What We Talk About When We Talk About Complexity

Complexity is a word we hear more and more. Understanding what it means in practice can help us navigate it with greater confidence.

What do we mean we talk about complexity?

It’s everywhere living systems reside, yet it’s also a deeply misunderstood or even mysterious subject. There is an entire field of study that looks at complexity and how it manifests and affects the world around us. In this post, I want to re-introduce you to the idea of complexity to help you get familiar with it. I won’t take the mystery out of it (that’s part of what makes it complex), but I can help you feel more comfortable with it as a concept and help you see it in your everyday interactions. My hope is help you make good decisions and take wiser actions in the face of complexity.

Complexity arises when things are connected in ways that make outcomes unpredictable. There is no threshold for complexity; rather, it is a condition that arises from the following:

1) Multiple sources of influence — forces, actions, behaviours, and relationships — are co-occurring within a set of boundaries (like a setting, context, values, or time horizon);
2) The rate of engagement — the scale, scope, range, intensity and speed of these influences are varied and dynamic in that they respond to feedback from the system;
3) New patterns of influence (like those above) emerge from these interactions, which means the system has undergone a transformation by its very nature.

In practical terms, a lot is happening at once, and what results from all of that are interactions that produce something different from what started.

We Can’t Go Back

We may anticipate what happens in general terms, but our ability to predict and control outcomes in these contexts is limited or non-existent. It also means that we can’t go back once the system has evolved.

It’s like weather, not a machine—you can’t control it with a switch, but you can learn to read the patterns and respond wisely. And like the weather, precise prediction is fraught with issues.

Human development is another example. As we evolve with age and experience, we can’t return to what we were. And like humans, there may be a developmental trajectory, but there’s no precise, linear path. If there were, our genes would be our destiny. Instead, what we have is this interaction between our genes, our past history and behaviour, and our present and emerging conditions. This is what allows us to change.

Our capacity to design — our lives, organizations, communities and more — contributes to the conditions that shape how we evolve. It’s why strategic design is so important to learning how to live better with complexity.

There are other definitions, debates and ideas about complexity that I’d encourage you to consider, but this is how I often describe it to my clients and students.

We see complexity in nearly every human endeavour, because we are constantly interacting with others’ values, ideas, behaviours, rules, questions and more. Furthermore, these interactions occur within communities, societies, and ecologies that both influence and are influenced by us.

Beyond Cause and Effect

Uncertainty is one of the accompaniments to complexity. The absence of knowing is often why people struggle with complexity.

But wait, there’s more.

Our traditional models of science and education focus on causes and effects. This thing does this; that reaction happens as a result.. From the natural world to the study of human history, we frame what happens around us in terms and conditions that are tied to a linear mindset of causes and various scalar effects that come from them.

While there is some use in this mindset, it’s limited at best and deceptive or outwardly false at worst when dealing with complex conditions and systems. Linear cause-and-effects can be observed, measured, and dissected for answers. The consequences of complexity are less obvious.

What adds to the challenge of dealing with complexity is that complex systems have multiple layers of activity within them. It’s possible to have clear causal relationships among the complexity — those things that work, can be (somewhat) controlled and predicted, and have observable outcomes among the “mess”. Clinical medicine can be like this. We have some things like orthopaedic surgery which is often difficult, involves many inputs, but is straightforward that co-exists with chronic disease management, which can have many variables to it, no cure, and many treatment options.

Thus, we may still have things in which we can have higher levels of confidence than others. Public health, for example, is a hybrid of these varied approaches, which makes it among the most complex areas of health practice.

How to Live With Complexity?

If we can’t predict things within complex conditions with any confidence, how do we manage?

An example I like to use is sailing, where there are tactics and strategies that can assist people in getting from point A to B even within the most turbulant winds. (We will look at this in future posts). Sailing is an example of working with the literal tension between the context (the water and the wind) and the vessel navigating both (the boat). It’s an example of how we can, with skills, knowledge, perception, and intent navigate complexity to achieve things.

This idea of navigation through complexity will be the focus of a future post in this series as we start looking at complexity and strategy.

The aim is to help us all become better sailors or, as the top image suggests, maybe better at seeing where the storms are coming across the valley of uncertainty that these times bring us. Whether you’re sailing, hiking, or trying to address the effects of chronic diseases in your patients and communities, understanding complexity is one of the best places to begin.

Thanks for reading.

If you’re stuck trying to understand complexity in practice within your organization, I’m always happy to talk and see if I can help.