Every once in a while, I am blindsided by a powerful idea I have never encountered before. I am surprised on two levels: first, I’m surprised by the torque of the idea, and second, I’m astonished that I hadn’t encountered the idea before. This happened to me today.

Adrian Bejan is a well-regarded professor at Duke, whose background is mechanical engineering. However, Bejan is known for advancing an idea and presenting it as a universal law of physics, one that cuts across all disciplines. He’s no crackpot: his idea — the Constructal law — is widely discussed, and has gained him wide acclaim.

From Wikipedia:

The constructal law was stated by Adrian Bejan in 1996 as follows: “For a finite-size system to persist in time (to live), it must evolve in such a way that it provides easier access to the imposed currents that flow through it.”

“Constructal” is a word coined by Adrian Bejan, coming from the Latin verb construere, to construct, in order to designate the natural tendency of flow system (rivers, trees and branches, lungs, tectonic plates and also the engineered forms to morph in a constructal evolutionary process toward greater and greater flow access over time.

The skinny is that Bejan has proposed something like the laws of thermodynamics, a basic maxim that says that systems are changed over time by the flows within them, and they tend to evolve toward forms that will make the flows more efficient.

In his book on the subject, Design in Nature, he uses examples from biology, physics, technology, and social organizations. His basic explanation is this:

Everything that moves, whether animate or inanimate, is a flow system. All flow systems generate shape and structure in time in order to facilitate this movement across a landscape filled with resistance (for example, friction). The designs we see in nature are not the result of chance. They arise naturally, spontaneously, because they enhance access to flow in time. Flow systems have two basic features (properties). There is the current that is flowing (for example, fluid, heat, mass, or information) and the design through which it flows. A lightning bolt, for example, is a flow system for discharging electricity from a cloud. In a flash it creates a brilliant branched structure because this is a very efficient way to move a current (electricity) from a volume (the cloud) to a point (the church steeple or another cloud). A river basin’s evolution produces a similar architecture because it, too, is moving a current (water) from an area (the plain) to a point (the river mouth). We also find a treelike structure in the air passages of lungs (a flow system for oxygen), in the capillaries (a flow system for blood), and the dendrites of neurons in our brains (a flow system for electrical signals and images). This treelike pattern emerges throughout nature because it is an effective design for facilitating point-to-area and area-to-point flows. Indeed, wherever you find such flows, you find a treelike structure.

Since human beings are part of nature and governed by its laws, the point-to-area and area-to-point flows we construct also tend to have treelike structures. These include the transportation routes we follow to work (a flow system for moving people and goods), which include many smaller driveways and neighborhood paths flowing into a few larger roads and highways. So, too, do the flowing networks of information, material, employees, and customers that keep those businesses afloat. The engineered world we have built so that we can move more easily does not copy any part of the natural design; it is a manifestation of it. That said, once we know the principle, we can use it to improve our designs.

To hear his thoughts about social organizations I bought a Kindle version of that work today, and I need to work through it. But as just an example, here’s one comment that lines up with things that I’ve been saying about information streams in social networks for years:

The constructal law captures the broad tendency of social organizations to construct evolving flow systems that enable people and their goods to move more easily, more cheaply. This is not human desire. It is physics.

However, Bejan seems to interpret the tree-like nature of constructal forms as a general support of hierarchy is in social organizations. However, I am betting that this is a simplification of push and pull models of social information flow.

My observation, so far, having only glanced at a few sections, is that we could interpret the transition from traditional, top-down, push-centric flows of pre-social business to the lateral, pull-centric flows of social business as a stated change, a major evolutionary step in organizational dynamics, one made possible by the rise of the web and social tools.

More to follow.