If we take the ideas behind The Sims to a more office like situation, consider the following situation where person A and B, or Bert and Ernie, influence each other. Bert's Recognitions-level is way down; he doesnt feel any recognition at all on his job, so his goal becomes "Getting Recognition". Bert in his mind has three possible strategies which all revolve around just getting attention (as he gets no feedback at all he is dying for any attention at all):

• Passive: doing nothing, see if anyone reacts;
• Aggressive: full force complaining and bitching;
• Escape: doing completely something else that delivers some kind of recognition.

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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

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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.
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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)

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Whatever your take is on projects, at the end of the day it is just a bunch of people working together to achieve a certain goal. During this endeavor to laugh, cry, pull pranks, play dirty tricks and have all other kind of behavior towards each other. If you are lucky they even work to reach the final goal. If you take everything away, and put people in the center of what a "project" is, you will see a group of stakeholders interacting with each other, just like any other group of people would do.

Just to make things easier on our lives, we call the result of all this behavior "the project". In this sense it is nothing more than an abstraction. If we say "the project is late", this doesn't mean that some creature or entity from outer space showed up later than expected; it is the result of the project people working together that wasn't finished on the time we predicted.
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When I got my first class on computer networks, I was hooked. I loved the idea of small packets of information hopping from one computer to another. Amazed about how the information always seemed to arrive at the right spot, even if there were a gazillion computers connected, like on the Internet. Although I never worked in that particular field of information technology, I still remember an important lesson from the routing-algorithms that could be used. To find out which way another computer was located within the network, you can use one single computer as the main guide; that host has all the data needed to locate the computer you want to send your information package to.

This sound very effective at first, and it even is, if not too many PCs and mainframes are connected to the network. However, when you are thinking about the Internet, forget it. The information is just too much, and always outdated if you try to have a single map of the net. You have also a single point of failure in this scenario. If this one computer crashes, not one package will arrive at its destination. In search for alternatives, my mind was fixed on needing a map of the network. As it turned out, you can also have algorithms without the need for a image of the entire network; if you get a data package, you just give it to a computer you are connected with, and that accepts it the fastest. I never forget the new: the hot-potato-algorithm. After a while, the package will end if with its destination.
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