Episode 4 | On Survival and Adaptation | Interview with Luca Dellanna

In this episode we are going to meet Luca Dellanna, an expert in people and operations management, and one of my favourite contemporary authors, who can cover extremely complex topics alway providing clear and practical examples to relate them to our daily experience, as you will soon find out.

In this conversation we will mainly discuss about 2 of his books, which cover topics strictly related to the field of complexity. 

One book is titled Ergodicity, and it explains very clearly how this Statistical Physics and Chaos Theory concept has deep implications in our daily life and decisions. We will start from a practical example that will lead us to a clear definition, and we will learn what can be the strategies to keep non-ergodicity under control, in particular talking about the value of redistribution. Finally in this first part we will discuss how ergodicity plays an important role in survival fitness, and that you have to push natural selection as deep as you can within you, to have less chances it will apply over you.

In the second part we will discuss another of his books, Teams are Adaptive Systems, where we will delve into the concept of Complex Adaptive Systems, and we will learn how ethical and value based behaviour can provide a competitive advantage to managers. Furthermore we will find out how feedback loops, so important to define intelligence in human beings (and possibly also in artificial beings), play a good part in team management to avoid stupid behaviours.

We will conclude by discussing how a leader who embraces complexity needs to focus on managing it rather than controlling it, by managing risks and looking at the adaptations she promotes.

Links to:

• Luca Dellanna Website 
• Ergodicity 
• Teams are Adaptive Systems