Living in Complex Times - A Quick Investigation into the Problem and Opportunity of Complexity

For the last 8 years or so I have been in a field of work that I've always found difficult to explain. Maybe I'm just making it harder and (almost certainly) more long winded than it needs to be. When I say "I'm part of team called 'The Difference' and I help groups of people work together to tap into their collective intelligence and apply it to complex problems", I usually get glazed looks or a barrage of questions - oh to be able to say 'I'm a carpenter' or 'I'm a doctor' and having people just immediately get it.

I guess at the heart of what I get to do is helping people explore and engage with the problem and opportunity of complexity, whether that be in their project, organisation, industry or even their relationship and influence on society and the world at large. I am definitely not an expert on complexity, but I have grown to appreciate that it is often to our peril that we ignore the complexity inherent in so many of the challenges facing our organisations, communities and world today.

The goal of our work is to tap into and attempt to unlock the ‘group genius’ needed to tackle the ‘wicked’ problems that exist, whether that be on a local scale or those with global scope and scale. The methodology we employ to this end is heavily influenced by the work of Matt and Gail Taylor (who began it in the 1970's). It is an ever evolving beast, it's more like a living organism than a static set of doctrines and has potential for new and interesting contributions from the many different experiences , disciplines and methodologies we bring to the table.

So, all that being said and given the many complex issues currently dominating the headlines at the moment, I thought it might be valuable to share some thoughts on complexity and how it relates to our work that I penned a few years ago when exploring with my team the exciting and often frustrating territory we often find ourselves in.

Complexity as a problem

To put it simply, our approach grew in response to the observation that change was accelerating, complexity was increasing and that this creates problems (often called ‘wicked’ problems) that organisations were ill equipped to properly address - in fact, their ability was declining.

The problem with complexity is that any actions taken within a complex system often have unintended consequences that are difficult to fully perceive or link to causes. This means that if there is to be any hope of making progress on a ‘wicked’ problem, it is necessary to look at it from a wide variety of vantage points at various levels of recursion* 

This is a VERY difficult task for any one person (see:impossible), but if we are to avoid the “unintended consequences of applying inadequately-designed, over-simplified solutions to complex, systemic problems” then it is necessary to tap into the collective intelligence of a diverse group of smart people within and across organisations. As the saying goes “All of us are smarter than any of us” (widely attributed to Carl Sandburg) 

Complexity as an opportunity

It may, however, be helpful to ensure our thinking is not limited to seeing complexity as a problem to be solved, but also as a huge source of opportunity to be engaged with and, perhaps, embraced.

This whole topic is an interesting one, and as you could imagine, is a bit like an Alice in Wonderland rabbit hole that has the potential to turn many of our assumptions about how the world works on it’s head. It’s also something we all directly experience and deal with in our day to day lives, so it’s important that we think about it!

Peter Senge uses a great analogy (see ‘navigating webs of interdependence’  video link below) by asking the question “Are you part of a family? Have you ever seen people in a family produce consequences through how they feel and act, that aren’t what anybody intends?” This is something we can all relate to and can help us begin to get a picture of the complexity of interactions that exist within a complex system.

More often than not our human attempts at imposed hierarchical ‘order’ are woefully inadequate to handle the complexity that exists in reality, and whilst it can be good at efficiently reproducing known outcomes, this ‘efficiency’ usually comes with a host of unintended consequences. In contrast, nature not only ‘deals with’ complexity, but in many ways complexity is fundamental to the apparent ‘order’ that we see in the natural world and there is a lot we can learn from it.

The more I dig into this topic the more I realize I can’t even begin to scratch the surface in a short article, but like it or lump it, complexity is and always will be a part of the world we live in. So here is an attempt to introduce SOME of the big ideas around complexity theory that might be able to enlighten your own investigation.

The Interconnectedness of Things and the Emergence of Spontaneous Order

Consistently in the study of complex systems, the emergence of patterns and ‘spontaneous’ order occurs. I’m not even going to begin to try explain this one, other than that the emergence of large scale ‘order’ is often a product of the cumulative effect of lot’s of small, simple interactions between the different elements that make up the whole.

