UCLA

All the human organizations are not governed by competition, power relationships and individual interest. Sometimes well‐meaning people willingly decide to join their forces for a common project. The success of each participant, musicians of an orchestra, members of a eight rowing boat team, or of a danse troupe, is then integrally determine by the joint success. Besides the individual qualities of each member, the common success critically depends on the ability of the organizational structure to facilitate the flow of informations and orders between participants, i.e. to synchronize their individual actions. Here, in the framework of an oversimplified mathematical modelization of the individual behavior, we investigate the synchronization properties of some typical hierarchical organizations and perform the comparison with existing ones. We show that the democratic network is the most stable one. One of our most surprising results concerns the existence of evolutionary culs‐de‐sacs, i.e. hierarchical structures that, although not optimal from the point of view synchronization, are not able to improve themselves under the effect of small perturbations.