The Field Guide › Trails › Complexity: a long and technical descent
Complexity science started with physicists trying to explain the weather, and ended up with management consultants trying to explain your team. This trail runs from Weaver to Ostrom, and partway down, we find that complex human systems are a different kind of thing, and it ends not with a lever, but a commons.
Weaver's short essay is the historical starting point for the science of complexity, and the piece that named its central object.
The founding textbook of cybernetics, and the source of the one idea from that tradition that organisations most need: the Law of Requisite Variety.
Simon's essay is the second pillar of the complexity-foundations set and, for anyone thinking about organisations, the more directly useful of the two: it supplies the concepts of hierarchy and near-…
Anderson's two-page essay is the canonical statement of emergence and the classical-science counterweight to reductionism at this end of the complexity-foundations set.
Holland's Daedalus essay is where complex adaptive systems acquires its name and its canonical characterisation, and it anchors the systems-science half of the complexity-foundations set alongside An…
Cilliers supplies the philosophical spine that most organisational uses of complexity are missing, and his argument is a warning as much as a foundation.
Juarrero opens with a question that sounds trivial and is not: what is the difference between a wink and a blink?
This is the paper that introduced the Cynefin framework in its full form, the fuller and more radical predecessor to the Snowden and Boone Harvard piece that most people cite.
Holling's paper is the origin of resilience as a technical concept, and the taproot beneath everything else in the ecological-commons set: Walker and colleagues, Levin, and Holling's own later panarc…
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…
Page writes the bridge between formal complexity science and the study of human social systems, and does it with unusual discipline.
Centola, Becker, Brackbill and Baronchelli did something rare in complexity research: they took a phenomenon usually invoked as a metaphor, the tipping point, and demonstrated it cleanly in a control…
Stacey brings the science of complexity to bear on strategic management, and his target is the field's governing assumption that organisations move, or should be moved, towards a stable equilibrium t…
Donella Meadows's short, much-loved essay distilling decades of systems-dynamics work into a ranked list of the places where intervention in a complex system pays off, and the places where it does no…
Pelrine brings social complexity science, and specifically Snowden's Cynefin framework, to bear on Agile software development, and the argument doubles as a general case about knowledge work.
This EUROCONTROL white paper does something the safety literature rarely manages: it takes the sprawling body of systems thinking and complexity theory and distils it into ten workable principles, wr…
The foundational text of commons scholarship, and the work for which Ostrom would later receive the Nobel Prize in economics; this corpus already holds her 2010 lecture, but the 1990 book is where th…