Michael Richey

Hi all, My name is Michael Richey and I live in Seattle Washington. I am a Boeing fellow, focused on corporate engineering education and knowledge management. My responsibilities include providing business leadership for 787 engineering technical and professional educational programs. This includes topics in advanced materials i.e., composites and Product Lifecycle Management theories and practices. I also lead cross-organizational teams e.g., academic, government and industry, developing educational programs. This includes learning science investigating research on human learning that draw on neurobiological, cognitive, developmental and socio-cultural theories and their related methodologies to advance knowledge of learning, including its supportive contexts and transformative technologies including the application of immersive and cognitive learning theories into academic and industrial settings.

My SFI research question include:

Can one construct a general theory of social organizations that is quantitative and predictive? Are there “universal” scaling laws that reveal underlying principles?• Are there average idealized social organizations? Did they evolve under “natural selection” in a “free market” environment via competition?

What is the nature of their hierarchies and generic network structure? Are there universality classes of networks? Is there an optimal maximum (or minimum) size? How robust is this heterogeneous social system? What is the capacity for dynamic adaptation? What policies and procedures enable adaptation, how do they propagate through the social network?

What is the effect of internal – external policy decisions, technology and global pressures change? How do these decisions support the goal oriented behaviors of social agents? (Contagion phenomena)

What computational models can we employ to better understand an innovation culture, as a complex adaptive system? What are the commonalities among adaptive agents (leadership, and extended global workforce)? Can we distill these behaviors into prototypical adaptive behaviors; can we leverage this insight to shift lifelong learning strategies? Can we identify the level of sophistication and enabling conditions?

Social Niche Construction: the new business model fundamentally altered the internal agent behavior through exposure to global external agents and cultures. Can we model this new operational mode and understand how to leverage the combined intellectual capital generated from this diverse perspective?

Social worlds: This new model presents a opportunity to shape – influence global behaviors by shifting the balance of local and regional control. How is this accomplished by agents within this global environment? How does this decentralized – centralized balance occur, how does this impact agent behavior i.e., heuristic business modeling for the benefit of the collective system goals? Social agents receive or acquire knowledge; the information is leveraged against a schema, processes and acted on. Within the social network, how do agents access information, what is the level of fidelity, how do they direct their acts toward optimizing the solution space? How can societies evaluate the tangible and intangible returns from investments in innovation and global business and economic modeling, and to predict the likely returns from future investments within tolerable margins of error and with attention to the full spectrum of potential consequences How do learning communities attempt to capitalize on the potential synergy between diverse groups of people to address multiple, diverse aims. A good example of this phenomenon is the learning cities initiative (West 2002, Yarnit 2000) which seeks to build city wide learning communities which both improve citizen learning and economic regeneration.

I hope to gain a broader understanding on complexity and complex adaptive systems, including computational modeling, social emergence, as related to sustainability, innovation and scale, the life and flow of information through social networks, innovation disruptions through user generated content, societies as complex systems, leadership and ethics relation to complex systems, and singularities, what causes the collapse of complex societies.

Re: possible projects in mind for the CSSS. Maybe? SFI and Boeing have partnered on a research project that seeks to understand the contexts, structures and processes of social adaptive systems and innovation. We have funded research focused on understanding the global business model from a innovation and complex adaptive system perspective. The discovery phase (June 18th thru September 25th) will leverage the SFI Course graining approach to define the boundaries and primary research goals. Based on the knowledge gathered within this “Discovery” phase, create a better understanding of the social system and dynamic models and specific methods of enquiry. If there is student interest in exploring alignment of the SFI-Boeing research objectives to the CSSS projects, I would appreciate an opportunity to explore.