Complexity & Systems

This theme engages with complexity theory, Cynefin, and related frameworks to examine why psychological safety is hard to measure, hard to mandate, and hard to sustain — and what that means for practitioners who work in conditions of irreducible uncertainty.

Articles (28)

• Complexity
• Efficiency vs Resilience
• Emergence & Dynamics of PS
• Organisational Fabric
• Soft to Each Other, Hard on the System
• Adaptive Cycle
• Critique of Personality Profiling
• Normal Accidents
• OODA Loops & Strategy (Iterum)
• PS & Artificial Intelligence
• PS in Diverse Groups
• Resilience Engineering
• Safe to Fail
• Safe-to-Fail Wargames
• Three Horizons of Strategy
• 180 Factors of Transformation
• Conway's Law
• Dunbar's Number & Team Size
• Everything is an Experiment
• Experiments, Bets & Probes
• Guardrails & Failure
• Nonlinear PS & Performance
• OODA Loop
• Queueing Theory & Slack
• Safety Organised Criticality
• Static vs Generative Work
• Theory of Constraints
• Colution

Papers (37)

• An Introduction to Cybernetics (Ashby, 1956)
• Complex Adaptive Systems (Holland, 1992)
• Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (Wiener, 1948)
• More Is Different (Anderson, 1972)
• Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies (Perrow, 1984)
• Resilience and Stability of Ecological Systems (Holling, 1973)
• Risk Management in a Dynamic Society: A Modelling Problem (Rasmussen, 1997)
• The Architecture of Complexity (Simon, 1962)
• Understanding the Complexity of Economic, Ecological, and Social Systems (Holling, 2001)
• Working in Practice But Not in Theory: Theoretical Challenges of "High-Reliability Organizations" (La Porte, 1991)
• A Leader's Framework for Decision Making (Snowden & Boone, 2007)
• A New Accident Model for Engineering Safer Systems (Leveson, 2004)
• Complexity and Postmodernism: Understanding Complex Systems (Cilliers, 1998)
• Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning (Rittel & Webber, 1973)
• Dynamics in Action: Intentional Behavior as a Complex System (Juarrero, 1999)
• Ecosystems and the Biosphere as Complex Adaptive Systems (Levin, 1998)
• Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System (Meadows, 1999)
• Resilience and Precarious Success (Patterson & Wears, 2015)
• Resilience, Adaptability and Transformability in Social-Ecological Systems (Walker, 2004)
• Resilience: The Emergence of a Perspective for Social–Ecological Systems Analyses (Folke, 2006)
• Science and Complexity (Weaver, 1948)
• Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (Scott, 1998)
• Social-Ecological Systems as Complex Adaptive Systems: Organizing Principles for Advancing Research Methods and Approaches (Preiser, Biggs, de Vos & Folke, 2018)
• The New Dynamics of Strategy: Sense-Making in a Complex and Complicated World (Kurtz & Snowden, 2003)
• What Sociologists Should Know About Complexity (Page, 2015)
• Analysis of the Iridium 33-Cosmos 2251 Collision (Kelso, 2009)
• Errors in Organizations: An Integrative Review via Level of Analysis, Temporal Dynamism, and Priority Lenses (Lei, Naveh & Novikov, 2016)
• Experimental Evidence for Tipping Points in Social Convention (Centola, Becker, Brackbill & Baronchelli, 2018)
• Lessons from Everest: The Interaction of Cognitive Bias, Psychological Safety, and System Complexity (Roberto, 2002)
• Principles of Adaptive Management in Complex Safety-Critical Organizations (Reiman, Rollenhagen, Pietikäinen & Heikkilä, 2015)
• State of Science: Evolving Perspectives on 'Human Error' (Read, Shorrock, Walker & Salmon, 2021)
• Studying Complexity in Health Services Research: Desperately Seeking an Overdue Paradigm Shift (Greenhalgh & Papoutsi, 2018)
• Systems Thinking for Safety: Ten Principles. A White Paper — Moving Towards Safety-II (Shorrock, Leonhardt, Licu & Peters, 2014)
• The Deepwater Horizon Explosion: Non-Technical Skills, Safety Culture, and System Complexity (Reader & O'Connor, 2014)
• The Science of Complexity: An Alternative Perspective for Strategic Change Processes (Stacey, 1995)
• Resilience is a Verb (Woods, 2018)
• On Understanding Software Agility: A Social Complexity Point of View (Pelrine, 2011)