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Madness

Published March 19th, 2007 in Emergence and Branding.

I was watching North Dakota take on Minnesota in the WCHA Final Five championship game last weekend (an unbelievable game, btw) and it reminded me of the other NCAA tournament going on at the moment. Yes, that one. The one that is overshadowing all other sports at the moment, including kick-ass college hockey as well as an intense NHL playoff race, but I digress…

While I personally can’t seem to get into March Madness, I do have to marvel at the sheer amount of complexity it generates. First of all you have the ranking system that determines who gets into the tournament. Like other college ranking systems it includes both statistics and speculation, although it’s much easier to understand than the BCS ranking system which is halfway between differential calculus and voodoo.

I was watching North Dakota take on Minnesota (hey there, Doug Woog!) in the WCHA Final Five championship game and it reminded me of the other NCAA tournament going on at the moment. Yes, that one. The one that is overshadowing all other sports at the moment, including some kick-ass college hockey as well as an intense NHL playoff race, but I digress…

March Madness is, as the name implies, maddening, and it is a perfect example of complexity and emergent behavior. To start, there is the game of basketball (or any sport for that matter) which is a complex mix of rules, playing systems, physical skill and emotion. Games can hinge on an individual performance, a bad call by the referee, or the psychological effect of having a home crowd. Then there is the tournament itself, which is complex in its sheer number of possible outcomes: 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 (or 2 to the power of 64 for the mathematically disinclined). On paper, you would have a FAR better chance of winning the lottery - 1 in 80,089,128 for the US Powerball - than predicting the outcome of the “Big Dance.” Feeling overwhelmed?

Yet, this impossibly dense environment of complexity spawns highly emergent behavior. The creation of office betting pools is the most recognized example of emergence. Each office pool is a network of individuals, all playing games on top of games - it is a system formed by a system, and it is influenced dynamically and in real-time. In addition, local economies are established within these office pools to handle betting and/or any side wagers. Rituals and traditions are often established among the people participating, both individually and as a group. Every year one of my co-workers brings in his little portable black and white TV each day of the tournament even though he fills out brackets and gets updates online. Now, even though it just takes up desk space, he sticks to his tradition year after year.

Why do people around the country form office pools? Given the odds, shouldn’t predicting the outcome of the tournament be an exercise in futility, a fools errand?

People expect serendipitous phenomena. We expect upsets, Cinderella stories, big wins, and close calls. When we are confronted with a complex system like the tournament, we look for conditions where these phenomena are likely to occur. Our intuitive ability to think this way gives people who can easily recognize favorable conditions a competitive advantage.

More importantly, people desire serendipitous phenomena. This is what generates responsive emergent behavior in the form of things like office pools. If there weren’t any Cinderella stories, there wouldn’t be betting against each other to predict the outcome - it would be too predictable. A certain amount of noise (risk/unpredictability) in the system is, in fact, highly desirable.

So how does this relate to branding, design and aesthetics? March Madness should teach us that complexity is a good thing, and that it can generate emergent behavior and serendipitous phenomena. Indeed, since it happens every year, March Madness should show us that complexity and emergence are not simply random states and they can be effectively managed - not micromanaged, but cultivated, influenced, and adjusted to varying degrees. For example, the NCAA cannot condone or encourage betting on the tournament, but you don’t see them actively discouraging it (beyond within the teams themselves), do you? The NCAA also has some control over the initial bracketing of the tournament, giving them the ability to seed the system favorably.

Brands should not fear complexity, for it has the ability to lead to strong emergence. A website where people post their stupid videos gets bought for a billion dollars. A posterized image of Andre the Giant becomes the icon for an entire subculture. A 30-second commercial about a caveman spawns a TV series. A Cinderella team makes it to the Final Four.

All because of Madness.

Links:
Top 10 Sweet 16 Upsets Since 1996
Betting on March Madness
March Mathness: fun facts on college basketball from the world of numbers

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