The world needs more complex problem solvers

“We are losing the ability to understand anything that's even vaguely complex.”

― Chuck Klosterman, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto

I know that if you read one more article on Coronavirus you are going to puke. Trust me, I am only going to use it as a McGuffin because I would like to reflect on a different issue: Why we need to embrace complexity instead of fighting it, and why our world needs more people in the Complex Problem Solvers army.

And I will try to sum up the reasons we are in dire need of it, and how we can try to be of use on the times we are living.

Coronavirus as an eye-opener

Our main concern at SingularSolving as complex problem solvers ourselves, especially when we have decided to try to make a way of living out of it, it's to try to raise awareness of the importance of the matter in a world completely oblivious to it.

We recently had a pitch along with a technical Healthcare partner for a hospital in need of a cardiology interventional care room where we tried to push the issue. It made a lot of sense: All the different technology providers had similar technical proposals, and the difference had to be built on two different battlefields: Patient Experience and Complexity Management. Trust me, there are not much more complex scenarios than Healthcare and particularly cardiological interventional rooms.

Well, the pitch went completely like the proverbial ship into the night.

The issue was not even in the agenda. The concept was alien. They felt like being lectured in some abstruse, obscure art on a business school class of sorts. We are talking about doctors and the like, we are not talking about bumpkins and laymen. Their heads nodded in the same fashion that Chinese cats (Maneki-neko) wave their arms, but the concept just went through their brains without leaving a single trace behind.

Then coronavirus enters the scene.

Finally, people grasp a lot of different concepts that were completely alien to them up to that moment: circumstances that were completely unknown, situations that were completely unprecedented, things that never happened before, things that were not in the books, things that need to be orchestrated and managed because they are comprised of a lot of internal different threads happening at the same time.

And then, people become desperate.

They become completely overwhelmed by the situation. They do not understand that there is a complete discipline who deals with this kind of scenario on a regular basis. They turn to their governments, that, to no surprise to us professionals, are completely ill-prepared to deal with this kind of situation as well.

The whole discipline lies in the shadow-world.

Why we loathe complexity?

The kind of avulsion we suffer at the mere idea of complexity has its roots on different manifestations of the same basic principle: If forces us to deviate from our traced paths, from our heuristics, and we are genetically programmed to avoid that. We'll try to dwell on several coalescing facts that reinforce the overall mix of ignorance and fear that the discipline elicits.

Complicated vs. complex

First things first, people cannot grasp the difference between complicated and complex. If you check this popular question and answer website, the most voted up and considered answered are well, plain wrong.

First things first: Complicated problems or systems are 'large' but still solvable or deterministic. Complex problems or systems have emergent properties and behavior (such as self-organization) that make them non-deterministic / non-solvable, regardless of the amount of computing power available. Very simple systems can also be complex. Very complicated systems don't need to be complex. I do not want to dwell on the science now, because it has been the subject of several books on the matter and it's not the purpose of the current article. There is a good primer on complexity here if you are into dwelling on the subject.

A complicated system can range from building a cathedral, which was something basically solvable in the XIV century, to crafting and helicopter. This, despite its overwhelming nature, can definitely be done as we can notice by the amounts of working units out there.

I always use on my Complex Problem-Solving masterclasses the same example: Mr. Wolf vs Gregory House. Who is the better example of a complex problem solver??

We'll answer this later.

Our abstract love of simplicity

There is a universal appeal for decluttering and simplicity. Ranging from Marie Kondo's antics regarding how sorting out our homes would bring us happiness and peace of mind, to a complete range of new-age tinted quotes trying to demonstrate the beauty of simplicity:

“Simplicity is a bliss that makes one comprehend.”

― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“Any darn fool can make something complex; it takes a genius to make something simple.”

― Pete Seeger

“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.”

― E.F. Schumacher

I could go on for ages, as there is a trove of messages on that line, ranging from Confucious to uncountable books on self-help currently on the stands. Well, the problem is that that narrative is utter poppycock.

Problem with this narrative, apart from the lounging from much simpler halcyon days in the not so distant past, is that we start on a wrong note, from a semantic point of view. Opposite of simplicity is not complexity. It is unnecessary complexity.

Nobody wants or needs unnecessary complexity, arabesques, and filigrees when a simpler, blunter, more direct approach could resolve the matter. The problem is when the nature of the problem put on our table is complex, and there is no direct, simple, sleight of hand movement that will suddenly untie the gordian knot.

The overall disrespect about knowledge and facing difficulties

I've got a ten-year-old daughter who simply refuses to practice the kind of skills that she is not able to master at the first or second try. Call it rollerblader skating o whichever discipline that lies away from the minimum effort, the concept of needing hard work to get something going is Klingon to her. It does not help the fact that she usually grasps the concepts on the fly, with zero effort from her part.

