Complexity

Imagine for example, an organization that can efficiently build a world class car even while it discovers and branches out into other related market niches, improving its profitability in the vehicle market as it progresses. Now imagine it doing so without clear leadership or hierarchy, able to successfully adapt to apparently disastrous scenarios such as the loss of half its staff, or the invention of an alternate fuel. A great number of bankrupt firms would have paid untold sums for the secrets complexity offers.

A short history of complexity

Complex systems form the heart of evolution, their emergent adaptability holding the key to development of all life forms. It is popular to state that complex systems walk a tightrope between chaos and order, between individuality and sociality. Evolution is impossible without the competitively creative design of complexity. Its design and applicability to organizations and other social phenomena both excite and frustrate researchers as they race to find applications to their own disciplines.

Several characteristics of complex systems make them inherently attractive as harbingers to organizational theory. They are almost inexplicably more than the sum of their parts. They are self-organizing, adaptive, emergent and able to evolve, even while they remain robust and reliable. It is the nature of complex systems that intrigues scientists and researchers across the fields of mathematics, biology, physics, and the social sciences. What can we learn from a form that is so pervasive in nature? How can we take advantage of its properties to better equip us to study our own complex behavior and organizations?

One of the principal purposes of this website is to explore and suggest methods of using what we know of complex systems to improve the efficiency and creativity of organizations. Like complex systems themselves, that exploration is by definition a holistic and integrative one. Each functional component’s relation to the other is at least as important as its individual contribution. Human Resource development or compensation systems for example, are therefore best studied within the context of the entire organism rather than individual reinforcements based on market leading thought, or solely under expert domain.

Researchers agree that complex systems share certain characteristics, even if they use slightly different language to describe them. Their success relies on the following components, or their essential nature:

Self-organization. It appears that self-organization is actually a prerequisite for evolvability or adaptability. It nurtures structures that gradually evolve while remaining robust enough to withstand shocks and internal and external alteration.
Robustness. Complex systems are redundant or robust. Humans primarily design systems judged on efficiency or lack of redundancy. The reason is simple; we often infer that efficiency or singularity leads to reduced cost (this does not have to be true). But the more specific the system, the more restricted its ability to face new circumstances. And singularity or specificity means failure in the face of novelty. Robust systems withstand mutations without altering essential behavior. Therefore we can interpret robustness as structural stability. Robustness allows molding of successful adaptation as opposed to failure.
Gradualism. The popular idea of evolution or adaptation is one where happenstance plays the principal role; slight or significant variation leads to either success or failure, and the organism evolves haphazardly depending and building on the surviving variation that occurs. In the example of a computer program tasked to find all occupied squares in a 125×125 matrix, notice that this approach performs no better than chance. The popularized approach and random results are the same. Are evolving organisms so haphazard? We find that self-organization and robustness allow the answer to be ‘no’. More importantly, if adaptation were merely driven by chance, there would be no possibility that the life we see on earth could have evolved within the lifetime of the universe.
Amenable landscapes. Successful evolution depends on environments or landscapes that are conducive to such adaptation. The desert lizard does not need to contend with months of ice and snow. One does not find a kangaroo living in the Alps.[1] How then, shall we define or describe landscapes conducive to successful adaptation of our organizations? Can they be reduced to particular constructs? What exactly do we mean by landscapes when we are talking about corporations?

The nature or characteristics of complex systems themselves are inter-related as necessarily implied in the above list. And in addition to being self-organizing, they form scale-free networks and conform to power laws (as opposed to bell curves). Equal but different as opposed to sameness defines complex systems; diversity is celebrated as opposed to an imposition of balance. Complex systems are not Marxian. These concepts alone provide a rich perspective with which to assess organizational structure of any organization.

Finally, it is popular to assert that models of complex systems by necessity must be as complex as the system itself to retain their accuracy. Steven Wolfram postulates that models can be much simpler, using a new kind of science of his design.[2] Whether he has indeed constructed a new interpretation of the world, or run aground on the same rocks as traditional mathematics remains to be seen. Nevertheless his work on cellular automata has given us an incredibly valuable tool, the product of a researcher who has dedicated his life to the study of complexity.

This website explores complexity not so much to research the phenomenon as to apply its characteristics to organizational structure as a means of replicating its strengths of reliability, adaptation and creativity in our own organizations. The goal is to improve their speed, profitability, creativity, and reliability all at the same time.

Conclusion

To return to the popular assertion where we began, “How chaotic are complex systems?” To answer that question, we must begin with the admission that human experience is extremely prejudiced. Given our penchant for command and control systems, hierarchies and authority, the answer to that question is arguably that they are not nearly as chaotic as most observers imagine. After all, people, multi-cellular organisms, ecosystems, and economic systems are all products of this phenomenon.

Can complex systems provide valuable insight into organizations, or is their structure just too malleable? I believe their properties, like much psychology research, have much to teach us regarding the inherent untapped potential in organizations. But we must fight our natural aversion to anarchy and the conditioning beginning from childhood towards hierarchy. These are high hills to climb and will no doubt impede our progress. Luckily, we have awe-inspiring examples to observe.

And there is another macro-variable at work; the world is turning at ever greater speed. Fast changing events reveal a fundamental weakness of highly controlled hierarchical systems; they break down when confronted with fast changing or huge impact environments. In such landscapes, it is highly probable that events will conspire to nurture the formation of organizations based on complexity. Indeed, as we shall see, they are already forming.

End Notes

[1] Stuart Kauffman, At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity, 1st ed. (Oxford University Press, USA, 1995), 154.