Chapter 3: Using a Complexity Lens New Ways of Seeing
Chapter 3 Part 1 of Your amazing complexity: Unleashing its potential
“All beauty, richness and harmony in the emergent dynamics of a complex system largely depend on the specific way in which its elementary components interact” (Boccaletti, et al., 2023).
You as a complex system your beauty, richness, and harmony emerge from the intricate dynamics of your many parts interacting. A system is a network of relationships where parts interact. In her classic book on complexity science, Melanie Mitchell defined a complex adaptive system as having a large network of components with no central control, exhibiting complex behavior, sophisticated information processing, and adaptive learning. That’s you. Amazing!
Control emerges from the process of interaction. You experience many examples of complex adaptive systems every day, such as engaging in conversation, digesting food, and choosing a TV show. The network of links in the system represents channels for the flow of information—relationships that enable interaction and mutual influence. For example, your two eyes work together with the support of a complex nervous system to add the quality of perspective to vision that one eye cannot produce (close one eye to compare distance vision with the binocular view). Your family involves members that relate to each other for mutual support. Your evening meal today emerged from a chain of decisions and environmental features like supplies at a store. A complex system has many interacting parts. A complex adaptive system learns—it adapts to the environmental changes around it and makes internal changes for improving the fit. Each of us is a complex adaptive system (CAS)—a system of processes and structure that is constantly changing and adapting. We comprise a whole set of systems and interact with many others every day.
CAS theory provides a framework or a lens for making better sense of our complex world. Some older theories are too simple to explain our complexity or how we cope in a complex and rapidly changing world as a CAS. The key question becomes: how can we make enough sense of our complex life and situation to make good choices about the use of our most precious resources—energy, time, and attention? Reading this book and practicing the exercises, using the tools, and trying the methods is likely to change the choices you make in useful ways, because your framework will better match your complexity. A common example is the attempt to achieve a work-life balance—aligning the personal and professional to take care of ourselves as whole persons in a changing environment.
Social environments have expanded over centuries from tribes to cities to nations to a global interdependence. Our prior frameworks made sense through simplifying the complexity of these environments. That may have been an oversimplification. The CAS framework provides an opportunity to acknowledge and begin to understand that complexity, so it has been recently adopted by many disciplines impatient about oversimplified frameworks, theories, and models as the emerging paradigm. The three environments of natural, social, and built systems intertwine which makes our world triply complex.
For example, consider the food you ate yesterday. At least some of it grew far from where you live and traveled via supply chain to reach your table. I typically start my day with a breakfast that includes a fig from Turkey, coffee from Guatemala, and oatmeal from the midwestern states of the USA. The air you are breathing right now includes oxygen created by plants from around the globe and brought to you via wind patterns that span the globe. You are a complex system embedded in larger complex systems.
A complex adaptive system (CAS) is a collection of interacting individual parts or members. Each part has the freedom to act in ways that are not always predictable and establish interconnected actions with other parts. An action by one part ripples through the whole system, triggering changes in other parts and in the relationships. Think back on experiences that either threw your whole day off or made your day seem special—one event or action can affect your whole self, and you come out changed. Minor choices and events also affect our whole day but
may go unnoticed.
Because of their interdependence, whenever one part in a system makes a change, it ripples through the network of relationships, changing the context for the other parts, so their next behavior is adaptive to the changing context. You experience this every day in many ways. One common experience is conversation with several people at once. If they are listening to each other, one member saying something affects the others who then respond in their individual ways. The conversation develops over time and may reach a conclusion that none of them could have predicted. Even conversations are complex adaptive systems—a network of interactions that combines to make sense co-created by the participants.
The whole is more than the parts. When the parts interact, a network of relationships emerges to form a system that is qualitatively different from the parts. As a simple example, hydrogen and oxygen atoms combine to make water (H2O) which has the quality of wetness. The parts do not have wetness—only the whole molecule does. Wetness emerges in the relationship between the atoms. In making sense of this paragraph, you relied on many parts interacting, including eyes, brain, memory, heart, and lungs. None of those parts could make sense of this sentence independent of the others.
We exist in three primary environments: natural, built, and social. Complex ecosystems in nature have existed a long time, but our awareness and understanding of them have only been growing for a few centuries. The environments people have built now span the globe. Even the utilities in one building depend on a network of other built environments and work processes from finding and drilling for oil to refining it to shipping it and then making it available to consumers through a complex supply chain. The emergence of alternative energy sources such as solar and wind involves new CAS systems and related supply chains.
For example, the network illustrated below represents a collection of documents from an archive and the way their contents connect. A similar network could represent the main personal relationships in your life and the people they connect to or the way your brain fires as you read this sentence—linking words and meanings from memory to grasp the meaning. We consist of many complex networks and experience many on a daily basis. The 10 concepts defined below apply to most of them.
