Synchronization is an example of positive feedback. Essentially, each fire fly is gradually conforming to its own echo. Feedback loops can also be negative and balancing. Negative and positive feedback loops are called reinforcing feedback. They tend to move a system to growth, decay, and imbalance. Balancing feedback loops tend to keep the system in an equilibrium state.
Like organisms, it also makes sense to talk about the fitness and evolution of organizations. The fitness of an organization might be measured by its profitability, value, share price, etc.
Unlike natural systems, organizations are engineered and hierarchically managed.
Faced with stagnant or declining fitness, a manager selects a strategy. The strategy may work for a while, but the problem comes back, often worse than before. In his book The Fifth Discipline, Peter Senge identifies several traps or anti-patterns (he calls them archetypes) that organizations can fall into. These anti-patterns can be regarded as attractors in the organization's state space. These are discussed here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_archetype
Agents share a common resource. For example, cows share a pasture. The more the agents take of the resource, the more their fitness increases. Therefore, the optimal strategy each agent pursues is the greedy strategy: take as much as possible. However, as the shared resource becomes depleted, agents much work harder for less gain. Eventually the resource is depleted. We saw this in the Altruistic Cows model.
Agent/Organization 1 feels threatened by agent/organization 2, and therefore increases its defenses. This makes agent/organization 2 feel threatened, so they increase their defenses, and the cycle repeats.