Diversity and Resilience

This is the idea that in nature (and indeed any complex organization), the more biodiversity exists in an ecosystem, the more flexible, resilient and adaptive that ecosystem is in response to changes and stresses. Conversely, ‘monocultures’ or ecosystems with low diversity, are extremely vulnerable to changes and stresses.

The Law of Requisite Variety – (Key Thinkers: Ross Ashby, Stafford Beer)

This is a complicated one, but it is basically the idea that the more variety a system needs to deal with, the more variety is needed within the system for it be able to effectively respond.

Learn or Die!

One of the more interesting things I have come across is the assertion that the ability of any organisation to deal with complexity is directly related to its ability to learn as a system. This means that if we hope to even attempt to navigate the complex world we live in (let alone help anyone else to!), it is vitally important that we KEEP ON LEARNING and make it a priority and fundamental pillar of the way we work and be in the world.

Peter Senge in his book ‘The Fifth Discipline’ describes 5 major features of learning organisations:

Shared Vision - ‘What do we want to create together?’

Mental Models - Uncovering the deep-seated beliefs, values, mind-sets and assumptions that determine the way people think and act.

Personal Mastery - How much we know about ourselves and the impact our behavior has on others

Team Learning - Sharing our experience, insights, knowledge and skills with each other to do things better

Systems Thinking - a framework for seeing inter-relationships that underlie complex situations and interactions rather than simplistic (and mostly inaccurate) linear cause-effect chains.

(I’ve provided some links to some quick overviews of Peter Senge’s thinking below that are really helpful.)

 As I said earlier, I am no expert on the topic and there is so much more to learn and observe, but hopefully this is a helpful prod to think about the problems and opportunities that exist within complexity!

Some questions for reflection:

• How does your experience of family highlight how unintended outcomes can arise within a complex system?
• Where have you observed or experienced order develop spontaneously?
• Can complexity be simplified?
• Are complex and complicated the same thing?
• What can we learn from natural systems? How can this apply to the work we do?

*This is a definition of recursion I found that is often used in computer science and data systems: Recursion is a method of solving problems that involves breaking a problem down into smaller and smaller subproblems until you get to a small enough problem that it can be solved trivially. Usually recursion involves a function calling itself. While it may not seem like much on the surface, recursion allows us to write elegant solutions to problems that may otherwise be very difficult to program. (https://interactivepython.org/courselib/static/pythonds/Recursion/recursionsimple.html)

A simple way to think about recursion could simply be the question “But Why?”

Further exploration:

The Interconnectedness of Things and the Emergence of Spontaneous Order

 Eric Berlow – Simplifying Complexity *HIGHLY RECOMMENDED *

Nicolas Perony – Puppies! Now that I’ve got your attention, complexity theory:

Johan Rockstrom – Let the environment guide our development

Steve Lansig: Resilience: What is a complex systems approach?

Louie Gardiner using the Landscape Diagram to describe emergence:

TEDxRotterdam - Igor Nikolic - Complex adaptive systems

 Kevin Kelly – Out of Control

Starling Murmuration (start at 21 seconds)

 Diversity and Resilience

 Biodiversity and Monocultures:

 Wolves in Yellowstone

 The Law of Requisite Variety – (Key Thinkers: Ross Ashby, Stafford Beer)

https://requisitevariety.co.uk/what-is-requisite-variety/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDRudRhNgy4

https://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/REQVAR.html

https://www.dubberly.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/01/2_requisite_variety.jpg

https://www.panarchy.org/ashby/variety.1956.html

 Learn or Die!

 Peter Senge - Navigating webs of interdependence *HIGHLY RECOMMENDED *

 The Fifth Discipline – by Peter Senge

Sir Ken Robinson – Escaping Educations Death Valley

Other interesting stuff

Rate of Change Model

Vantage points model

Carl Sandburg 

The Zone of Emergence model (Matt Taylor)

Living Systems (start it at 4:21 if you want to get past the preamble)