• Root (271)
  • digest (139)
    • debate (1)
    • economy (12)
    • education (5)
    • freedom (7)
    • freespeech (18)
    • idiots (9)
    • media (26)
    • music (1)
    • politics (29)
    • religion (1)
    • society (2)
    • stumbleupon (6)
    • tech-sci (3)
  • fun (22)
    • videos (7)
  • ideas (6)
    • epistemology (5)
  • meta (6)
  • misc (11)
  • news (36)
    • media (5)
    • politics (25)
  • personal (12)
    • florin (5)
    • lupo (6)
  • series (4)
    • complexity (1)
    • ponerology (3)
  • tech-sci (35)
    • comp (4)
    • medicine (28)
    • psychology (1)
    • quantum (1)

RSS feed

GPG/PGP pubkeys

Complexity (I)

author: www-data

Today I want to talk a little bit about complexity. It is a mixture of notes to Dietrich Dörner's The Logic of Failure and my personal records on that topic. See it as handing out my private notes to the world. :-)

Why this series

Most people are not familiar with analysing complex situations. They don't even recognise complexity. They avoid it, sometimes at any cost. Their refuge is often a world-simplifying ideology. Most of all, you will recognise these people because they have lots of opinions without actual knowledge of the subject at hand. This is what politics is all about.

So, the inability to recognise and deal with complexity is fundamental to the dogmas de jour. I want you to go beyond the lines of todays dogmas, not by pushing another dogma down your throat, but by giving you tools for today.

What is complexity?

Complexity is a subjective property of the world that surrounds us. Whether in personal relations, social questions, business or politics, you most likely encounter situations where many options to act exist. You ask yourself "What do I want" and act that way. Still, the outcome is not always as expected. After joyously tackling a new project, you hear yourself say "This is more complicated than I thought!" But don't worry.

Complexity means a large and highly connected number of traits, i.e. variables, in some scope of reality. Connected means that a change to one variable will inevitably cause changes in other variables, be they close or remote. These changes are called side or distant effects.

What do you need to deal with that? High complexity demands of you the ability to gather information, integrate it into a model and act again. This ability is part of Edward de Bonos definition of Thinking as a separate cultural knowledge do be thought at schools. These steps are not really new - you can find them in leadership manuals of the German disaster response agency.

Further complicating your position is that systems have dynamics on their own. They will change even if you are not doing anything. Observing a complex system's behaviour helps in understanding it. Pitily, you do not always have sufficient time to observe it working: You're pressed for time.
Also, the system's dynamic nature will cause changes to variables in the future, which you will not have thought of before.

The last complication is intransparency, which means that you do not have access to all the variables and connections of the system at hand. It's quite obvious: If you do slag your boss in front of some unknown co-worker, you might get fired, because you did not know the connection between them.

In the next part of the series, I will talk about the reality model in general. Then I will talk about goals and later about model building and information gathering.

2009-01-22 12:56 | www-datarootshell.ro | [/series/complexity] | permanent link