Creating the whole out of the parts is something we do naturally. Anna Dorn wrote that pink as a color does not exist. Pink “isn’t part of the visible light spectrum. There’s no “pink” wavelength. So what are we seeing?” Dominik John makes a similar point about sound when he answers the question: Do falling trees make noise?
The old question “If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it does it make a sound?” The falling tree would create a host of sound wave lengths that have a physical existence, but is our experience of sound like pink – something we add to the world by filling in the gaps? What key parts of our experience do we unconsciously create by adding the parts together to form a whole? If we are creating our own reality, we will want the best methods for the construction process,
The qualities of the whole emerge from the interaction of the parts. The pattern of emergence describes how parts unite at all levels of our world to create wholes that differ in some important way from the parts. That qualitative difference means we need new ways to measure, describe and understand wholeness, including human individuals and societies. CAS thinking represents the process that enables such an understanding to emerge. Better selfcare choices depend on our understanding of the parts, their interaction, and the whole.
A Whole System Embedded in Larger Systems
The sunflower with its seed in the photos below represent levels of whole systems embedded in an ecology of great complexity. The seed contains the code for the sunflower’s design and functions and the raw materials to begin the growth process. The sunflower emerges from the seed as a tiny sprout and absorbs water, sunlight, and nutrients from the soil to grow to maturity. Time lapse videos capture the process of growth from the outside while inside the growing flower complex processes generate the changes. The sunflower is an example of the 10 processes described in the list below.
Growth of a sunflower to maturity – from a small seed.
The complex adaptive systems (CAS) framework describes you with these 10 features:
a. interacting with the surrounding environment as an open system with porous boundaries (e.g., you are breathing oxygen in and carbon dioxide out this minute),
b. adapting constantly to your environment to enhance the fit by changing internal processes, the dance of adaptation (e.g., your cell phone may signal a text which leads to a change in your plan for the next hour),
c. collecting information, processing it to separate signal from noise, and crafting mental models as tools of understanding that enable wiser choices (e.g., integrating advice from several people to make a change in the way you work),
d. self-organizing set of parts that interact with each other so a unique whole emerges (e.g., your reading words on this page to find relevant meaning involves coordinating many physical and cognitive parts),
e. choosing from a multiplicity of possibilities (e.g., choosing a route from your home to a particular store across town right after serious flooding has closed your customary route),
f. learning as changing of our internal parts and subsystems in response to internal and external changes (e.g., you may alter one of your assumptions that will alter a decision later in the day based on reading this chapter),
g. facilitating interactions among individual parts, also called elements, agents, or members (e.g., you may be sipping coffee or tea for caffeine to energize your ability to focus on this page),
h. emerging wholes resulting from bottom-up interaction of parts forming new collectives or products that have qualities lacking in the parts (e.g., the conclusions you draw from reading this page may result in an idea not expressed in the writing because of the history you bring to your reflecting on the contents),
i. changing in nonlinear ways that are unpredictable where a small change may have large consequences (e.g., the flapping of the wings of a butterfly altering the weather or one short phrase on the page rippling through your system of making sense to alter one of your daily practices),
j. using feedback to drive processes or amplify or reduce them (e.g., consuming too much caffeine to get this section read may result in your body experiencing a change that you become aware of because of the way you now feel leads to cutting back on the caffeine and looking for other ways to stay alert).
The verb form (-ing) of the ten terms listed above emphasizes your dynamic nature. Notice your breath, your heartbeat, your thoughts in this moment. Each is a reminder of your system at work. Are you focusing your attention on this sentence? Lots happening! That is you functioning as a complex adaptive system—24 hours a day. Describing mathematics classes as CAS, Margaret Sinclair cited Kevin Kelly’s 1994 book Out of Control” as a resource in writing, “Complex systems are adaptable, evolvable, resilient, boundless, and novel but that they are also nonoptimal, noncontrollable, nonpredictable, non-understandable and nonimmediate. That’s you. Amazing!
The examples listed with each of the 10 concepts in the above list represent simple, common experiences. Many of your choices, actions, and reactions will seem more unique and more complex. The principles still apply.
All 10 processes occur within you every day at the biological, cognitive, emotional, and relational levels as you cope, manage, and adapt to your environment. Familiarity with these 10 ideas will sharpen your ability to see and understand the nuances of nearly any event. The 10 items represent a longer list of terms of rather technical sounding terms within the field of CAS such as the sample in the Appendix at the end of the last post in this Chapter. Subsequent chapters in this book will rely on these 10 terms and add just a couple more that fit specific themes in the book. You will have the opportunities to reflect on them to help you master their meaning and decide if they should become fundamental principles within your own meaning making system.
Where have you seen the pieces fitting together to form a unique whole? Was that in everyday experience or transformational moments?
Next: You are a Complex System