by Ali Anani and Bas de Baar

In Fish And OODA Loops we introduced fish schooling as an important part of the Fish Pond Metaphor. Schooling mimics human tendency to organize and view our selves in groups of people. This leaves the question of how individual fish operate within a school resulting in one organic adaptive entity? Our preliminary answer is the topic of this posting.

Photography by Mr. Bologna

When fish pack together in a school their movements are tightly coordinated without one central fish giving orders. The school can make very sharp turns adapting to any threat in the environment. Speed is of essence. Be slow and you are dead. The fish on the outside of the school sense the threats. If enough outside fish make a certain turn the rest follows automatically.

Tightly packed bundles of protruding hairs, called a neuromasts, encased in a jelly-like sheath, are scattered around the head and body. Most are concentrated in two canals along the sides of the fish called lateral lines, which run from the head to the base of the tail. With the slightest change in pressure, the tiny hairs bend. The fish senses the movement of the objects around it, and quickly responds. (source)

The faster information is transferred through the whole school, the better its adaption. However, this is not the entire story. If the fish act upon any piece of information that hits their body the movement of the school gets slow and slight chaotic. By focusing mainly on the fish in front of them, you get this tightly packed movement. The fish seem to swim upstream the information flow.

As a result, the macroscopic behaviour of a school, such as its steering behaviour, is closely related to the transmission of information within the school … In particular, a sharp turn due to the synchronized movements of a majority of individuals in the school is related to the tendency of an individual to receive information about its neighbours mainly in front of it. This kind of synchronized movement is easily observed in natural fish schools such as sardines or herring. Their synchronous behaviour sometimes gives the illusion of a single large organism, which is said to be a defence strategy against attack from predators … Individuals in natural fish schools tend to follow the motion of their front neighbours, a tendency called front-priority … This front-priority tendency means that individuals in natural fish schools tend to receive information from their front neighbours. (source)

Instead of looking at information as some kind of package that is lying around somewhere, we have to view information as a stream.

We have to view information as a flow rather than as a thing. Online learning is a flow. Its like electricity or water. Its there, its available and it flows. Its not stuff you collect. I dont see myself sitting in my home collecting jars of water. I use the water as it comes. If you think the internet as an environment that is moving and shaping all around you, then you will have a better attitude to be able to handle the flood of information that is coming at you (source)

The constant flow of information is dripping and feeding the OODA loop. If not enough information is flowing in, the image of the environment is incomplete. If too much information is entering the loop one drowns in an overload of information. And finally, the quality of the flow is important to our adaption skills. Poor or false information can be even more destructive than no data at all.