Introduction
Turing Meta exists because of the basic insight that businesses and organisms are not that different. They both learn, grow and adapt, face the problems of uncertain conditions, and changing environments and ecosystems.
This insight is familiar to complexity science, a cross-disciplinary research program that has been progressing since the mid-1980s, leveraging the emergence of computational methods to simulate complex systems, across biology and economics.
Turing Meta has built on the basic insight from complexity science with the further insight, that if we want to deliver on making management of business a science, we must learn from Nature, where biological organisms face the same problems, and apply the solutions that are empirically proven to work in Nature, to business.
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Business Knowhow & Experience
Uniquely, Turing Meta takes this advanced research and combines it with over 25 years of experience working in the commercial sector in a wide variety of industries, ensuring that any academic insights are actually relevant and applicable to the real world of business.
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Turing Meta now allows businesses to benefit from research from the last revolutionary decade in complexity science and biology to solve basic business challenges:
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how to formulate metrics & evidence-based decisions to help achieve sustainable growth,
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how to design metrics which help to organise for adaptation,
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how to manage risk in complex environments.
The work by Turing Meta, informed and inspired by the research program of the Santa Fe Institute, and the work of the Biomimicry Institute, uses this experience to deliver practical steps and valuable insight to improve the management of your business. These practical steps are driven by better metrics with a better-informed theory of management of decisions around those metrics.
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This Turing Meta website showcases articles explaining how businesses can benefit from these insights, and provides knowledge and materials that support the consultancy, led by the Director and Founder, Adam Timlett.
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About the Research
The research feeding into Turing Meta’s consultancy follows prior work by the founder of giving talks to biology departments and to the general public at leading universities such as UCL, KCL, and Cardiff University, many of which are recorded on this website.
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As a result of this work, since 2018, original research carried out exclusively by Turing Meta on the science of adaptation and complex systems has also been subject to expert feedback from senior professional researchers at KCL, UCL, and Imperial College, and has depended on a close and detailed analysis of a significant portion of the relevant biological and heterodox economics literature.
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About the name Turing Meta
The name Turing Meta references the British mathematician Alan Turing, one of the founders of computer theory, the theory that makes modern computing possible. Turing was also the inventor of the concept of Turing Patterns, a mathematical model of how biomolecules can form patterns, such as the stripes of a zebra, or the spots of a leopard, despite having no overall plan.
The original idea for Turing Meta came about after the founder's participation in ‘Computation by Natural Systems’, a 2-day Royal Society residential conference during the Spring of 2018.
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Before the advent of computers, computation merely described the work of calculation, and was done by humans. Turing Meta is about the idea of studying work in all its senses, whether done by humans, organisms or machines.
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​About the art
Innovation and creativity is a constant theme in this research and the website features the unique creative talents of James Robert White. You can find out more about the artistic collaboration on the 'About the Art' page.
James' own website is www.jamesrobertwhiteart.com
