Finally, with regard to the geometric growth rate discussed above, we can transpose these statements into industry:

• – For the production or reproduction of goods and services, the same multiplication or propagation process applies to any shape, pattern or configuration of a selected product.
• – Are we still manufacturing more goods and services than required to satisfy our needs? Is this simply due to the fact that there are scraps, garbage in provided parts, malfunctions or even volatility in manufacturing processes?
• – Again, in terms of objectives, what are the differences, concerning the content and finality, between an industrial objective and the one used in nature? What is true in nature?

What has been discussed above is not relevant to existential questions: these are substantive issues that go far beyond the concerns of environmentalists or “free riders” and any kind of parasites. It only consists of knowing whether the business models and organizations built by human beings are consistent with the final purposes of Nature: are the business models that we have developed viable? It is a question of sustainability, holonism and reliability of our creations, and in a direct way to ensure our survival. In fact, it should be noted, within the framework of this section, that interactions to be considered are linking three subsets, or areas, of agents; they are located in Figure 6.1.

6.3. Discussing the situation in between the three areas

We may focus on the fact that relationships between a company and stakeholders are of key importance today. Efforts are underway to involve the company in a wider role: we quote this trend as the so-called “social responsibility”. The objective is to better cover relationships between Area 1 and the “full” Area 2.

The debate, however, is unresolved, since the concepts at the individual level (because of the “hedonism” associated with the individualization of the society) are not yet taken into account. The same happens with the notion of ethics and, more specifically, the “professional ethics” that cannot be modeled and formalized because they directly involve the individual consciousness of each person. Hence, the survival problem between Area 1 and Area 2 is not fully covered.

Here, we are neglecting relationships between the two subsets (Area 2 and Area 3) since they are out of the scope of this section.

Similarly, if we consider Area 1 and Area 3, we are addressing the “societal responsibility” of a company. At this time, this point is not fully covered by the so-called social responsibility of an enterprise (SRE). There is a big gap between industrial companies – they are often like “multinational” or “transnational” corporations – and governments: the concept of their “global governance” is not a common topic with common interests. Many responsible people talk about “e-governments”, meta-governance, open governments, etc., but nothing is really defined and effective. It is an open question.

By analogy, it is as if we were trying to run without our cerebellum or brain, and vice versa. In terms of “survivability”, we are not ready for controlling “nature” or the evolution of society, and we can still improve our governance approach. Indeed, everything in nature is based on antagonisms and ambivalences. Consequently, we have to keep in mind some new paradigms, all of them related to key “sustainability” issues:

• – with new technologies, robotics and transhumanism, it will be increasingly difficult to create new and enough jobs;
• – the evolution of societies weakens freedom as it creates more laws, prohibitions, regulations and rules. The space for freedom of each citizen is therefore strongly reduced;
• – in terms of governance (through the effects of the Web and social networks), there are increasingly fewer intermediaries between a state, its government and individuals; hence, a change of political structures is required to reduce them, to implement the simplification of the governance through a country: who can decide what is good for us? Who can generate and elaborate a real “Citizen and Democratic Constitution”?
• – new technologies provide some autonomy, capabilities and authority to each of us (e.g. Google and Big Data), but they reduce our autonomy because everything is known, everything is seen, nothing is neutral, and everything becomes unbalanced (information asymmetry);
• – the collaborative economy is an indisputable advantage, but sharing economy and information is also a spoliation: when information is shared, we cannot gain any advantage over a competitor and are becoming dependent on a structure;

• – the Web provides better communication facilities than those in the past. It enables us to reduce the exclusion of many populations, but it changes the economic context the content of jobs and the emergence of new needs so quickly that it accelerates the phenomenon of exclusion.

