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Thoughts on Complexity
Paul Schumann

Preface
Complexity includes at least three states of being where many of the rules we take
for granted no longer apply. Concepts like causation, predictability, repeatability,
control, analysis, determinism, linearity, and even centralization don’t work in
complex systems. When dealing with a complex system it’s as though you’ve gone
through a looking glass and everything you thought you knew is no longer valid.
Furthermore, many complex systems exist at a human scale. We interact with many
of these complex systems in daily life, natural and man made, and as a result
become part of some of these complex systems.

It requires a paradigm shift to begin to comprehend complex systems. I shudder to

use the word because it’s been so over used and trivialized. But I can think of no
other concept to describe the shift. Complexity requires new perceptions, new
beliefs, new ways of thinking and new rules for problem solving

The first barrier to be overcome is perception. Our belief systems are so strong, our
scotomas so large, and our fears so great that resistance to accept the new reality
is enormous. That’s understandable. After all, our world is built on the concepts
listed above that aren’t valid in complex systems.

There is a fable about Columbus arriving in the new world and the natives unable to
“see” the three ships. They had no mental construct, or paradigm, that would allow
them to perceive the ships. A medicine man sat for days looking out at the water.
By studying the pattern of the ripples caused by the ships, he was able to finally see
them.

In essence that’s about the extent of our perception of complex systems. We can
see the effects, and in some cases measure the effects, but we don’t understand
how they work, based on our previous paradigm.

The three types of complex systems are critical state, chaotic and emergent.
Earthquakes result from a critical state, and markets appear to be in a critical state.
Weather is chaotic. And, massively parallel systems of intelligent agents exhibit
emergence, like termites.

Lewis Carroll described a complex system with intelligent agents in Alice’s

Adventures in Wonderland:

Paul Schumann, PO Box 161475, Austin, TX 78746, 512.632.6586,

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Alice thought she had never seen such a curious croquet ground in her life: it was
all ridges and furrows: the croquet balls were live hedgehogs, and the mallets live
flamingoes, and the soldiers had to double themselves up and stand on their hands
and feet, to make the arches.

The chief difficulty Alice found at first was in managing her flamingo: she succeeded
in getting its body tucked away, comfortably enough, under her arm, with its legs
hanging down, but generally, just as she had got its neck nicely straightened out,
and was going to give the hedgehog a blow with its head, it would twist itself round
and look up in her face, with such a puzzled expression that she could not help
bursting out laughing; and, when she had got its head down, and was going to
begin again, it was very provoking to find that the hedgehog had unrolled itself,
and was in the act of crawling away: besides all this, there was generally a ridge or
a furrow in the way wherever she wanted to send the hedgehog to, and, as the
doubled-up soldiers were always getting up and walking off to other parts of the
ground, Alice soon came to the conclusion that it was a very difficult game indeed.

The players all played at once, without waiting for turns, quarreling all the while,
and fighting for the hedgehogs; and in a very short time the Queen was in a furious
passion, and went stamping about, and shouting "Off with his head!" or "Off with
her head!" about once in a minute. Alice began to feel very uneasy: to be sure, she
had not as yet had any dispute with the Queen, but she knew that it might happen
any minute, "and then," thought she, "what would become of me? They're
dreadfully fond of beheading people here: the great wonder is, that there's any one
left alive!"

Complexity is transdisciplinary, i.e. a discipline that crosses many older disciplines.

There are examples of complexity in math, chemistry, physics, geology, weather
and the environment, economics, markets, biology, medicine, etc.

One last closing thought. I’m not writing about complicated systems. Complicated
systems in general do not exhibit the properties of complex systems.

Skills Required to Deal with Complexity

The skill set required to deal with complexity hasn’t been developed yet as you can
appreciate as it is a new paradigm that crosses almost all older disciplines.
However, there are some things I can say about the concepts that have to be
learned.

The common concepts across all complex systems that must be taught are:

• Systems : We need to teach:

• What a system is
Paul Schumann, PO Box 161475, Austin, TX 78746, 512.632.6586,
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• The types of systems

• How one determines the type of a system

• When you have included enough of the system

• How a system responds to its environment

• History of systems

• Reductionism and holism: Both concepts need to be taught, along with an

understanding of when each one should be applied.

• Statistics: Statistics is a branch of mathematics concerned with collecting and

interpreting data. Depending on the system, different types of statistics need
to be used. People need to know how to collect and interpret data taken from
the history of all types of complex systems. And, we need to teach the
difference between probability and risk.

• Pattern recognition: In Emergence, Steven Johnson comments, “As the

futurist Ray Kurzweil writes, 'Humans are far more skilled at recognizing
patterns than in thinking through logical combinations, so we rely on this
aptitude for almost all of our mental processes. Indeed, pattern recognition
comprises the bulk of our neural circuitry. These faculties make up for the
extremely slow speed of human neurons.' ...the brain is a massively parallel
system, with 100 billion neurons all working away at the same time.” We
need to educate people in how to use this capability, at a conscious level, to
see patterns in systems or to use tools to assist in that recognition process.

• New ways of looking at the future and the development of a long term
perspective.

• Techniology: The study of how technology is developed and how society

influences what technologies get developed and how technology influences
society (think sociology or ecology)

• There are several important concepts for chaotic and critical systems
that must be taught: Chaos, Criticality and Emergence

• Decentralization: “As we enter the Era of Decentralization, there is an

important educational challenge: How can we help people become
intellectually engaged with the new types of systems and new ways of
thinking that characterize this new era? To date, schools and other
educational institutions have done little, if anything, to engage students with
the idea of decentralization. Instead, they often perpetuate centralized

Paul Schumann, PO Box 161475, Austin, TX 78746, 512.632.6586,

paschumann2009@gmail.com, http://insights-foresight.blogspot.com
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explanations and approaches” comments Mitchel Resnick, Turtles,

Termites, and Traffic Jams.