There's nothing people loathe more than things that seem out of reach for them. And if we live in a progressively more complicated world, be sure than the kind of problems that are going to be laid on our table, are going to be more and more complicated as well. the temptation to tackle them with our cookie-cutter approaches of the past is huge.

I already had a full rant on the subject and how is making our life miserable by making us pick simpletons with ridiculous approaches to reality that cause disasters and ruin. So I lay my case to rest, your honor.

So, why are we so infatuated with simplicity?

We are so infatuated with simplicity because it offers such an easy way out of our problems. We love to believe that deeply hidden into our complex problem there lies a simple, elegant stroke of genius that will wipe out the problem in its entirety in a flash of brilliance.

Well, that happens from time to time, but it uses to be a freak accident.

Usually, complexity loves company, like misery.

Most of you are familiar with Fermat's last theorem.

From Wikipedia:

The proposition was first conjectured by Pierre de Fermat in 1637 in the margin of a copy of Arithmetica; Fermat added that he had a proof that was too large to fit in the margin. However, there were doubts that he had a correct proof because his claim was published by his son without his consent and after his death.[2] After 358 years of effort by mathematicians, the first successful proof was released in 1994 by Andrew Wiles, and formally published in 1995; it was described as a "stunning advance" in the citation for Wiles's Abel Prize award in 2016.[3] It also proved much of the modularity theorem and opened up entire new approaches to numerous other problems and mathematically powerful modularity lifting techniques.

The unsolved problem stimulated the development of algebraic number theory in the 19th century and the proof of the modularity theorem in the 20th century. It is among the most notable theorems in the history of mathematics and prior to its proof was in the Guinness Book of World Records as the "most difficult mathematical problem" in part because the theorem has the largest number of unsuccessful proofs.[4]

The true answer to Fermat's last theorem lies on the 120+ hundred pages of the solution of Andrew Wiles and his seven years of work, not in a casual effort from Fermat that could be resumed in an elegant way in the margins of a book. And in the process of solving it, it provided hundreds of useful intellectual byproducts.

But Fermat's narrative is much more pleasing to the ear. The fact that it is utter crap does not prevent it from being the better tale.

Why we must embrace complexity

Sorry to inform you, first and foremost, that there is no peace to be found in it, or some kind of esoteric soul-cleansing result in the process.

It's because, well, we have no damn viable alternative option.

I'll try to dwell on several reasons why this is so.

When the book does not give the answer

Let's get back to the Coronavirus issue:

One of the things that most analysts agree is that South Korea made an impactful response to the threat without having to go through the gruesome measures other countries have been forced to take . Some of them put the focus on how technology helped them to achieve their goals.

But I have found no significant mention of what I consider the key on how Korea tackled the problem.

I have made thousands of times the remark that technology by itself does not salve the day to anyone. It's both strategy and thinking pushing the right technological levels.

They realized that they were facing a completely new problem, erase the slate, let's start from the beginning.

We in Spain were attached to the old protocols: The ambulance, the emergency telephone, the business as usual... All of them, who are useful in normal circumstances, collapsed spectacularly under the pressure put by the new scenario. We tried to squeeze a new scenario into old processes and of course, we failed in a blaze of hysteria and complaints.

House is the real Complex Problem Solver. Mr. Wolf knows his job and it's the best performing them ("That's thirty minutes away. I'll be there in ten."). House is the one they resort to when there is no answer to be found in any book. It's the one who is functional under an "I do not know jackshit of what is happening to this patient" that renders useless to 20 years trained doctors in medicine, in Ivy League Universities.

?

Our veneration of models

“Too large a proportion of recent "mathematical" economics are mere concoctions, as imprecise as the initial assumptions they rest on, which allow the author to lose sight of the complexities and interdependencies of the real world in a maze of pretentious and unhelpful symbols.”

― John Maynard Keynes

Speaking about narratives we love, there is one we particularly embrace without hesitation, especially in modern times: The absurd faith we have in models and algorithms as non-biased objective judges of all realities.

This is so completely and utterly false that I don't know where to start. Maybe I would like to start with Houllebecq's statement, "the map is not the territory" point.

Reality is that algorithms tend to have a double bias on them: First the bias on the person who wrote it and second the limitations of representation of reality. Most of us who have had to study Physics at some point in our career know the spherical cow joke, the fact that in order to make manageable several physical reality models, we have to make absurd oversimplifications. The same thing happens with economics, the same thing happens with a lot of things that we think they are being handled properly and that could be either ridiculously simple or biased and botched beyond any kind of redemption.

When we willfully ignore how Facebook's algorithm work, how Google profile us, how Yuval Harari has mentioned the dangerous allure of Dataism, we make it at our own peril.

Anyone mentioned the recently dumped Boris Johnson contagion algorithm?? It was supposed to be a "data-driven brilliant decision" and instead it was a Malthusian contaminated biased decision, as my colleague Benjamin Suarez pointed out.

Inertias and why we must overcome them

“Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.”

