Learning in and about complex systems

Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 1996

I have, alas, studied philosophy, Jurisprudence, and medicine, too, And, worst of all, theology With keen endeavor, through and through-And here I am, for all my lore, The wretched fool I was before. Called Master of Arts, and Doctor to boot, For ten years almost I confute And up and down, wherever it goes, I drag my students by the nose-And see that for all our science and art We can know nothing. Johann Wolfgang yon Goethe, Faust, Part I The Mismatch: View 1-The Systems Thinkers vs. the People Jack D. Cowan, the mathematical biologist from the University of Chicago who is a co-founder of the Santa Fe Institute, has suggested that the major discovery to date from this much-hyped Institute has been that "it's very hard to do science on complex systems" [1A]. The optimistic claims of some of its renowned members suggest that "complexity science" is developing a theory of complex adaptive systems that will be able to deal with systems such as mental illness, corporation management, the U.S. government, entire economies, and even biological evolution. This confidence seems like a case of d~ja vu: previous "theories of almost everything" include cybernetics, information theory, catastrophe theory, artificial life, and chaos theory. They have indeed proven valuable in gaining new insights about the behavior of complex systems. Examples are

Journal of Responsible Innovation, 2016

I share the concerns raised in Vogt's commentary, 'How Fast Should We Innovate?' Controlling the pace of technological change is one of the epochal challenges of this era, and I offer suggestions to facilitate scholarly inquiry, collective deliberation, and public policy. Two framing moves Most writing on the subject of pace focuses on individuals' and subcultures' subjective experiences: John Dewey observed a 'mania for speed' (1927) long before Alvin Toffler discovered 'future shock' (1970) and nearly a century prior to Judy Wajcman's STS perspective in Pressed for Time (2014). 'We're always chasing time,' averred a sleep-deprived longhaul trucker, surveilled by bosses while at the mercy of nearly impossible schedules (Menzies 2005, 36). Energy-extraction boomtowns have long been recognized as socially dysfunctional (Freudenburg 1984)and much of the world now resembles a boomtown. Contemporary commerce, communication, and transport are said to have generated a hyperculture, 'a swirling vortex that today sucks into itself all elements of individual experience, thought and emotion' (Bertman 1998, 84). I am disposed to accept this general picture although I would prefer greater nuance in the claimsmore acknowledgement, for example, that hours actually spent on work and housework have remained fairly steady (albeit unfairly distributed by gender and social class). And some of the technosocial disruption has been beneficial for some peoplerelaxing formerly overbearing constraints from marriage, religion, in-grouping, and social convention. However, my main quarrel with stories about the 'no time' problem is a classic level-of-analysis issue: preoccupation with micro-level symptoms distracts from study of the institutions and political-economic practices causing the difficulties. What is driving the pace of innovation, where are the potential brakes, and what would it take to selectively decelerate somewhat adroitly? A second important reframing of pace-of-change thinking is to stop using the pronoun we, because we in fact rarely innovatethey do. Corporations with the highest R&D spending are based in the U.S. (11), Germany (2), Great Britain (2), Switzerland (2), France (1), Japan (1), and South Korea (1) (Strategy& 2016). California venture capital and Silicon Valley predominate among start-up firms globally; the U.S. military determines more than half of weaponry R&D; and those driving permissionless innovation (Dotson 2015) are disproportionately young, male, affluent, and whitewith the blindered standpoints that come from a narrow demography.

Constellations, 2003

In 1999, James Gleick, exploring everyday life in contemporary American society, noted the "acceleration of just about everything": love, life, speech, politics, work, TV, leisure, etc. 1 With this observation he certainly is not alone. In popular as well as scientific discourse about the current evolution of Western societies, acceleration figures as the single most striking and important feature. 2 But although there is a noticeable increase in the discourse about acceleration and the shortage of time in recent years, the feeling that history, culture, society, or even 'time itself' in some strange way accelerates is not new at all; it rather seems to be a constitutive trait of modernity as such. As historians like Reinhart Koselleck have persuasively argued, the general sense of a "speed-up" has accompanied modern society at least since the middle of the eighteenth century. 3 And indeed, as many have observed and empirical evidence clearly suggests, the history of modernity seems to be characterized by a wide-ranging speed-up of all kinds of technological, economic, social, and cultural processes and by a picking up of the general pace of life. In terms of its structural and cultural impact on modern society, this change in the temporal structures and patterns of modernity appears to be just as pervasive as the impact of comparable processes of individualization or rationalization. Just as with the latter, it seems, social acceleration is not a steady process but evolves in waves (most often brought about by new technologies or forms of socio-economic organization), with each new wave meeting considerable resistance as well as partial reversals. Most often, a wave of acceleration is followed by a rise in the 'discourse of acceleration,' in which cries for deceleration in the name of human needs and values are voiced but eventually die down. 4 However, contrary to the other constitutive features of the modernization process -individualization, rationalization, (functional and structural) differentiation, and the instrumental domestication of nature -which have all been the object of extensive analysis, the concept of acceleration still lacks a clear and workable definition and a systematic sociological analysis. Within systematic theories of modernity or modernization, acceleration is virtually absent, with the notable exception of Paul Virilio's 'dromological' approach to history, which, alas, hardly amounts to a 'theory.' This surprising absence in the face of the