“There is an apparent paradox in people's reactions to decentralized

systems.” Resnick explains. “On one hand is the allure of decentralization.
They are fascinated by systems that are organized without an organizer,
coordinated without a coordinator.” On the other hand, “When people see
patterns in the world, they intuitively assume that the patterns are created
by lead or by seed.” That's the educational challenge.

Sanders and McCabe write, “Complex adaptive systems, and models thereof,
are characterized by distributed organizations or networks, whose parts all
influence each other, either directly or through feedback loops, which
continually evolve and adapt to accomplish overarching goals. This is in
fundamental contrast to the top-down, hierarchical management structures
found in most government organizations and in much of corporate America,
where local experimentation, innovation and adaption are discouraged in
favor of rigid bureaucratic rules and planning procedures.

Simple cause and effect relationships do not characterize complex adaptive

systems, and hence most of the conventional policy-planning tools currently
used by decision-makers, both government and corporate, are inappropriate
and ineffective. Complexity science offers new ways of understanding,
thinking about and designing organizational systems that are capable of
responding to and influencing complex nonlinear relationships.
Understanding the local dynamics in a complex system can provide great
insight into the behavior of the overall system and help identify key leverage
points of change and transformation.”

• Trans-disciplinary approaches: “Complexity science is truly an

interdisciplinary science” write Irene Sanders and Judith McCabe.
“Adopting a systems view of the world meant that the questions were too
big for any one discipline alone to answer. As scientists began looking for
connections among the different types of complex systems, the
boundaries between disciplines began to open. As a result, we are
witnessing the integration of knowledge across the disciplines – the
physical sciences, social sciences and the humanities. Insights about
complex systems are emerging across a broad spectrum of fields - from
physics, mathematics and computer science, to biology, oceanology,
neuroscience, art and architecture. From health care to city planning,
complexity science is creating a fundamental shift in the way we view the
dynamics and interactions of complex systems.” This the real message of
complexity science (in the sense of Marshall McLuhan's “The medium is
the message.”) Complexity science is the “medium” through which
Paul Schumann, PO Box 161475, Austin, TX 78746, 512.632.6586,
paschumann2009@gmail.com, http://insights-foresight.blogspot.com
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multiple disciplines can together transcend their parochial views, and

facilitate the emergence of a new world view.

At this point I only know of two types of skills required – intellective and
interpersonal.

The concept of intellective skills was developed by Shoshana Zuboff in In the Age
of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power:

…The thinking this operator refers to is of a different quality form the thinking
that attended the display of action-centered skills. It combines abstraction,
explicit inference, and procedural reasoning. Taken together, these elements
make possible a new set of competencies that I call Intellective skills. As long as
the new technology signals only deskilling – the diminished importance of
action-centered skills – there will be little probability of developing critical
judgment at the data interface. To rekindle such judgment, though on a new
more abstract footing, a re-skilling process is required. Mastery in a computer-
mediated environment depends upon developing intellective skills.

Interpersonal skills will have to include collaboration, decentralization, leadership,

creativity, innovativeness, flexibility, openness, self development, tolerance for
ambiguity and uncertainty and others I’m sure.

Management of Complexity
First, if it’s true complexity and not just an extremely complicated system, there is
no known way to manage it. The best we can do now is to manage the effects of a
complex system. For example, I mentioned earthquakes as being the result of a
complex system in a critical state. We can’t manage the earthquake or even predict
when an earthquake will occur or its magnitude. But, we do know from the history
of an earthquake prone fault system that there is a probability of a certain
magnitude of earthquake occurring. We then design buildings to survive that
magnitude of earthquake.

No analysis of the BP and Toyota examples has been done to determine if the
systems are complex or just extremely complicated. Or, what type of complex
system they might be.

Tad Patzek, chairman of the Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering Department at

the University of Texas, testified in Congress last month about the Gulf of Mexico oil
spill. His comments included observations on broad, long-term trends in industry,
government and academia. He reported, "Horrible things happen when complex
technologies and procedures overtake humans, who service the technologies falsely
assuming complete control.” Patzek asserts that it is a complex system with
emergent properties. I doubt that this is true. I think it most likely a complex system
Paul Schumann, PO Box 161475, Austin, TX 78746, 512.632.6586,
paschumann2009@gmail.com, http://insights-foresight.blogspot.com
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in a critical state. I suspect its behavior is more like an earthquake (criticality) than
a termite mound (emergence). It probably has some characteristics of both as the
human and software subsystems (intelligent agents) in the system could exhibit
some characteristics of emergence. However, his conclusions are valid: large events
like this will occur, and we can't predict when they will occur or prevent them.
Understandably, he never states this as directly as I did. How can you tell that to
politicians or business people? (Remember the Queen in the croquet game?)

The software developers have tamed the complicatedness of large software

programs such as operating systems by turning a hoard of software developers,
who are not in the same organization, loose on the project and then by facilitating
the development of a complex system of intelligent agents (individual
programmers) with positive emergent properties. This requires a degree of
openness, decentralization, flexibility, cooperation and loss of control not presently
possible in most modern corporations. Nor, do we know how to apply these
principles in systems other than software.

Paul Schumann, PO Box 161475, Austin, TX 78746, 512.632.6586,

paschumann2009@gmail.com, http://insights-foresight.blogspot.com