There's nothing magical about classification, or even autoclassification for that matter. It's merely the ability to be relatively accurate in a dynamically responsive fashion so that you can read and react to complex situations as they happen, thus keeping them simple-unlike this sentence.

In this article, I want to call your attention to the way nature uses classification in order to simplify complexity. For many of you who are overloaded by email, documents, communications, and meetings, perhaps you'll begin to see some light at the end of the tunnel. By following nature's example, there's hope you can actually simplify the complexity in which you find yourself immersed.

InfoGlut: when too much of a good thing becomes a big problem
The Internet emits a plethora of information from a multitude of systems designed to dump unclassified information at your feet. It's a remnant of the Information Society when information was perceived as power, before we got too much of a good thing and it became InfoGlut. InfoGlut keeps you knee-deep in data, up to your ears drowning in information and starving for knowledge.

As a result, it becomes nearly impossible for you to read and react with confidence in order to make important decisions on a daily basis. You need only recall your last Internet search to envision what I mean. It probably returned thousands of irrelevant documents because you used a free text search that removed or freed words from their natural context. It is their natural context, however, that defines the meaning of words.

Creating simplicity through the Sameness Operator
Computer scientists are developing ways to classify complex problems into simple problems using autoclassification. Where do they look for guidance? In nature, of course!

Nature clusters unordered items by using what I call the Sameness Operator, otherwise known as common context. The Sameness Operator groups items by their likenesses, collecting groups into successively stronger groups based on similarity of usage.

Species in nature must be dynamically adaptive, as Charles Darwin pointed out in his seminal work, Origin of Species. If animals were not adaptive, they wouldn't survive. In order to be adaptive, animals instinctively use the Sameness Operator. This simplification method allows species to read and react in such a way as to leverage nature. Therefore, they are not overloaded and overwhelmed by InfoGlut that's left unordered and unharnessed.

If unordered and unharnessed InfoGlut begins to sound a bit like your workday, then this is no coincidence.