I must admit, that the first time a played The SIMS I immediately try to get them to kill of love each other. I mean: “Looking for a job” Yeah, yeah. “Hitting the next door neighbor” Cool! Assuming that I am not the only weirdo here, and to make stuff entertaining, lets go to our example.

Consider the actor Tiffany in a game. She might have the following properties:

• Gender (M/F) := F
• Age (number) := 30
• Lust (number) := 50
• Anger (number) := 40

We have a 30 year old female that is rather neutral on her emotions lust and anger. Tiffany might be doing something. Actually, every actor is always “doing” something at a given moment. E.g. sleeping, drinking, having a shower or playing chess. This is called the “state” of the actor. Although in reality what people are doing can be limitless; a state can only be a value from a limited list. Of course, this might be a long list. Lets say Tiffany is currently “drinking”. At this moment we have a 30 year old woman having a drink and feeling normal. This game doesnt sound like a lot of fun, does it? So, lets give it some action.

Tiffany is one outgoing person, to put it like that; when her lust-level is 50 or above, she needs to satisfy her lust, this will become her “goal”. If you are fond of some abstract syntax you like the following notation about Tiffany:

• Goal::Satisfy lust
• State:=all
• Threshold:=lust=>50

So, it doesnt mind what she is doing, when the lust peaks, so does she. One of the strategies she has up her sleeve to fulfil this goal is to just kiss someone. But how to select a suited partner? Or a willing victim if you want. The game will have some rules to determine the target, the actor with whom to interact with.

• Target: gender=M; lust>90.

All males with a lust above then 90 can be a target. The computer will run through the list of actors in the game to search for candidate that fits the rule. If it has found one, we get to the part where you can see something happening in the game. If it has selected a strategy (kiss someone), found a suited target, it will run some predefined activities associated with this strategy: walk towards the target, say hi, do some chitchat, etc. This is all finally visible on your screen. And finally when the goal is satisfied, when Tiffany finally has her long desired kiss, this will influence her properties; perhaps in this case her lust-level will finally drop by ten points.

Bas de Baar helps people find ways to enjoy the diversity of human interaction in their organizations so that they can get out of their own way and achieve their goals. - Sims Project Model: Tiffany’s Lust is a post from: Project Shrink.

To be able to discuss how people operate within a project, it is important to have some kind of idea in our head about people, their behavior and how they interact. Some kind of model. Of course a model is a simplification of reality; we leave things out, we make stuff easier, just to be able to understand it all. This might be a small problem, but we have no choice. Without ignoring aspects and making a few assumptions there is no way on earth our brain will get it. Sorry to bring this to you: but our mind is too small for reality.

When looking for a way to describe how people operate, you just have to be totally amazed by the popular computer game The SIMS. In this game you simulate a group of people that live together. They go to work, they sleep, they have coffee with the neighbours, and they have sex and raise their children. The simulation runs in principle by itself, but the fun is that you can interfere in their situation; can withhold them from food, provide them a lot of money, make them hate or love each other. You just sway your magic wand, kick back and see how your actors in the game react. And what staggers me the most, and why I bring up this subject in the first place, is the level of detail, and live like feel of the simulation. They really nailed it down, simulating ordinary people on their own and in a group.

Just from the looks of it, it seems worth to look a little closer to the underlying behavioral game engine (the part of the game which emulates individuals behave depending on interactions with other actors in the system) to help us crack the code for a proper model. Of course this will be a simplification of the real deal.

Every individual in the game is called an ‘actor’. Every actor has some properties that describe it. Of course you have a name so you know who is who, but you also consider aspects that are a given like age and gender. Next to these kind of ‘given’ properties you have items that describe the state of mind the actor has at any given moment, and yes, they will change. Think about emotions like lust and anger, or physical conditions like hunger and general health.

To be able to do something useful with these properties, they can have values. Of course, gender can be Male or Female, but for things like Anger you can use numbers: 0 can mean completely without anger, and with a value of 100 the steam is getting out of an individuals ears.

Bas de Baar helps people find ways to enjoy the diversity of human interaction in their organizations so that they can get out of their own way and achieve their goals. - How To Learn Project Management By Playing The Sims is a post from: Project Shrink.

For the context of projects I will focus on a special type of systems: Complex Adaptive Systems, or CAS for short. I will first throw you off guard with a formal definition, after which I will explain a little more. The following definition is from John H. Holland:

Photography by Phauly.

“A Complex Adaptive System (CAS) is a dynamic network of many agents (which may represent cells, species, individuals, firms, nations) acting in parallel, constantly acting and reacting to what the other agents are doing. The control of a CAS tends to be highly dispersed and decentralized. If there is to be any coherent behavior in the system, it has to arise from competition and cooperation among the agents themselves. The overall behavior of the system is the result of a huge number of decisions made every moment by many individual agents.” (source: Waldrop, 1992)

Before you go all bouncy, let me tell you a story about the Game of Life. In 1990, while at university, a popular programming exercises was to create a small program based upon John Conways (a mathematician from the 60s) computer simulation “Life”. The idea is that you have a 2-dimensional grid with cells. These cells can be alive or dead (on or off, colored or blank). When the simulation is running the state of a cell is determined by three simple rules:

• If the cell has no living neighbors or just one, it will be dead (caused by loneliness);
• If four or more of the cells next to it are alive, it will be dead (overcrowding);
• If a dead cell has exactly three living neighbors it will come alive (Bitstorm).

The effect of these simple rules can be quite surprising. The starting grid can be very chaotic, but after a while you can see patterns emerge, and even stable situations can be reached where nothing will change any more, or the same patterns are just repeated over and over.





This simple program shows how from a simple set of rules that only take into account the cell itself and its direct neighbors can create some complex patterns in an entire system (the grid as a whole).

And this is exactly what is known as complex adaptive systems (CAS). Systems like this are the economy, the weather and human interaction, and the game of Life is a very simple one. In a CAS a very large group of small components or agents are interacting with each other. These local interactions are following some general rules. The collective of all these interactions, the sum if you want, determines the behavior of the whole system.

After previous postings on this blog (and wait until you reach my next posts about about The SIMS) you don’t have to wonder what this all has to do with project management. The people involved in the project and its surroundings are considered the “agents”. It is the human interaction between all those stakeholders that determines the overall behavior of the project. Nothing new here. But, applying CAS literally means that rules aren’t applied to the project as a whole, but the focus should be the individual interactions between people. That is way this entire exercises is so important.

Bas de Baar helps people find ways to enjoy the diversity of human interaction in their organizations so that they can get out of their own way and achieve their goals. - What Are Complex Adaptive Systems? is a post from: Project Shrink.

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