Complexity: a long and technical ascent

A guided trail · 17 stops · through the research literature

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 up, we find that complex human systems are a different kind of thing, and it ends not with a lever, but a commons.

The route

1. Science and Complexity (Weaver, 1948)

   Weaver's short essay is the historical starting point for the science of complexity, and the piece that named its central object.

   • Detour: Complexity: A Guided Tour
   • Detour: Complexity
2. An Introduction to Cybernetics (Ashby, 1956)

   The founding textbook of cybernetics, and the source of the one idea from that tradition that organisations most need: the Law of Requisite Variety.

   • Detour: Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine
3. The Architecture of Complexity (Simon, 1962)

   Set beside Weaver (1948), Simon's essay is, for anyone thinking about organisations, the more directly useful of the two: it supplies the concepts of hierarchy and near-decomposability that let one t…

   • Detour: Organisational Fabric
4. More Is Different (Anderson, 1972)

   Anderson's essay accepts reductionism outright and opposes the inference that the only scientists studying anything really fundamental are those working on the fundamental laws.

   • Detour: Ecotones & Edge Effect
5. Complex Adaptive Systems (Holland, 1992)

   Holland's Daedalus essay is where complex adaptive systems acquires its name and its canonical characterisation.

   • Detour: Five Ecological Concepts
6. Complexity and Postmodernism: Understanding Complex Systems (Cilliers, 1998)

   Cilliers supplies the philosophical spine that most organisational uses of complexity are missing, and his argument is a warning as much as a foundation.

   • Detour: Soft to Each Other, Hard on the System
7. Dynamics in Action: Intentional Behavior as a Complex System (Juarrero, 1999)

   Juarrero opens with a question that sounds trivial and is not: what is the difference between a wink and a blink?

   • Detour: Experiments, Bets & Probes
   • Detour: Organizing and the Process of Sensemaking
8. The New Dynamics of Strategy: Sense-Making in a Complex and Complicated World (Kurtz & Snowden, 2003)

   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.

   • Detour: A Leader's Framework for Decision Making
   • Detour: Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning
9. Resilience and Stability of Ecological Systems (Holling, 1973)

   Holling's paper proposes that the behaviour of ecological systems could well be defined by two distinct properties, resilience and stability, where ecology had treated both under the single heading o…

   • Detour: Adaptive Cycle
   • Detour: Resilience, Adaptability and Transformability in Social-Ecological Systems
10. Social-Ecological Systems as Complex Adaptive Systems: Organizing Principles for Advancing Research Methods and Approaches (Preiser, Biggs, de Vos & Folke, 2018)

    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…

    • Detour: Efficiency vs Resilience
    • Detour: Studying Complexity in Health Services Research: Desperately Seeking an Overdue Paradigm Shift
11. What Sociologists Should Know About Complexity (Page, 2015)

    Page writes the bridge between formal complexity science and the study of human social systems, and does it with unusual discipline.

    • Detour: PS in Diverse Groups
12. Experimental Evidence for Tipping Points in Social Convention (Centola, Becker, Brackbill & Baronchelli, 2018)

    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…

    • Detour: Safety Organised Criticality
13. The Science of Complexity: An Alternative Perspective for Strategic Change Processes (Stacey, 1995)

    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…

    • Detour: Rewetting Organisations
    • Detour: Complexity and Postmodernism: Understanding Complex Systems
14. Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System (Meadows, 1999)

    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…

    • Detour: OODA Loop
15. On Understanding Software Agility: A Social Complexity Point of View (Pelrine, 2011)

    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.

    • Detour: PS & Agile
    • Detour: Principles of Adaptive Management in Complex Safety-Critical Organizations
16. Systems Thinking for Safety: Ten Principles. A White Paper — Moving Towards Safety-II (Shorrock, Leonhardt, Licu & Peters, 2014)

    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…

    • Detour: HOP
17. Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Ostrom, 1990)

    Ostrom targets the use of three models as metaphors for policy: Hardin's tragedy of the commons, the prisoner's dilemma and Olson's logic of collective action.