6.4. Discussing the situation inside each of the three areas

The concept of survivability in our society is such that we cannot easily ignore that death is a part of our evolution anymore. Indeed, there is an antagonism between transhumanism (extension of life) and the need for freely disposing and leaving the life as desired:

1. At an individual level, physical death is sometimes considered as a catastrophic failure and everything is done to delay this occurrence. It is a public health problem and many discussions are undergoing on this subject, associated with various debates on aging, etc. This thinking is quite developed and, in Western countries, for instance, we try to conduct wars (to play war games as well) in a surprising way: violence is focused in acts and images, concentrated among partners who are the opponents, but there is no death, or dead people, on the winner’s side; it is a “clean war”.
2. In the enterprise, the same philosophy applies: quite often we hear about strong management in business, about the so-called “killers”: e.g. a cost killer in the procurement area, etc. Everyone accepts, and this is the same with the employees, that some people can be fired or retired just to save a company (it is a kind of altruism). But no one allows the fact that a company can go bankrupt and die because this is the end of a source of revenue: that is when an entire community stands against such a deadline. Then it is the start of operations conducted by politicians and public authorities to avoid or delay such a fall.
3. For different reasons, whenever a country is threatened with bankruptcy, the entire international community is involved and they participate, through the banking system, to save an entire economy. It is the current state of affairs. It is true that the interactions between each country and societal issues are such that everyone is forced to cooperate to avoid or delay the deadlines, or simply the so feared death of a country. This contrasts with the approaches known a thousand years ago: when a war ended with the possible last lap of a whole nation. Now, given the concepts related to a general interest, our cultural and economic concept of the death, our mind is more than ever oriented toward survival and global approaches.

This is why our strategies about death and survival have deeply changed our recent views in terms of monitoring, management and control of complex systems.

6.5. Evolution of life: impact on management decision systems

All these considerations about life and its aims, thus pose the problem of how complex systems are managed and controlled in life sciences. We can observe, more specifically, how one obtains a robust decision, steady adaptations, and how we can replicate and propagate a solution. To do this, we can proceed to a set of observations, model them, and transpose their principles and mechanisms into the industrial, economic and administrative systems under study.

In this section, our intent is to describe some challenges related to the decision support systems (DSS). Several types of problems have been identified. Among them, we can select the following problems because of their link with biology, the brain and their connection with survival principles. They are:

• – data collection and measurement, and, more specifically, the perception of subjective and sensory data. This is of key importance in an enterprise where decisions are based not only on factual data but also on perceived feelings and information communication;
• – the organization of decision processes (just because the brain does not work either as an artificial neural network (ANN) or a conventional computer);
• – the decision process includes the human being, most of the time and mainly for complex decisions: everyone always involves reasoning, emotional and computational capabilities. The emotional part of the decision process is generally not modeled in our business intelligence (BI) technologies and it is important to try understanding what kind of paradigm we are faced with.

Why this concept of the “brain”? What are the relationships with the above comments? Indeed, the brain is a culmination of life in terms of management authority, control, monitoring and steering entity in life sciences. It is a model to be studied: here, we will highlight a few characteristics and determine which are best suited for a possible transposition and improvements.

The advantage of analyzing what is happening in the brain is that it is able either to process sensorial data or quantitative and qualitative information; thus, it is a model aimed at understanding some innovative decision-making and performing better computational and reasoning activities, data-or knowledge-based.

6.5.2. Levels of consciousness in the brain: application to DSS

According to Antonio Damasio [DAM 10], Professor of neurosciences at the University of Lisbon (Portugal), the living being, to decide and survive, mainly uses three levels of consciousness as involved in cognitive processes (see Figure 6.2).

