Understanding Wicked Problems with Complex Systems Theory
A solution that worked a year ago won't necessarily help us today. How do we contend with that?
My last essay was about “wicked problems” and how we can deal with them. Most of the polarizing issues we deal with in our world are wicked problems. An approach that helps me understand these problems is complex systems theory, which we’ll jump into today.
What is a system?
A system is a collection of moving parts that form a greater whole and usually produce something.
Coming out of the Renaissance, folks like Descartes, Newton, and Galileo were trying to understand the world and how everything worked. They considered Earth to be part of a mechanical universe: There's no spirit in it; it's just a bunch of moving parts governed by rules. Some people call this the billiard ball universe, and it’s also called causal determinism.
This closed, simple, linear systems approach is what we'd been using for many centuries until just a couple of decades ago. A closed system is essentially a container. There are things inside and outside the system, and they're separate.
Even though a system might have many moving parts, it's pretty simple. You can take it apart and understand it. When we're looking at regular, simple, or closed systems, we're going to be fixing a part of them or improving the structure.
Great examples of a simple system would be a clock or a factory. Something breaks down, so you find where it happens in the linear process. Usually, you have a part you need to fix, tweak, or lubricate.
A complex system is open, dynamic, and nonlinear. Complex systems theory was born out of a multidisciplinary experience. Various people noticed similar dynamics, whether they were studying ecosystems, sociology, city planning, or international relations.
Some great examples of these complex systems are our democracy, the economy, international politics, and global supply chains. Your body is a complex system.
What makes a complex system?
Systems have many parts. In a complex system, all the parts are interconnected, interdependent, and autonomous. The control is distributed throughout.
All the different parts are doing their own thing, making their own decisions. There isn't a hierarchy telling them how to operate. They're also nonlinear, so they're fundamentally unpredictable. Any change to the system will have a disproportionate impact throughout the whole thing.
A small change can have a huge impact, and a massive change might have a relatively small impact. That may sound paradoxical, but all these different moving parts are interconnected, interdependent, and autonomous. This is the butterfly effect.
What is emergence?
Another aspect of complex systems is their emergent quality. All the parts doing their thing end up becoming a greater whole. That greater whole doesn't look like the parts, and the parts wouldn’t become the greater whole without each other.
If you (consensually) smash a bunch of humans together, you get a city, a great example of an emergent system. Naturally, they start forming democracies and structures.
Another important aspect of emergent or complex systems is uncertainty. We don't know what's going to develop when something happens, as uncertainty is related to nonlinearity. They're dynamic systems, so any change will impact the rest of the system and change the outcome.
If you change what's happening around the system, the agents inside it will act differently. That's because it's an open system.
What's an open system?
An open system means that you can't tell where the edge is. Let’s think about the healthcare system and start with doctors, hospitals, ambulances, and EMTs. Then we'll include the patients.
But what about the people who bring the food to the system? What about the advertising to get people eating healthy food? It’s so far-reaching.
All of those things start becoming part of the healthcare system. We don't know where the boundaries are, and things cause the whole system to change. That's what makes it dynamic.
Complex systems evolve
Something that worked yesterday or ten years ago won't necessarily work today or in the future because we're in a different context in a dynamic system. Complex systems have evolutionary aspects to them. What happened in the past has a huge impact and creates the ever-changing present, but you can't go back.
Even with the complexity of these systems, we can see patterns within them. Still, they're unpredictable. One of the things I find really helpful in understanding this is focusing on the relationships more than the parts.
With the old closed, simple, linear systems, if something's broken, we fix the part. In a complex system, we don't change the parts: We pay attention to the relationship. Imagine an organization. If people don’t get along or keep making bad decisions, you could try to make some rules. That would be the old systems approach.
A better approach is to improve the relationship quality: Teach communication skills or develop guiding principles. These elements arise from focusing on the relationships more than the parts. We can cope with complexity better when we have the systems to match.
How do we measure complexity?
Three things measure complexity:
Multiplicity is how many different parts are moving in the system.
Interdependence is about interconnectedness and how each action impacts the others.
Diversity looks at how many different actors are inside the system.
More multiplicity, interdependence, and diversity mean more complexity. This is what gets us to these wicked problems. There are no simple solutions, and every action we take will ripple out in much bigger ways than we could've expected. Complex systems theory can help us understand the nature of the issues we're looking at.
We have to figure out how to address our problems. There are some awesome theories and ideas from the world of design. These designers are coming up with many great ideas for approaching wicked problems and complex systems.
Often, we realize that we have to choose an approach:
Do we try to centralize power?
Do we try to decentralize power?
Do we focus on the big picture?
Do we focus on the individuals?
Do we focus on the past?
Do we focus on the future?
All of these are interdependent polarities. The answer to all of those is yes. They're not either/or questions.
Our issue? We keep thinking that it's one or the other, which gets us into polarization. But there’s a whole world that can solve this puzzle.
In my next essay, I'll be diving into the world of polarity thinking. We'll be looking at how it can help us figure out the best approaches to managing complex systems and handling our wicked problems. Stay tuned.
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