No one can predict the future, least of all software engineers. As our society bears witness to an age of increasing complexity, how does one even begin to judge the validity of today’s KPI/OKR/KRA/TLA against the backdrop of the unpredictable?
Mother Nature takes a simpler approach: do what you can and try not to die. While the rest of the cosmos marches down the inevitable path towards maximum disorder, Nature seemingly never stops creating expansive islands of ever-increasing order. By exploring the boundaries of mathematics and chaos, structure and self-organisation can be found everywhere from economics and social networks, to chemistry and biology. But how is this possible?
This talk highlights several key ideas that have emerged over the past century, and tells the story of how Nature evolves, reacts and experiments to create amazing structures, limited only by the universe itself. On our journey, we will explore the awesome power of weather systems, the elegance of the human brain, the unfair reputation of waterfalls, and the reasons why pandas are pointless.