Fred opens up an important distinction in "complexity". What I want to
develop in response is distinctions in complexity which depend on the
source of the users of the word. While each of these may usefully create
operational definitions from their own perspective, I am going to develop
some based in my interpretation of the work of the Santa Fe Institute
(SFI) - of which I'm a Business Network member.
What I want to develop here is distinctions of complex adaptive systems
that lead to what I call intelligent systems: emergent phenomena of human
interactions and the human beings that co-evolve with those systems. I
think this is crucial to effective development of organisational learning.
I'll intersperse my thoughts with Fred's comments because they make some
of the points very clearly and then fall into the same trap of
metanarrative of what he is attacking. (If I manage to do this well, it
will also be an example of deconstruction that some have been asking for.)
I distinguish 4 distinct uses of the term complexity. Each has a
different source and produces different results in the hands of the users.
- the most popular seems to have arisen from mathematics, physics and
chaos theory. It is the main one argued against by Fred (quoted below).
It is the main one used by Meg Wheatley and Ralph Stacey and is the most
popular one in examples - like weather and butterfly wings.
- the second most popular has arisen from systems dynamics or non-linear
dynamic systems as mentioned by Fred. This arose from an attempt to
understand and explain living systems using the best tools available at
the time. While IMHO the work done at these early stages was very
creative, that approach has serious flaws and has been passed by in
current theory, technology and methodology.
- a more recent one and, I think most relevent for organisational learning
purposes, has been created from what SFI and others have developed
beginning from living systems - systems whose defining way of functioning
is adaptation, learning and innovation. These include evolution, immune
systems, cognitive research, species, societies and human learning.
- the fourth is one which I'm developing that is intelligent systems
(complex becomes redundant and unwieldy at this stage). These systems are
those which emerge from the interaction of language based entities and
co-evolve with those entities. My particular interest is a new theory of
organisation that will enable our aspirations and possibilities by taking
into account the intelligent possibility of a language based system.
The following includes snips from Fred's message as examples.
> > (quoting Jim) Such systems that exhibit this
> > phenomena are usually called fractal or non-linear dynamic systems. It
> > does indeed appear that social institutions are such a system.
The point is not whether fractal or non-linear dynamic systems can
describe social institutions. At some level they can. The point is that
the nature of the system is missed if it is living (or emergent from the
living as in institutions) when it is analysed in "material" terms.
Descartes said that the world could be divided into the material and the
non-material and observed that the methods of description, the approaches
to understanding, and the tools for working in each were different. Since
then in the West, we've developed the "material" to the almost total
exclusion of the "non-material". (These are converging in both physics
and philosophy and the distinction seems to becoming less and less
useful. But for our purposes, it provides interim assistance.)
If you use the material approach to analyse a living system - say a
magnificent polar bear. You kill it, cut it apart, study its inner
workings. But you aren't studying the phenomenon of a polar bear any
more. While something has been gained, the whole has been lost. Yes we
can use fractals to describe a leaf - and maybe even an organisation - but
that doesn't tell us about the nature of the thing itself.
> IMHO, chaos/fractal/nonlinear dynamics are *not* the real revolution.
> They are only qualitative changes in an unstated theory that the world can
> be accurately described in formal/mathematical terms of any level of
> complexity.
For the reasons stated and more, chaos/fractals/non-linear dynamics are
merely outcomes of the transformation that is occurring. And, because
they are concerned with mathematical descriptions and modelling with
equations, they describe only some effects and not the nature of the
thing.
Non-linear dynamics needs a little more deconstructing here from
an admitted non-mathematician and a non-computer scientist. I attended
the International Systems Dynamics conference in Scotland this summer and
could find no evidence of living systems being studied. Double loop
learning and a variety of complex (even complex adaptive) systems were
being talked about but the terms were those of mechanistic and
reductionist approaches combined with sophisticated computer simulation
and modelling.
While the modelling talk used phrases like emergent and holistic, there
was no evidence that the terms were understood in ways that related to
living systems nor was there any evidence of the analytic and other tools
producing anything remotely resembling emergent or self organising
phenomena. I heard many a presenter (and participants) talk about working
with groups and saying, "of course a group, team, organisation is just a
bunch of individuals". This seemed to me a gross failure of systems
dynamics thinking.
> But to say that chaos/fractals/etc. are the key to
> understanding the dynamics of *real*, particularly, "living" systems such
> as organizations and other social systems is to continue the long
> tradition of assuming that such systems follow the same system of logic
> that mathematics addresses.
> [In] other words, I think the
> chaos/fractal/etc. *revolutionaries* are confusing difficulty in
> predicatablity with *inherent unpredictability*.
Here is where I think Fred begins to get into trouble. The essential
nature of living systems is not their predictability or unpredictability.
Its true that mere difficulty of predictability is a different order of
things from "inherent unpredictability". The problem is that the term is
a mathematical one. How will we decide even "inherent unpredictability"
excpet by reference to the very approach that Fred is trying to avoid.