2005

OECD eBooks, 2020

In policymaking, we hear the word "system" all the time. The economic system. The education system. The financial system. The political system. The social system… However, we rarely hear the word system attached to the word "approach". But unless we adopt a systems approach, unless we employ systems thinking, we will fail to understand the world we are living in. Our world is made up of complex systems, systems of systems interacting with each other, and changing each other by that interaction and the links between them. The global economy now has a greater number of links than ever before. The global nature of supply chains; new ways of exchanging goods, services and ideas; increasing migration; and ever-greater digitalisation, all increase our global connectedness. Such interconnectedness, in turn, gives rise to complexity, and this can be good or bad. However, within mainstream economics, the understanding of why and when interconnectedness may increase stability or instability has remained fragmented. Complexity science helps us to understand the main features of the most important systems we have to deal with. Features such as emergence, when the overall effect of individuals' actions is qualitatively different from what each of the individuals is doing. Radical uncertainty is another important aspect. It describes surprises-outcomes or events that are unanticipated, that cannot be put into a probability distribution because they are outside our list of things that might occur. But despite radical uncertainty and the unanticipated, the future is born by anticipation. We take decisions and perform actions to influence the future, as individuals, societies or governments. And the imagined, probable, or expected outcomes influence our decisions and actions in the present. Even things that may never happen, or will only happen decades from now, can have an impact on what we do today. That is why we plan our day, buy insurance, and pay into pension funds. That is why we try to forecast everything from GDP to the weather to the results of elections or football matches. Of course, not all our decisions about the future are in tune with what economic rationality would like us to do. We promote evidence-based decision-making, but of course there is no evidence about the future. Moreover, experience shows that simply extrapolating from the past can be ridiculous, dangerous or at best misguided. A complexity approach helps us to avoid these errors. We are dealing with a world characterised by nonlinearities, tipping points, and asymmetrical relations where a small cause can have a big effect. In a systems approach, global issues need global solutions. Environmental problems do not respect borders. You need to import some goods and services to be able to export others. The digital revolution is making it hard to define what the "domestic" in "gross domestic product" is. Growing inequalities are creating discontent. If we are to tackle these issues, governments must change the ways in which they design and implement policies. An acceptance of complexity shifts governments from a top-down siloed culture to an enabling culture where evidence, experimentation, and modelling help to inform and develop stakeholder engagement and buy-in.

Constellations, 2003

Hartmut Rosa's stimulating paper brings together work from a wide range of theoretical and empirical sources in order to develop a coherent theory of the acceleration of late-modern society. Its particular strength lies in the elaboration of the diverse features of this acceleration, showing their connections, i.e., how the elements relate to each other, and explaining the mechanisms that lie behind them. In the process of constructing this complex web of interdependencies, Rosa manages to show how the processes, together with their opposites, explain the complex mutual dependencies and model some of the prominent feedback-loops involved. Irrespective of whether or not one agrees with the central thesis that modernity is driven by acceleration, this is a paper to be admired for its breadth and depth of analysis and its impressive theory-building capacity. Rosa has created a rich tapestry of ideas and theories that includes work from cultural theory and history, sociology and social psychology; he weaves the threads of supporting evidence from developments in technology and politics, work and occupational structures. The resulting construct relates categories to mechanisms and drivers and these in turn to paradoxes and consequences. While not all sections of the paper are equally convincing, Rosa presents an excellent case for the paradoxes and contradictory tendencies that arise with the time compressing processes of modernization: acceleration leads not to time saving but time shortage while simultaneously being seen as an answer to the chronic shortage of time. Increases in the speed of information transfer and the pace of life fulfill neither the prospect of more efficient communication nor the promise of a good life; instead they result in information overload, entirely new worlds of services and entertainment, and an exponential increase in non-realizable options. Speed limits and deceleration are integral to the modernist logic of acceleration irrespective of whether they derive from physical limits, cultural islands of arrested time, unintended consequences of intended acceleration, or deliberate deceleration by anti-modernist tendencies. The modernist logic appears to fold back on itself. It seems that the success of acceleration begins to undermine its own preconditions for continuity, a process alluded to by theorists such a Paul Virilio and Jean Baudrillard and identified by Ulrich Beck with the concept of "reflexive modernization." 1 We could continue this train of thought by suggesting that the limits to and countervailing tendencies of acceleration could become sources of new innovation and deliberative change. That is to say,

The Hidden Power of Systems Thinking, 2020

pre-industrial period and it rises by 0.17ᵒC each decade. This might not seem like a lot, but it is. If the world continued on this trend, our world-our habitat-would degenerate severely. These signals of alarm have surfaced in different ways in public consciousness. Those preferring to do nothing sought to deny these long-term trends. Having lost this argument, they then sought to deny that they were human-induced. This argument has been lost too. As the science developed, so the thesis expanded. Humankind was not just igniting the climate but stomping all over the biosphere-the part of the earth's crust, waters and atmosphere that support life of all forms. Thus was born the term the 'Anthropocene' (see Box 1.1). BOX 1.1 THE ANTHROPOCENE The Anthropocene is a term formulated in 2000 by earth scientists Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer to designate a new geological era in which human influences are so great that they are affecting 'whole Earth dynamics' through a range of biophysical and social processes. The International Working Group on the Anthropocene 6 notes that human impacts on the Earth include: • Erosion and sediment transport associated with a variety of anthropogenic processes, including colonisation, agriculture, urbanisation and global warming.

Journal of Economic Development, Environment and People, 2013

The 21st century is burdened by a series of dramatic changes and efforts are carried out to find potential solutions to consumerism, access to information, transient climate disequilibria, health care and demographic transformations. A new page in human history will bear witness to the introduction of new ways of thinking, new changes, new relationships and interconnections that transcend states and societies. The moment is ripe for individuals aware of the implications carried by global changes and challenges, to step up and encourage responsibility and sustainable development. Mankind is currently living in a data-rich world, where information is widely dispersed. Nevertheless, extracting the right assumptions and conclusions from the available data proves difficult as numerous social phenomena do not run with clockwork precision as the laws governing the Newtonian universe.Human awareness and intelligence demand a more responsible approach to all operations and steps should be ma...