Explaining how to navigate Complexity
- Making things simple but not simplistic is hard
- Making things simple for people can be confused with making them comfortable
- We live in a world of inherent uncertainty – everything is entangled with everything else – the only certainty is that whatever we do will have unintended consequences
- One can introduce complexity here and talk about dispositions, not causality using the magnet metaphor or similar but that depends a bit on the time you have and the audience
- One can introduce complexity here and talk about dispositions, not causality using the magnet metaphor or similar but that depends a bit on the time you have and the audience
- Speed of response to emerging possibilities and threats is key, the earlier you see things the better but you won’t see what you don’t expect to see
- At the point speaking of inattentional blindness and the radiologists where 83% don’t see the Gorilla can help and establish the need to find the 17% who do before they talk to the test
- At the point speaking of inattentional blindness and the radiologists where 83% don’t see the Gorilla can help and establish the need to find the 17% who do before they talk to the test
- That means one of the first things you need to do is to create human sensor networks capable of real-time feedback and those networks need to be culturally, cognitively etc, diverse
- In this context, the cliché that your employees are your greatest asset takes on a new meaning – for government its citizens
- In this context, the cliché that your employees are your greatest asset takes on a new meaning – for government its citizens
- In Complexity Theory, there are three necessary but not sufficient conditions for novelty to emerge
- This may take a bit of time but I am finding it is important that trying to get people to think holistically in effect provides a cognitive filter that means you don’t spot weak signals until it is too late
- This may take a bit of time but I am finding it is important that trying to get people to think holistically in effect provides a cognitive filter that means you don’t spot weak signals until it is too late
- So it’s fairly simple, we can change the granularity and interactions and see what happens, reinforcing the good, disrupting the bad
- You need to use examples – small groups of people, interactions don’t have to be explicit, material objects and processes can play a part
- You need to use examples – small groups of people, interactions don’t have to be explicit, material objects and processes can play a part
- Then not everything can change or be changed and we need to understand what is in play – here I draw the energy/time grid of .10 Estuarine Mapping and include counterfactuals
- I may at this point bring in constructors and constraints but its not necessary
- I may at this point bring in constructors and constraints but its not necessary
- Finally what we are doing is managing the substrate – there is little point in deciding what plants you want before you have done a soil survey and checked the irrigation
- There may be other metaphors but that works – and it means you are selling a pre-process before they then do something more conventional (starting with where people are not where you would like them to be)
In all of these, I am talking about very practical things that you can put in place, not abstract or ideal qualities. I know it’s not fully there yet, but it does seem to be working.