The Field Guide › Paper
Preiser, Biggs, de Vos and Folke give the clearest modern statement of what it means to take complex adaptive systems seriously, distilling the field into six organising principles and then following through on their consequences for how you research and explain such systems. The principles hold that complex adaptive systems are constituted relationally (the parts are defined by their interactions rather than prior to them), that they have adaptive capacity, that they are dynamic and inherently unpredictable, that they are radically open with no natural closed boundary, that they are always determined by their particular context rather than by universal law, and that their causality is complex, running through emergence, non-linearity and path dependence rather than simple cause and effect. The payoff is methodological: if a system has these properties then variable-based, boundary-fixing, prediction-seeking method is the wrong tool, and you need approaches built for relationships, context and emergence instead. Although written for social-ecological systems, almost none of the argument is actually confined to ecology, which is why it transfers so cleanly to organisations, healthcare and safety, and why it makes a strong modern anchor for a corpus that treats teams as living systems rather than machines. Its limit is that it is a principles-and-methods synthesis rather than an empirical study, better at reframing the research question than at telling you which specific method to pick up. (Text drawn from the 2018 Ecology and Society paper, 23(4), art. 46.)