Everything is deeply intertwingled.
— Ted Nelson
Remember when we discovered systems thinking? All those amazing feedback loops and flows; finally, a way to grok that the system really is more than the sum of its parts. Well, complexity thinking takes the fun a few steps out into the wild blue yonder. It builds on those systems insights. But instead of painting images of thermostats and other mechanical gizmos, it dwells on slime molds, weather patterns, ants, immune systems and whirlpools. The feel of it – oh joy – is organic, organismic. It leads us away from machine-based thought patterns that have dominated civilized intellectual landscape for centuries. No more clockwork universes for you and me, thank you very much!
Complexity thinking emerged from non-linear mathematics. In practice, it means stepping out of the framework of linear continuity and smoothness, and entering the world of discontinuities and sudden transformations. A particularly endearing concept is the phase shift. Picture a brook babbling along while the temperature drops. Nothing to see here, just water, right? Then all of a sudden, what was swirling fluid turns into hard, crunchy ‘glass.’ A phase shift just occurred – an unexpected reconfiguration, sometimes a fundamental leap or an evolutionary breakthrough. Phase shifts are not intuitively apparent. Would a tribesman raised deep in the Amazon ever anticipate ice? And this is one of the reasons doom no longer makes sense to me. The daunting, dreadful, suicidal sameness we see all around us holds the potential for an astonishing transformation, a radical reordering of what was there before.
Often, it is a tiny nudge that leads the system to such a shift. This phenomenon is called the ‘butterfly effect.’ As the saying goes, a butterfly flapping its wings in China may precipitate a windstorm in Kansas. Discovered by a mathematician who was studying weather patterns, butterfly effect simulations were instrumental in convincing the scientific community that accurate long term weather forecasts were not possible. Translation: what each one of us does to coax out a better world can have a huge and surprising impact down the line; moreover, it’s not something opponents of such changes can foresee or prepare for.
Complexity thinking explores new metaphors and intimations that are remarkably friendly to the new political and social consciousness just now being born. Take self-organization, for example. Self-organization — the ability to emerge structures without anyone actually in charge — is the default behavior of complex adaptive systems. In other words, life knows how to organize from within and will do so if left to its own devices. Hey, the anarchists have been right all along! And even better: complex systems show that entirely local behaviors generate global patterns and structures (global in this case meaning systemic, overall). As researchers say about social animals, “they think locally and act locally, but their collective action produces global behavior.” If slime molds can do it, surely humans might?
When individuals in a group are able to respond collectively to changes in circumstances, the group becomes a complex adaptive system. Life, as a complex adaptive system, happens ‘at the edge of chaos.’ This is the fertile space lying between rigid order and randomness. Organisms move back and forth within that space, avoiding the trap of going too far in either direction. There appears to be a force that attracts the living forms to that in-between space where they can flourish. Such a force, such a “lure” – a point or region to which a system is drawn – is appropriately enough called an attractor.
Systems thinking has one major weakness: a fixation on goals. After all, machines are always designed with a definitive purpose in mind. Life, not so much. So complexity thinkers talk of strange attractors instead. These are potential end-states that themselves emerge from the present, and cannot be either predicted or pre-set, much less arrived at by stepwise design. I will return to this welcome insight in a series on unplanning.
There are other intriguing areas to explore that impinge on complexity thinking. Here’s a sampler: fuzzy logic, game theory, self-similarity (fractals), chaos theory, tipping points, coherence, stigmergy, criticality, small worlds, circular causation. In addition, complexity theory has been making inroads into the bleak landscapes of “management” and corporate restructuring, scaring the crap out of ladder-climbing sycophants hungry for their slice of the power pie. The cat is out of the bag: complex systems, sorry, cannot be controlled. Be still, my beating heart — is the myth of heroic managerial prowess nearing the dustbin of history? As the tide of complexity thinking rolls in, the beach is washed clean of the sandcastles of the control freaks. Complexity science is painting the mustache on the boss. Who woulda thunk?
But enough candy for today. Have some broccoli fractals. Tasty!
Leaving Babylon 
January 14, 2012 at 12:46 pm
…and there certainly seems to be enough strange attractors floating around these days, to ensure something comes from the growing chaos I see around me.
January 14, 2012 at 6:12 pm
“When individuals in a group are able to respond collectively to changes in circumstances, the group becomes a complex adaptive system. Life, as a complex adaptive system, happens ‘at the edge of chaos.’ ” reminds me of various things from the Business General (and from another thing I can’t find – about how well-trained groups can innovate. It might be from Rob Paterson’s comment of a recent post of mine… Here’s the Business General quote, about Dynamic Manoeuvre:
“The principle components of Dynamic Manoeuvre are that:
The leadership shows creativity, originality and surprise in setting the goals and objectives of the organisation. Just settling for doing the same thing slightly better is never considered good enough.
Dynamic Manoeuvre must be understood and practised at all levels of leadership.
The leadership is constantly open to finding an unconventional or unexpected route to financial success, by maximising surprise and innovation, such as moving into an entirely new business field or market.
The organisation is able to operate its decision-making processes faster than any of the competition
– and fast enough to keep ahead of the market and other key variables. Once a decision is made, it is implemented swiftly and fully by a fully briefed and engaged workforce.
All levels of the organisation are encouraged to contribute to finding new, innovative and intelligent ways of boosting the organisation and its activities. From the CEO to the most junior employee, each person looks at what they have been asked to do and tries to find a better way of achieving the desired effect.
All possible lessons are learnt from past successes and failures and faithfully employed in future activities.
Page 236-7
January 15, 2012 at 6:27 am
“A phase shift just occurred – an unexpected reconfiguration, sometimes a fundamental leap or an evolutionary breakthrough.”
Perhaps strangely, your post takes me back to the Junior High science lab. I can remember clearly the odd smell of it now, and hear the quiet hiss of the Bunsen burner mingled with the murmurs of the mostly uninterested students while our science teacher, Mr. Erlenmeyer, fumbled inexpertly with the apparatus. A supersaturated solution was being created. As the solution cooled, we drew neatly labeled diagrams of the experiment that we were observing. Then, with everybody crowded around to watch, Mr. Erlenmeyer dropped a tiny “seed crystal” into the solution and an amazing transformation took place! Beautiful crystals formed magically, filling the flask and everybody, even the coolest students, were impressed.
“The daunting, dreadful, suicidal sameness we see all around us holds the potential for an astonishing transformation, a radical reordering of what was there before.”
Conditions are intensifying in ways that are far too complex for us to really comprehend. Perhaps there is a child somewhere in this world today whose mind is the potential “seed crystal” which will precipitate the phase shift in the human collective mind that this world needs so badly.
It’s an audacious thought, Vera, but I have a deep and persistent feeling that this is exactly what is happening in our time.