Spontaneous self-organization is ubiquitous in Nature and it is Nature’s own potentiality for bringing about order out of apparent chaos. Stimulated self-organization is when human intervention aids Nature in her work of self-organization. Obviously, stimulated self-organization can happen in both positive and negative modes, positive when it enhances and negative when it diminishes Nature’s strivings. One of the simplest examples of this is in chemical reactions especially in metallurgy wherein by studying the Gibbs free energy that is a balance between energy and entropy, one gives a definite direction to the chemical reactions. But this example is too simplistic to merit the name. Stimulated self-organization really makes itself felt in the more complex domains of human endeavour like education, management, strategy, and most human disciplines.
In my own work on education, I was impelled to invent this term to distinguish all classes of human intervention that dramatically enhanced Nature’s self-organization to a phenomenal degree. Perhaps a concrete example suffices to illustrate this. In our work on education at CFRCE, we have been involved in a unique and singular phenomena, that of initiating school and college students directly into frontier research in an extremely short period of time, consistently, year after year utterly contradicting conventional ideas and methods of education. The methodology that we have been using completely justifies the fact that it is possible only by aiding Nature’s nurture. If not, our work would appear as an unusually magical and miraculous. As I always like to point out, what is really magical and miraculous has more to do with the tremendous human potential lying untapped by conventional education. Any method that unleashes this potential is bound to achieve results that border on the spectacular. And stimulated self-organization is the key to that.