Thus, with regard to the above two comments, we can draw the following statements that can be applied to any complex system functioning:

• – At the brainstem level, the “reptilian brain” ensures the basic functions of an animal necessary to its life and survival. The physiological system dedicated to regulations and the primitive impulse processing, such as irrational fears, are located at this level. These functions would be the first to occur during the creation of a living species.
• – At the midbrain or limbic system, the so-called “emotional brain” combines pleasure and displeasure associated with stored memories (punishment–reward system). Therefore, there are storage and analysis functions on specific information developed for regulating given internal organs/organisms. Again, at this level, we can perceive some fear, and be sensitive to rewards.
• – Finally, the cerebral cortex, or the neocortex, mostly located in the periphery, is the seat of learning, memory and consciousness: it enables the thought of a human being and labor activities such as the conscious planning of actions in order to be alive and survive. Thus, one can anticipate and understand certain or random situations, develop behaviors and attitudes, feelings, etc. In this area, we can quote the memory-prediction framework theory of brain function created by Hawkins [HAW 04]. This theory concerns the role of the mammalian neocortex, its association with the hippocampus and thalamus in matching sensory inputs to stored memory patterns and how this process leads to predictions of what will happen in the future.

It is important to note that artificial decision support systems are structured following the same architecture. Without conducting a formal analysis, we can note that in industry or economy, for instance, most of the control and monitoring systems provide functions based on signal analysis compared to thresholds; then, these tools select and generate control actions and regulations that are applied to organs or “agents” to be kept under control.

Sometimes, to get more reactivity and better adaptivity, some “reflex” processes were designed and integrated into more complex tools; within this framework, an “artificial neural network” was developed. Through its learning abilities, and its “life and survival” like oriented capabilities, scientists thought we had discovered a way to eventually replace human beings. In fact, we are far from that reality since ANNs are only over the first level of unconscious action or basic functions existing in the brain; moreover, we are not yet able to achieve artificial neural nets including several thousand synapses structured in a complex way as observed in reality.

Also in the same field of smart management and decision, recent studies have shown that to make a complex decision, it was necessary to integrate two components, associated with the limbic and neo-cortex systems as explained before:

• – reasoning: this relies on knowledge, logic, memory and computational processing to develop decision strategies. However, such computational systems are of a deductive and logical nature. The brain can simulate some kind of thinking as subsets of these operations. However, the brain has no hierarchy of logic gates and operators as a computer has [DOZ 02]. A deductive system has no place for love, hate or fear;
• – emotion: at this stage, we are switching the active mode of a decision by introducing some psychism – associative and emotional capabilities are necessary to link ideas, strategies and emotions. To go to take an action and to take a decision in practice, we have to decide in the most appropriate manner. Here, the emotional part of the brain is required. Indeed, to make a choice, it is necessary to quickly assess a situation, enhance the impact of an action, to motivate ourselves and “feel” when and how to take a decision or not. It is known that logical conclusions and needs to act have, quite often, emotional overtones as in, for example, the judgment that a greed attitude in economy is not only logically incorrect and lacks ethics, but also despicable and unfair. Only the human brain is able to associate such emotion with the achievement of the decision process.

Thus, we see that it is the second level of consciousness in the brain (emotional) and the third level (reasoning) that are mainly required to take a complex decision. We therefore have not invented anything new. Some millennia ago, the lives of the people were like that we have today: filled with achievements, setbacks, cooperation and competition, rationality and strong emotions. We have just added in our modern practices, a different culture and the automation of some processes and human activities.

Two observations arise when assessing the reliability and adequacy of support systems for decision in our education systems dedicated to future managers:

• – the emotional part of the decision is not integrated into management courses in most of the major business schools: this is simply due to the fact that the decision support tools that are taught are of the analytical kind; mentally, in the business area, we are rationally working without any emotion. Also, it is often said that economy is ignoring emotion. In addition, we do not know how to model and put into the equation the subjective part related to emotions;

• – concerning reasoning, we are not much further forward: cognitive processing is based on deduction, abduction and induction mechanisms. Being indulgent, our DSS can work satisfactorily for the deduction. In terms of abduction and syllogisms, there are few existing tools, often not exploited since we do not know how to proceed with new created knowledge; finally, at the level of induction, it is a virtual desert.