― G. Michael Hopf, Those Who Remain

We love heuristics to a point that we take constantly bad decisions because as soon as the brain locates a pattern he can apply a previously used solution, he jumps over it like a pouncing tiger. Thousands of years of trying to save energy on the biggest energy spender of all (our brain) has made us addicted to heuristics, shortcuts, and cookie-cutting.

Consultancy is based on this whole principle, and that's why we think it's bound to be extinguished. But that belongs to another article altogether, even if we hinted it some time ago.

That's why you never should expect solutions from bureaucrats and apparatchiks. Bureaucrats and apparatchiks are useful at 80% of circumstances when you have to run through the motions and keep track of what is going on. But when exceptional circumstances hit, they are completely useless. In fact, they are harmful, as they insist on trying to apply their bloodless approaches, usually involving obscuring the truth and trying to prevent people to run into a panic, to issues that demand everyone to be informed properly about then, and decisive, reflexive, strategic action to be taken.

I suppose most o you are familiar with the Chamberlain approach to Hitler's menace (Appeasement). Or the lukewarm response that Lagarde made to Coronavirus threat to UE economy.

This trend is so overbearing that usually only way to overcome inertias is by means of a desperate situation or a catastrophe. Back to the coronavirus.

Think of the abandoned cities in ancient Egypt, because some catastrophe changed the course of a river. Or take the example of Baelo Claudia in Cádiz, Spain, a city that was abandoned due to a tsunami produced very likely from an earthquake located in the Atlantic Sea.

Our brain needs to be exposed to a catastrophic scenario before it can override its centuries of energy saving programming.

How do we process catastrophes and the blame game

Let's see which is the process we go through when we try to process a catastrophe, with several different stages we go through

All the text comes from "The ISIS Agreement: How Sustainability Can Improve Organizational Performance and Transform the World" by Alan Atkisson. And it is a reflection on what happened in New Orleans with the Katrina massacre. But can be applied to any catastrophe derived from a set of complex circumstances.

First of all, we face the reality of complex, no easy to do, finger-pointing. Our brains have been triggered, we need a culprit. And suddenly, we notice that our finger cannot point anything but puffs of smoke.

Some questions may ultimately be unanswerable. Yet they must be considered if we are going to clarify our thinking and prevent future tragedies and heal current ones. And in all such enquiries, we must recall that blame and responsibility are not the same thing. It could be that the forces at work were somehow unavoidable, and that no one is to blame; but if no one is responsible, willing to respond, then change becomes impossible.

Second, our own biases kick in. The politics, the oligarchs, the leftists, the right-wingers, the church, the state... the powers from above, the Illuminati and the freemasons.

For many, the quick-and-easy answer to questions in the form of 'Who did it?' is 'They did it' — where 'they' means vaguely the government, or some subset of the ruling economic elites, or the'vested interests', or the desperate poor, or plain old outlaws, or some combination of these. Sometimes the answer one hears is 'We did it' — meaning that we all vaguely share responsibility for tragedies by allowing them to happen, or even just witnessing them, even if we feel powerless to stop them.

Third, the truth comes with a kick in the teeth. We watch in desperation the tangled web of complexity underlying most issues that are not trivial.

But neither assigning blame to a shadowy 'they' nor taking the burden of responsibility onto the shoulders of a formless 'we' helps us to understand anything, especially when the story is complicated — as it was in New Orleans, and as it is in the general case of the world's headlong rush towards unsustain- ability. There are so many factors at play. And serious attempts to map out those factors usually produce the visual equivalent of a plate of spaghetti, composed of tangled strands of human psychology, policy, institutional behaviour, market dynamics and technical infrastructure, coupled to unpredictable natural or human events. To answer a question like 'Who killed New Orleans?' you first have to expand the question to include what, why and how. Soon, it becomes clear that whatever the answer is, it is definitely not simple.

The key here is, plenty of people never cross the first hurdle, let alone the second. Once the brain rests in peace of mind, we find it normally bothersome to reach the final conclusions of what happened, pushes us into uncomfortable positions and admitting our own limitations. Never a popular song at the local jukebox.

Conclusion

“Abandon the urge to simplify everything, to look for formulas and easy answers, and to begin to think multidimensionally, to glory in the mystery and paradoxes of life, not to be dismayed by the multitude of causes and consequences that are inherent in each experience -- to appreciate the fact that life is complex.”

― M. Scott Peck

We could go on this forever. For example, this is a wonderful article linking strategy and complexity in the wake of the early 2000's struggle of Microsoft Office fighting dominance on the field of Business Apps.

There is simply no way to escape the one-two punch of complexity and strategy in XXI century business.

Aim high, push boundaries and make things happen. Do not be overwhelmed by the fact that your shoulders seem to crumble under the initial pressure. Clench your teeth, bear the initial pain, and you will be much more prepared to face not only coronavirus but all the wicked problems that the XXI century is going to throw your way, in curveball fashion.

Be strong and survive. Be brave. Embrace complexity.