COMPLEX SYSTEMS

The Dayak people of Borneo live in impressive longhouses which accommodate up to 500 people. This concentration of people led the World Health Organization to attempt to kill malarial mosquitoes by spraying the houses with DDT. This spraying program markedly improved the health of the Dayak people, but it set in motion an undesirable set of unexpected consequences.
The thatched houses were the home of a small community of cockroaches, lizards, and cats. The cockroaches picked up the DDT. The lizards ate the cockroaches, and the cats ate the lizards. The concentration of DDT (through a process called biological amplification) was fatal to the cats. With the cats gone, woodland rats invaded the houses and brought with them fleas, lice, other parasites, and sylvatic plague. The rats had been held in check by the cats, though this did not become apparent until the cats were gone. Eventually, the Royal Air Force was called upon to parachute cats into the isolated villages in order to restore complexity and provide for biological control of rats.
The DDT also killed parasites and predators that had previously controlled a species of small caterpillar and prevented them from seriously damaging the thatched roofs. The caterpillars were now free to increase their number, and the roofs began to collapse. The trade-off consisted of malaria for poor housing and sylvatic plague. The thrust of the example is two-fold. It points out the consequences, often unexpected, of interventions that dramatically simplify a complex system. And, it demonstrates that even where a simplifying intervention is beneficial and necessary, there can still be unexpected and negative side effects.
from Michael Goldberg, On systemic balance: Flexibility and stability in social, economic, and environmental systems. p. 14.
Complex systems is a relatively new scion emerging out of the field of systems theory. The precursor, general systems theory, began with noticing the same patterns appearing across many fields of science. Russell Ackoff, a prominent researcher, describes complex systems as "messy problems."
Complex systems may be viewed as nested, interactive contexts. Senge (1990) urges us to think in "loops," not lines. In this way, it is possible to not only consider the contexts, but to enliven them, and examine the dynamic interactions among elements in the system. Contexts are not merely backdrops against which events occur, but create interactive fields. "We've been playing with 'vast networks of interference patterns,' with 'the continuous dance of energy.' The world is not a thing. It's a complex, never-ending, always changing tapestry" (Wheatley, 1994; p. 38).
When a complex situation is approached with technical rationality, reductionism, and linear logic, we cannot help but misunderstand, mis-diagnose, and mis-treat, as in the cats-and-caterpillars example. Sometimes, we ignore the intuitive; sometimes we ignore the counter-intuitive.
The following is a very brief summary of from Hutchins' (1996) "clear, concise, compelling" book, which itself presents a summary of the field. Important qualities of complex systems are:
• wholeness and interconnectedness. Complex systems require that we look at wholes, rather than parts. This means "both/and" instead of "either/or."
• emergence. A system has meaning only in the context of other systems. As such, "its identity only emerges in the larger context of the systems that surround it" ( ibid, p. 39).
• dynamic structure. Examples include negative, double, and delayed feedback loops. This is illustrated by Peter Senge's archetypal models in his book on management, The fifth discipline.
• open boundaries. A complex system can "exchange information, energy and matter across its boundaries" (ibid, p. 103).
• self-regulation and self-organization. Such a system "(a) regenerates (recreates) itself by reproducing the processes that produced it in the first place and by (b) defining its own boundaries" (ibid, p. 122).
I work to interweave the ideas of complex systems with relational ways of being in the workplace. This emphasizes relationships with people and processes, and is consistent with the patterns which emerge in complex systems and new physics: "Gregory Bateson speaks of 'the pattern that connects,' and urges that we stop teaching facts--the 'things' of knowledge--and focus, instead, on relationships as the basis for all definitions" (Wheatley, 1994; p. 34).
Using systems thinking, we can think about the dynamical causes of individual and organizational difficulties. "Behind 'symptoms' is a dynamical system at work" (Masterpasqua and Perna; 1997; p. 279) In the words of Michael Goldberg, "we need to define issues more broadly to avoid falling into the trap of narrow definitions leading to narrow solutions and broad, unanticipated problems" (1989; p. 163).
Practitioners who think systemically display qualities that are at the leading edge, perhaps visionary. They work in unconventional ways, within what may be a new paradigm. Systemic thinking and Schön's reflective practice are wonderfully congruent. Schön speaks about such "messy" practice in a delightful metaphor of landscape:
In the varied topography of professional practice, there is a high, hard ground where practitioners can make effective use of research-based theory and technique, and there is the swampy lowland where problems are confusing "messes" incapable of technical solution. ...in the swamp are the problems of greatest human concern. ... There are those who choose the swampy lowlands. They deliberately involve themselves in messy but crucially important problems, and when asked to describe their methods of inquiry, they speak of experience, trial and error, intuition, and muddling through (Schön, 1983; p. 42).
Of complex problems, Margaret Wheatley writes, "Solutions are a temporary event specific to a context, developed through the relationship of persons and circumstances." Her words capture the complexity, non-linearity, unpredictability, numerous and nested contexts, metamorphosing form, and seeming unrelatedness of elements inherent to a system.
Goldberg, Michael A. 1989. On systemic balance: Flexibility and stability in social, economic, and environmental systems. Praeger: New York.
Hutchins, C. Larry. (1996). Systemic thinking: Solving complex problems. Aurora, CO: Professional Development Systems
Masterpasqua, Frank and Phyllis A. Perna. (1997). The psychological meaning of chaos: Translating theory into practise. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Schön, Peter. (1983). The reflective practitioner: How professionals think in action. New York: Basic
Senge, Peter M. (1990). The fifth discipline: The art and practice of the learning organization. New York: Doubleday
Wheatley, Margaret. (1994). Leadership and the new science: Learning about organization from an orderly universe. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler.

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