6.6. Opening new thinking ways

Before addressing the subject of consciousness, it is necessary to introduce the notion of thinking. Thought is the result of the human brain activity. It thus abides with the same structural constraints, the same life principles and the same mechanisms that underpin complex systems. We can state that thought is a set of three elements:

• – the thinking process itself, with reasoning capabilities;
• – feelings associated with emotions;
• – sensations and intuitions that are sometimes linked to unconsciousness.

6.6.1. When consciousness leads to ethics

Subconsciousness drives our inspiration, intention, mood and perception. Consciousness and action follow afterward. Consciousness strives on experience yet transcends it. Can we and should we attempt to predict the worst? Surely not, the good and the best are always necessary in the name of the ambivalence principle “everything is relative, everything is ambivalent, and the dreams can’t exist without nightmares”. The issue is not to know what will happen and when but what can happen and/or what could happen.

6.7. Consciousness as an iterative feedback process growing from one level to another

A talk on consciousness should deserve a bit more depth. Isn’t man a “machine” dedicated to producing consciousness? There is not any other envisagable “production”.

We truly are a biological machine. Yet, beyond biology, there is the “spiritual mind”. Therefore, we go from the knowledge manipulating state to the thinking state, then to the consciousness state, and we come to the imaginary and dreamy state (and why not to total happiness/love?).

Yet, going back to nature, which gets more complex ever, and to the notions of co-evolution, there are communities of individuals above man, in strong interaction and that auto-organize. Similarly, the interacting individual consciousnesses will get more complex and generate a supra-or meta-consciousness (a convergence toward an attractor of the “collective consciousness” type through the transpositions/evolutions of these individual consciousnesses). Beyond this point, we would jump to the extra/multi-terrestrial universes. That is the kind of information that would then be possible to transmit, from in the beginning … all its information (material and biological). Then, the unidimensional DNA coding needed expansion into several dimensions progressively in order to develop consciousness. Minerals, plants, animals, and soon, a 4D over-man man will be modeled and added to the stack. Are we still yet to see this? We cannot tell since the notion of dimension is a human mind construction. Something to think about.

While we uncover how our brain works, we can measure the developments to integrate in terms of governance sustainability or, more specifically, management. For instance, the management process in a company was first geographical, hierarchical and rational (procedural), and then became organizational to cover the whole enterprise. Finally, the process is becoming much more cognitive through the control of information, senses and emotions. Now it will be dematerialized to gradually give way to ideas, autonomy and to the unconscious.

How can we conduct such changes? To better understand the new ways of thinking, we will go back to basic considerations relevant to sustainability, as expressed in our bio-capacity-oriented world (widely “resilience” oriented). This will also enable us to disassemble some quite conservative views.

Overall, nature has provided us with some basic mechanisms to enable man to survive, adapt and evolve. These capabilities are needed to cope with permanent changes to which it has been subjected.

In the following, we will not study changes related to the influences of external resources such as air, energy and water pollution (since this has already been the subject of a previous book [MAS 06]). We will also not focus on some in-depth changes brought about by technology (this is the subject of a separate chapter). On the other hand, we address two underlying causes of the evolution of systems that are addressed by many of us, often in a subjective and emotional way, which have a definite impact on management systems and decision-making in enterprise. They are:

1. the switching of wealth which highlights the rise of new countries and dominant populations and creates uncertainty, fears and changes in a society;
2. the emergence of new thinking and new economic theories. A business is not just a process; it is a set of humans working together. This is subject to the inherent major ideological, existential questions and this modifies, of course, the concepts of culture, the priorities and motivations of each individual … in a community.

Indeed, the economy, like the evolution of organizations and industry, cannot ignore some major changes in the cultural environment that will profoundly affect them and generate new behaviors, new priorities and new strategies. We can only regret here that companies, whose sole and understandable concern is expressed in terms of performance and competitiveness, do not have enough questions about their final purpose, and also on several points we will develop further: their operations, organizations and economic development depend on them.