Unpredictability is indeed a property of living systems - but not as
completely as indicated. I would not want to say that I can't predict
living systems at all. I certainly wouldn't want to say that nobody
could. There are levels of detailed prediction that I would declare
impossible but there are other levels (statistical, historical,
theoretical, patterns) that are quite predictable. Its the nature of
living systems that produces the relative unpredictability that is core.
The "sciences of complex adaptive systems" to use SFI's way of speaking
about these systems is that they are characterised by a few key elements
interacting with a grammar from which the phenomena under study emerges.
These cannot be analysed or traced backward by "cause and effect" means
and then "run forward" again to produce the same results. The difference
is not merely statistical nor difficult. It is impossible by the nature
of the entity. The nature of an emergent phenomena, as described above,
includes that the phenomena, after it has emerged, has an independent
existence that is not merely constituted by its parts. A new _being_ has
come into being.
> Living systems such as
> people and their social systems are inherently unpredicatable because the
> *create* things in the real physical world. Any formal description of a
> physical system can only describe the "important" aspects of reality *that
> have already been discovered*, which are very small compared to all the
> possible descriptions of that same reality.
Here is an insight and what I consider to be a misreading of the
transformation that is occurring. The insight is that we are talking
about systems of description. So we free ourselves from the arguments
about "reality" and turn to useful ways of talking about things. This is
not merely postmodern. Einstein, when he turned his thinking to thinking
and studied his own processes said that he couldn't have
invented/discovered what he did if he'd been bound by the definitions of
energy, matter, light, speed, time, etc. that were the language of
physics. What he said was that he could do the work that he did by
creating a language that was intuitive and non-necessary rather than be
bound by the language as descriptive and causally necessary.
What I consider to be the misreading is that Fred has again fallen into
the trap he is trying to close. If it is "our ability to create things in
the physical world" that distinguishes us and/or complexity, then we are
firmly back in the domain of the sciences and their approaches that we
were trying to escape.
> But living systems are able
> to use the implications of *physical*, not just logical, features and
> relationships to produce inherently unpredictable (via any formal means)
> future realities. It is the impications of this absolute unpredictability
> of unpredictability than the sensitivity of initial conditions (or bru
Here is where I introduce my distinction of intelligent systems. It is
needed precisely _because_ it is not unpredictability that is the major
issue nor is it because of our ability to manipulate physical entities.
It is because we are able to manipulate symbols, language, thoughts,
sentences that we introduce a new level of intelligence, awareness,
consciousness or something that is a complex emergent phenomenon that
co-arises with the language based complex world of human beings in their
interactions (not merely in their thinking.)
I look to information and communication theory as well as the newest
sciences and postmodern philosophy for sources of thinking that come
together to give us new understandings and new openings for action.
George Gilder in his introduction to "Microcosm" does a wonderful and
inspiring job of suggesting the nature of the transformation that is
occurring. He says that we are engaged in "the overthrow of matter" and
that is being accomplished by seeing things "from the inside" rather than
as external manipulators of physical things. That is, we are seeing the
nature of the things and working with that rather than changing the nature
of the thing itself.
Another way of saying this is that we are dealing with information and
that systems can be measured by their ability to deal with information.
Those that are language based have a completely malleable medium -
language itself - as their reality. Most social realities are made up of
other social realities and all are language. And it is natural that
language based institutions emerge with higher levels of intelligence or
consciousness than those from which they emerged. Significant in all of
this is that we can design systems, we can organise for intelligence, if
the phenomena occur in language.
The tendency of those who come from chaos and physics to talk about our
inability to design, control or even effectively influence chaotic/complex
systems is not going to help us much in our organisations (except to break
the metanarratives that grip executives). Worse, that thinking will not
get us results and therefore fails the "Einstein test" of pragmatic
results producing ways of talking.
> The "-ologies" that jamzen@world.std.com referred to (e.g., sociology,
> psychology, biology) will undergo the *real* revolution when the own up to
> the inherent limitations of formalization *of any kind* (including these
> "new sciences of complexity"), the loss of predictability, and ultimately
> (especially so for organizations and management) the loss of the ability
> to *control* based on this predictability when dealing with people and
> living things.
>
We do not lose control when we begin to introduce the thinking of complex
adpative systems or of intelligent systems. We gain control. The fact
that this control is a different order of things and at a different level
should not give us concern. What concerns organisations is that they can
produce desired results better with one kind of control than another.
The beauty of seeing human institutions as language based and intelligent
is that the possibility opens up that we have something to say about those
institutions which are the determiners of our potential for intelligence,
for awareness, for consciousness. I believe that we will raise the level
of those attributes on the planet for human beings and for all the planet
when we realise that we are the products of our institutions much more
than the creators of them. More accurately, I'd say that we are
co-emerging.
--
Mike McMaster <Michael@kbddean.demon.co.uk>
"Postmodern society is the society of computers, information, scientific
knowledge, advanced technology, and rapid change due to new advances in
science and technology." Postmodern Theory, Best & Kellner