Reconfiguring the cafe

In a genetically evolving cafe´, selection and rearrangement of people at the tables has to be arranged through heuristic rules. These rules, as explained in a previous chapter, are rules of thumb: rough and ready rules that really amount to no more than the application of common sense.

The most obvious first rule is that people not commenting on the chapter contents are evolved out. It makes no sense to keep them in because they would be reducing the efficiency of the cafe´ to provide guidance. They are removed after two or three chapters of failing to respond, so that they can be replaced by others.

The second common sense rule is that people who respond well to each other's comments should be kept together. This involves organising the arrangement of the table in groups of people rather than on an individual basis. This corresponds with the method of splitting up genes at a point - as was mentioned earlier in the section describing genetic algorithms.

The third rule concerns the organisation of the cafe´ as a whole. It doesn't make sense to have all the tables in a cafe reacting in the same way, anymore more than it makes sense for all cells in a biological organism to function identically. For greater efficiency, it is be far better for tables to be arranged to specialise, functioning to complement each other.

This can be arranged by designating tables to play particular roles in the guidance system and selecting appropriate people to sit at those tables. For example, one table can contain people who concentrate on feedback while others tables contain people whose responses are more in the nature of feed forward. Some tables can specialise in being critical, others in being enthusiastic. There are a number of different ways in which the appropriate mix of people can affect the way in which a table responds to chapter content.

The fourth rule is to put negative first responders at the same table - because some people have a natural tendency to respond quickly with a negative view point. This is often because they skim too rapidly through the content and take things out of context. After running many generations of these tables, I've discovered that the mood and opinions of tables are disproportionally influenced by first responses. If the first response is negative, it can inhibit responses that are valuable for feed forward.

It is an often observed characteristic of groups that they are easily influenced into a common mind set. There is an experiment, often mentioned in psychology, that demonstrates this phenomenon. It revolves around an optical illusion that a single stationary spot of light in a darkened room can appear to move. If a group is sent into a room and asked to determine whether or not the spot is moving, the group nearly always decides it is or it isn't according to the first opinion voiced.

This leads to a fifth rule that runs counter to some of the other rules: keep changing around the people at the tables so that a common mind set doesn't become fixed. Unlike the situation in conventional organisational structures, the tendency for a group to form a common mind set is not beneficial in discussions involving unknowns and uncertainties. It is just as easy for a group to agree upon a wrong conclusion as a right conclusion. Such agreements form early in discussions and often inhibit views that might look at other view points.

Changing people around at each new chapter, can also counter bias. For instance, discussions at two tables might come to totally different conclusions due the the bias of some of the early discussion leaders. In the following chapter (where probably both view points have been taken into account), people are switched between the tables. This has the effect of keeping everyone fairly open minded because they are continuously being exposed to different perspectives.

This is how an evolutionary strategy was used to write this book. Although it was written by the author, the writing was guided and kept on course by the people in the cafe´. They had access to hundreds, perhaps thousands of other people's views through their personal world of contacts. It was this community, helped along by a few heuristic rules that kept the book on course to home in on the main goal - of finding a suitable way to establish a personal niche in the world of e-business.