How can we exploit the results from research and transpose the scientific approaches into the real world? In present times, everything is growing up iteratively (in pseudo-random mode) and is not amenable to prediction, since most results (e.g. fractals) belong to the imagination and we do not know how to draw benefits for new products directly.

6.8. Life and equilibriums in ecosystems

Companies, and also the military, face three decision management levels:

• – the strategic level related to the long-term vision, main objectives, business plans, etc.;
• – the tactical level which consists of defining the options that we have to choose in a setting where the outcome depends not only on our own actions but also on the action of others.
• – the operational level which concerns the definition and the application of the algorithm to conduct the action, and thus to … play.

Hereafter, we will focus on the tactical level: it explains how the player of a game (or a decision-maker) has to proceed to develop successful solutions. Quite often, to increase the chances of success, a player has to combine several tactics over time, according to the opportunities of the game. Nothing is definitively acquired, and nothing is black or white: it is always necessary to find good equilibriums and combine several approaches simultaneously.

This is exactly what happens with sustainability: we will not describe in detail the theories behind either the Bayesian or dynamic games, or the Nash equilibrium theory; instead, we will only focus on the fact that a solution is a tricky and complicated equilibrium between rationalities, emotions, psychisms, dynamic capabilities and desires. Life is a marvellous and evolved field of operations: it is an advanced and interconnected information system; it is a complex decision system and game theory is found to be operating everywhere.

6.9 Conclusions

In this chapter which is dedicated to mental concepts and mechanisms of human life, we could detail a few approaches at human being level, resilience oriented, to solve problems encountered in business, economy, our day-to-day life or our social living.

As we easily understand, these concepts are directly useful to better understand and handle the sustainability approaches that we have to redesign. Indeed, we can transpose these mechanisms and ways of doing in many different areas, and implement them in any company where they will play an important role in its evolution and choices of strategies, sustainability oriented. As a result, they have an impact on the underlying structures and systems architecture of the system, and they effectively impact the development of new decision-making processes.

Our intent is, in addition to biological considerations, we also have to consider the social environment of a human being, and the evolution of society.

The objective is just to understand how a human being will evolve in a new environment, and then implement and exploit our mental capacities to face new challenges in a sustainable world.

For instance, when discussing the management system used in a company to motivate people, one will tell you that human resources have first to be happy in their work. To have happiness, which sucks life, however requires a sharing of responsibility, lives and destinies.

To summarize, we can specify that society is permanently evolving. Just to consider the last decade, we can say the following:

1. Society was primarily a society of duty. Everyone was concerned about fulfilling his tasks, doing his job as best as he could, to be responsible to the elders and to devote himself to his company or participate in social activities when he was at home.
2. More recently, our society has become hedonistic. Hedonism leads to a new form of globalization. It must be built or redesigned based on new values, references and benchmarks. This is the current situation; sometimes, due to lack of vision, governments have not paid attention to the fact that new boundaries and values had to be set up in society. Also, ethics were not there to regulate the new society and this is why some deviances relevant to quality of life, leisure, or even laxity have spread and invaded the public and social life.
3. What is next? If you try to look a little bit into the future, it is almost obvious that eudemonism is getting ready for the next step. It is related to a need for happiness, a feeling of fullness (the so-called “love” by the French philosopher Luc Ferry). Happiness can be considered as an end. It cannot be the sustainable privilege of a few people because the interactions in the global society are so numerous and strong that everything, any information, is well known, memorized, felt, evaluated and shared, by everyone, and finally … tagged in our mind, influenced by the new ways of social thinking and by the behaviors of our “neighbors”, in a global way, that is to say, in the broadest sense of the term. Under these conditions, the problem will be to complete our mental schemes and to integrate these concepts into the new management and decision systems. More specifically, it is necessary to include, right now, eudemonism in our future production systems (here, production is a generic term in its widest sense).

