Know Your Enemy (Week 1)
'He knows nothing; and he thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career.'
- George Bernard Shaw, Major Barbara
Our very first tool in the unravelling complexity kit is an active awareness of complexity in our problems and systems. The happy narrative of clear problems and solutions described in the introduction does not readily admit fallibility. However, whatever your walk in life you will do well to confront your own limitations- including the fact that you do not actually know everything. Complexity presents such a limitation because it hinders the range and effectiveness of solutions available for a given problem. For example, the recent American debt ceiling crisis was exposed to the diverse range of actors and feedback loops operating in the political and financial systems (see introductory survey). It was not possible to definitively resolve the debt problem, so a compromise was finally reached.
If complexity presents an often hidden limitation to our actions, we ought to seek to reveal it in all its guises. In this light I would have liked to ask Brian Anderson to expand upon his definition of complexity, namely that of 'something beyond any one person's ability to completely handle'. I understand his deliberate brevity and that complexity is itself complex to define. Nonetheless, searching for a level of meaning of a concept such as complexity can raise awareness of its impacts and characteristics. I found this to be the case in our first tutorial, where I had difficulty distinguishing wicked and complex problems but felt I still learned about their cumulative impacts.
I think that Anderson's definition could be varied in two ways. Firstly, we could qualify that complexity is something 'infeasible for one person to completely handle'. In a theoretical sense, any system which a group can 'handle' (in the sense of explain, design or oversee) could be handled by a special individual with resources equivalent to that group. The infeasibility caveat recognises that few people with the authority to oversee a complex system have the time or micro-managing ability to act alone. Delegation and specialisation are tools for engineers, CEOs and politicians alike to distribute authority. However, there is a particular trade-off for politicians between the convenience of delegation and the reduced democratic control of relying on an unelected group.
If complexity presents an often hidden limitation to our actions, we ought to seek to reveal it in all its guises. In this light I would have liked to ask Brian Anderson to expand upon his definition of complexity, namely that of 'something beyond any one person's ability to completely handle'. I understand his deliberate brevity and that complexity is itself complex to define. Nonetheless, searching for a level of meaning of a concept such as complexity can raise awareness of its impacts and characteristics. I found this to be the case in our first tutorial, where I had difficulty distinguishing wicked and complex problems but felt I still learned about their cumulative impacts.
I think that Anderson's definition could be varied in two ways. Firstly, we could qualify that complexity is something 'infeasible for one person to completely handle'. In a theoretical sense, any system which a group can 'handle' (in the sense of explain, design or oversee) could be handled by a special individual with resources equivalent to that group. The infeasibility caveat recognises that few people with the authority to oversee a complex system have the time or micro-managing ability to act alone. Delegation and specialisation are tools for engineers, CEOs and politicians alike to distribute authority. However, there is a particular trade-off for politicians between the convenience of delegation and the reduced democratic control of relying on an unelected group.
The second variation to Anderson's definition could acknowledge that some complexities will be 'beyond anybody's ability to completely understand or control'. A system such as the Australian economy may still be handled in the sense of being overseen by ASIC, the Reserve Bank and the like. However, such a system could not be controlled or even fully understood, whether by our special individual or the best possible group of experts. Such uncontrollability was diagnosed by Steve Cork (Week 2) as a function of some complex systems. These systems may be characterised by unclear borders or limits; adaptive agents within the system; and system 'memory' of its own.