# Dynamics in Action: Intentional Behavior as a Complex System

*Juarrero · Complexity & Systems, Critique & Boundary, Team Learning · MIT Press · 1999 · Paywalled*

Juarrero opens with a question that sounds trivial and is not: what is the difference between a wink and a blink? The movements are identical; the meaning is not. Action theory has never satisfactorily accounted for the difference, and her diagnosis is that the fault lies in a model of causation three and a half centuries old, in which all causes are of the push-pull, billiard-ball kind and all explanation is proof-like deduction from law. Applied to human action, that model cannot recover intention, because intention is not a shove delivered from behind. Her alternative is to reconceive causes as constraints. Constraints do not push; they shape the space of what is possible, and they come in two kinds: context-free constraints that reduce possibility, and context-sensitive or enabling constraints that create it, generating coherence and making new behaviour available rather than merely limiting it. This gives her a way to make top-down and bottom-up causation tractable at once, the whole constraining the parts that compose it, without mysticism. And it forces a change in what an explanation even is: if behaviour emerges from a history of constraints rather than from deterministic law, then explaining an action is a matter of historical narrative rather than inference, of telling how this became possible rather than deducing that it had to happen. For this map Juarrero does two things no other node does. She supplies the philosophical grounding for retrospective coherence, the observation that in a complex system a path is legible only after the fact, which becomes a rigorous claim about the logic of explanation rather than a rule of thumb. And she is the reason a human complex system is not merely a complicated one: agents with intentions are constituted by constraints and can change them, so the rule-following agent of computational complexity is the wrong model for a team. Her enabling constraints are also, precisely, what a psychologically safe environment is: not an absence of structure, but a structure that makes speaking possible. Its limits are that it is a demanding work of philosophy of mind, written for philosophers, whose organisational implications are left almost entirely to the reader. (Based on Juarrero's 1999 book, published by MIT Press.)

- **This page:** https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/juarrero-1999/
- **View the source paper:** https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262600477/dynamics-in-action/
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- [A Leader's Framework for Decision Making](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/snowden-boone-2007.md) (paper)
- [Complexity and Postmodernism: Understanding Complex Systems](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/cilliers-1998.md) (paper)
- [The New Dynamics of Strategy: Sense-Making in a Complex and Complicated World](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/kurtz-snowden-2003.md) (paper)
- [Complexity](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/complexity.md)
- [Safe to Fail](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/safe-to-fail.md)