6.10. Consequences and action plan

In this area, related to eudemonism [BOS 04], mutations and genetic recombinations are not, however, the only ways in which new variants with unanticipated properties can arise. Likewise, the enhancement of various cognitive or emotional capacities, or the installment of entirely new capacities, could produce combinatorial effects that may not be fully predictable. Ordinary growth and maturation of an individual could lead to the development of a fitness-maximizing non-eudemonic character even where none is manifest at conception. Novel mimetic influences might also trigger non-eudemonic tendencies. So while it is plausible that an advanced lifeform could avoid random mutations (for instance, in its DNA source code), it is more dubious that it would be able to predict and avoid emergent effects of growth, enhancement, and learning in individuals or in interacting communities of developing agents:

• – Efforts would be not to accept individuals with non-eudemonic fitness-maximizing preferences because these would then proliferate and eventually dominate. These individuals would somehow have to disappear from the population, and it is hard to see any practical and ethical way in which this could happen. Usually, in a company, the population is distributed according to a Gaussian curve. Distribution tails comprise either over-eudemonic agents on one side or greed agents on the other side. The objective in order to maintain the best cooperation consists of eliminating or reducing the tails. This can be achieved through management decision related to new job assignments, job content realignment, or even “firing”.
• – In some specific cases, it might make good sense to try to reduce the frequency at which dangerous mutants are spawned – in cases where this can be done relatively inexpensively, in an ethically acceptable manner, and where clear and specific harms can be foreseen. For example, in the future, we might pass laws against building powerful artificial intelligences with goal systems that are hostile to human values. But we cannot rely on this strategy alone to prevent a dystopian evolutionary scenario if such a scenario should happen to be the default.
• – The main care is related to the so-called “Worldwide Citizen” [DOM 11]. Indeed, it is a kind of “world’s conscience” and, in terms of governance, the role of super-democracies that are emerging: they progressively take charge and support the common assets and public good of very diversified populations: indeed the “Res Publica” that takes care of the public good never remains the privilege of a small elite. The reason is simple: because of globalization, the public good is no longer characteristic of the privileged few, but of the world itself. Everyone is working, living everywhere: you can take your breakfast in the morning in Paris, your lunch in Berlin and dinner at your hotel in Hong Kong. People are in full interaction with everybody in the world (we have the same brain) and understandable since the culture is becoming “compatible” (here, we do not use the term “uniform” or “homogeneous”) because of the existing way of communication and information exchange. Thus, a new global governance must be defined: a new form of “Res Publica” will emerge from that.

In this new world, the role of a nation, a CEO or even a manager in a human organization is that of a “facilitator”.

Furthermore, the power of a decision-maker is not a hierarchical power that is assigned because of his membership in an organization: it comes from his ability to argue a possible decision, to convince his team or the employees under his responsibility, in his business domain. Within this context, relevant to the emergence of a “World Citizen”, the role of a manager is much more difficult and risky: we will be asked to decide in a more cooperative and collaborative mode; this leads to a different selection and promotion mode with regard to tomorrow’s leaders.

Practically, what will happen? How could we adapt these concepts? By avoiding going back to the “Pax Romana” world, a simple answer is to reason locally (from a nation’s point of view). We can say that in France, the geographical notion of a “département” was created to supersede the “city”; this was extended to the wider notion of a “region”. Now, the global notion of “Europe” as a supranational organization is set up. Before changing once more the scale of the management domain, and thinking about a global worldwide governance, it should be noted that, in nature, the changes are progressive and evolving in the same way.

Before considering a “comprehensive and integrated world” (in conformance with the global vision of a “smart planet”), it is first necessary to carry out a gradual and continuous assimilation of these supranational organizations.

In Europe, for instance, all the countries are geographically, economically and culturally close. Around the world, interactions are particularly strong in the field of economy, transportation, tourism, etc. Within this interconnected world, everyone is “unique, similar and universal”. It is a kind of integration and assimilation (which is a much stronger concept): this evolution is an essential step in the globalization in progress. Thus, a new order can only arise through this “programmable network” (in terms of complex systems theory).