Embracing Complexity, 2015 (Jean Boulton, Peter Allen and Cliff Bowman) – Alan’s highlights
“If you take on board what it means to say the world is complex, this will change the way you think, feel, and act” (p.1)
Contrasts mechanical worldview with organic worldview (p.2)
“The mechanical view does not lead us easily into exploring interrelationship, co-evolution, dynamic flow, values, unintended consequences, multiple perspectives, learning, the emergence of the totally unexpected, collapse, the ways differing factors interact – or give sufficient consideration to the distant future or the role of the past” (p.3).
“But maybe the issue is less to do with tools and more to do with perspective” (p.5).
“This topic of methods is not straightforward. Working with a complexity worldview gives us, in the main, principles and frameworks rather than step-by-step formulaic processes. It provides maxims and question for consideration rather than rules” (p.5).
“It implies that, whilst we should work as best we can to use evidence and information to inform our decisions, sometimes the information which captures the past quite well is of limited use in illuminating the future” (p.6).
“If the world is complex, then acting congruently with that complexity can be simpler than trying to control a machine that does not exist” (p.6)
“When we say the world is complex we are saying it is:
Systemic: the world cannot be understood through taking apart the bits and understanding them separately. Factors work together synergistically, that is, the whole is different from the sum of its parts. We live as part of patterns of relationships.
Path-dependent: history matters and the sequence of events is a key factor in giving shape to the future.
Sensitive to context: one size does not fit all, and the way change happens and the way the future emerges is dependent on the detailed and particular events and patterns of relationships and particular features in the local situation. By generalizing we risk throwing out the very information that sheds light on why things happen and what might happen next.
Emergent, uncertain, but not random: although the future does not follow smoothly from the past, neither is what happens random. The world is neither chaotic nor predictable but somewhere in between.
Episodic: things are becoming, developing and changing, but change seems to happen in fits and starts. The intriguing thing about the world is that on the surface patterns of relationships and structures can seem almost stable for long periods of time, although micro-changes may be going on under the surface. And then radical change can happen suddenly and new patterns of relationships can self-organize and some completely new features that could not have been predicted may emerge.” (p.8)
“Form emerges from relationships between the things of which it is constituted. So this presents a view of the world as systemic, emergent, and co-created, rather than a view of the world as pre-fixed, predictable, and controllable.” (p.9)
Prigogine, noting the apparent contradiction between Newton’s laws of continuity, and thermodynamics laws of entropy, asked ‘why does life mount the incline that matter descends?’. The answer is that life is an open system. “If we recognize that situations of interest are generally connected and engaged with their environment – that they are open – then it can be shown that structures and patterns can emerge” (p.9).
Complexity science “provides an ontology, a worldview, a generic insight into dynamics, into the way the world ‘becomes’.” (p.11)
“Complexity at its essence is not a model or a method or a metaphor, it is a description of the way things are” (p.27).
“The key insight that came out of Prigogine’s work, and which gets to the heart of complexity theory, is the way forms, patterns and institutions emerge and become established are are then constantly challenged and potentially invade by the particular events, variations, decisions, shocks and so on that take place in particular places at particular times” (p.29).
“Current patterns form the context in which events may or may not gain impact and so may or may not destabilize them” (p.31).
“This dance between detail and structure, between science and history, between form and individualism, is at the heart of the contribution of evolutionary complex systems thinking” (p.32).
Characteristics of the complex world. “Our summary points are that the complex world:
Is systemic and synergistic
Is multi-scalar
Has variety, diversity, variation, and fluctuations, and these can give rise both to resilience and adaptability
Is path-dependent, contingent on the local context and on the sequence of what happens
Changes episodically and can tip into new regimes
Has more than one future
Can self-organize, self-regulate, and in some circumstances new features can emerge” (p.36).
“The complex world is systemic. This is a word that is used a great deal in this book and deserves some discussion. To say the world is systemic is to say that it cannot be understood without exploring interconnections. Furthermore, it is saying that we will often develop a better sense of what is happening if we preference patterns of connections and ‘wholes’ over a focus on individual things.” (p.36).
“A worldview will encapsulate beliefs about how things change, and about the nature of reality” (p.51).
Emptiness: “He [the Dalai Lama] explained that what this term captures is the sense that form is only temporary, is ‘devoid of inherent existence and emerges out of the relationship between constitutive elements’. He emphasized that ‘there is no self-defining discrete reality to cause or effect’. Emptiness expresses the idea that what we are is contingent on the context in which we find ourselves, it is dependent on whom we are with and on what is happening; we are not fixed beings independent of our circumstances. We – and our groups and societies – are emergent patterns and may shift into new patterns” (p.54).
p.75 re dimensions that define something
Dimensions of variance and the identity of things (thought shared with Andrew)
Cases – a la Charles Ragin, and my Ph.D. – as, in effect, systems that have been bounded for analytical purposes (p.115)
Commentary re Cynefin: “The important question, we would argue, is to consider the interplay between interventions (complex or not) and contexts. And we would question whether this model and in particular its extension, enticing as it is, to an approach for classifying projects [i.e. interventions] rather than contexts, in fact limits our thinking and clouds our engagement with ‘what is.’” (p.194)
The idea that models can and do enhance the process of learning from experience (I think because they focus attention on relationships and ideally causal mechanisms” (p.223)
“So strategy is not a blueprint or a plan. Strategy becomes an ongoing, unfolding and emergent process. We will need experiments to test out possibilities and we will need to allow for challenge, encourage diverse thinking and above all make sure we are getting plenty of feedback so we can make adjustments along the way” (p.232)
The idea that we have responsibility for quotes “seeding the system with good ingredients” (p.236 from Jean Boulton)
