The Field Guide › Paper
Cilliers supplies the philosophical spine that most organisational uses of complexity are missing, and his argument is a warning as much as a foundation. His central move is to insist that complexity is not a property you can model your way out of. A complex system is constituted by the interactions of many elements, richly and non-linearly connected, with no element holding a representation of the whole; consequently no compressed description of such a system is possible, and any model of it is necessarily a reduction that loses precisely what made it complex. This has a sharp consequence for practice: since we cannot have a complete description, our accounts are always partial, always made from somewhere, and the boundaries we draw around a system are not given by nature but are produced by the act of observation. Where we cut is a choice, and choices carry ethics. Cilliers is explicit that this puts him at odds with the rule-based tradition, and it is here that he matters most for this map: his emphasis on contingency and history is, as commentators have noted, radically different from approaches such as Holland's that seek to understand emergence through formulated rules and dynamic equations. He is also sceptical of the fashionable dependence on chaos and the edge of chaos, arguing that complexity does not require chaotic dynamics as its source, a caution that lands squarely on a good deal of management writing. For a corpus about psychological safety this is the antidote to the naive transfer of natural-science complexity into human affairs. It says that models of the social are always partial and always positioned, that the people inside a system are not agents executing rules, and that anyone claiming a complete account of an organisation is telling you something about their own framing rather than about the organisation. Its limits are that it is a work of philosophy written against a specific postmodern backdrop, and the Derrida and Lyotard scaffolding will strike some readers as a detour from the science; the argument survives intact if you set that framing aside, but the book does not make it easy to. (Based on Cilliers's 1998 book, published by Routledge.)