The places and spaces we live and exist in, are incrementally growing into systems of impressive volume and proportions, whether cities, information networks or corporate organizations they all erected grids which are far past the individual scale, still, the success of such environments can be described as the production of fine tuned and well adapted coordination of individuals and far reaching in scope. The ignition of intelligent concerted action at great scales, the desire and ability to collaboratively tackle complex challenges, seems to be at the moment a well distributed human “coordination paradox” bringing to the table as if opposing perspectives of traditional hierarchy on one side and bottom-up self-organization on the other. A paradox that demands to seriously reconsider our default options in merit.

Looking at the natural world and the way life evolved on the planet, we know today that social intelligence has evolved a number of times on this planet. Communication strategies can be found replicating from the tiniest social colonies all the way to whole ecosystems, including complex entities whose numbers of active agents, scope and diversity, as well as quality of resiliency and engineering, rivals the numbers we are struggling with in our human systems. And they all have in common different forms of networks. This lecture will open a different perspective on modes of communication and collective coordination and how they manage to generate systems that are living, creative and evolving.