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New working paper on potential of complexity science in peace-building and conflict transformation

February 5, 2010 by bramalingam

This 2009 working paper by Diane Hendricks is an exploration of the usefulness of complexity theory in the the field of peace research and conflict intervention (to see other publications relevant to complexity and aid, visit the Aid on the Edge of Chaos Publications page)

From the Executive Summary:

The paper begins by outlining key features of complex systems before going on to illustrate attempts made to apply complexity theory (originating in the natural sciences) in various social science fields with a consideration of some of the difficulties this translation poses.

Conflict analysis is the basis of research and strategy formation and indispensable to intervention in conflict situations, therefore, the potential for deepening and sharpening analysis that complexity theory may offer are discussed and conclusions about the advantages of a complexity-influenced conflict analysis are drawn. Some of the tools available to augment analysis are briefly presented, whereby the main emphasis is given to computer simulation.

The understanding of the nature of change processes in complex systems is considered and the implications of a complexity approach for intervention in conflict and development environments in terms of strategy development are discussed. The view is taken that the gains to be made (at least so far) are largely in terms of an altered and, it will be argued, more sophisticated and realistic orientation that affects the way that things are perceived in analysis and done in the field rather than in the introduction of specific new methods.

On the basis of the foregoing exploration it will be argued that a change is required in the education and training of peace researchers and conflict and development workers such that the above-mentioned orientation to complex conflict situations may be developed and here transdisciplinarity is seen as playing an integral role. The varying conceptions of transdisciplinarity are discussed and specific examples of transdisciplinary research and education enterprises are presented.

The importance of the intra-personal complex processes not only of conflict parties but also of conflict interveners (and even conflict transformation researchers) is highlighted. The view is taken that the peace worker becomes part of the complex system in which he or she seeks to intervene and, therefore, requires self-reflective abilities and the development of awareness and mindfulness in analysis, through strategy development and into actual intervention. The development of these abilities thus becomes part of an appropriate education and training for those working in the field of peace and conflict. This aspect of the topic is to be elaborated in further research papers.

The conclusion briefly reviews the valid concerns and doubts with regard to the application of complexity theory within the social sciences before attempting a tentative balance of the benefits to be gained from continued engagement in the process of adaptation and integration of complexity concepts and approaches in the field of conflict transformation.

Posted in Conflict and peace building, Public Policy, Reports and Studies | Leave a Comment »

“There is no such thing as a natural disaster”: crises, complexity and the role of theory

February 3, 2010 by bramalingam

In the few weeks following the Haiti earthquake, much of our work at ALNAP has focused on getting key operational lessons from previous earthquakes into the hands and minds of operational agency staff, and briefing media representatives on a variety of issues related to the relief and recovery work. 

As the initial signs of some kind of normality are returning for the people of Haiti, it may seem rather bland or even improper to talk of theory. But theories can and do powerfully shape how we think about disasters, how we understand the aftermath, and how we carry out international aid work.

Increasingly, the complexity sciences are being put forward as alternatives to the ‘classic’ ways of analysing and understanding disasters. In his 2003 book, Natural disasters and development in a globalizing world, Mark Pelling - a leading researcher on natural disasters based at Kings College London – argued that many developments in disaster resilience and climate change adaptation have strong affinities with complexity theory, although their use is often not acknowledged. He also suggested that complexity science offers a ‘meta-framework’ to bring together a number of ways of understanding disasters. This framework uses ideas of emergence, self-organisation, adaptation and networks, each of which are looked at below.

Emergence is increasingly important in how we understand the dynamics of a crisis. As argued by Greg Bankoff, Georg Frerks, Dorothea Hilhorst in Mapping vulnerability: disasters, development, and people: 

…complexity theory is highly relevant for disaster studies because it provides the entry point to describe disasters as the interactions between sub-systems of nature and society or hazard and vulnerability… Disasters caused by natural hazards result from the complex interactions of nature and society…” 

Such complexity-oriented approaches have been used to explore Hurricane Mitch, the Peruvian earthquake, the Montserrat volcano and others. As one study has noted: 

Consider the following three ingredients: a mega-city in a poor, Pacific rim nation; seasonal monsoon rains; a huge garbage dump. Mix these ingredients in the following way: move impoverished people to the dump, where they build shanty towns and scavenge for a living in the mountain of garbage; saturate the dump with changing monsoon rain patterns; collapse the weakened slopes of garbage and send debris flows to inundate the shanty towns. That particular disaster, which took place outside of Manila in July 2000… was not inherent in any of the three ingredients of that tragedy; it emerged from their interaction’ (Sarewitz and Pielke, 2001 cited in Ramalingam et al, 2008, emphasis added).

The underlying message is that natural disasters are characterised and created by context. Raima Larter (an award-winning complexity blogger) has used some of these ideas to argue that Haiti was not a natural disaster but a man-made one. In fact, these approaches suggest that there is in fact no such thing as a ‘natural’ disaster, as all disasters are created by emergent interactions between crisis drivers and human actvities.

As well as crisis-specific uses, some analysts have tried to apply complexity principles to understand global disaster trends, moving beyond disasters as one-off local events towards a macro-view.

Dr Peter Walker’s work on complexity and context as the determininants of the future is one of a number of examples of from within the aid sector. Thomas Homer-Dixon has written extensively on this, most notably in the superb and influential ‘Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity and the Renewal of Civilization’.  These works approach disasters as part of ongoing dynamic processes of global change, shaped by contextual factors such as demographic shifts, natural resource dependency, urbanisation and climate change.

The second area of relevance of complexity in natural disasters is in understanding the importance of self-organisation in the process of response and adaptation after a disaster. Professor Louise Comfort, who works in Public and International Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh, has used complexity theory to understand local responses to earthquakes and other crises.  Comfort builds on the idea of emergent crises (as described above), and focuses on the next stage – how local self-organisation occurs in the face of disaster.

Comfort’s argument is that self-organising capabilities within commmunities are central to both pre-disaster resilience and post-disaster response. Self-organisation is determined by the capacity to exchange and act on incoming information across different levels. Effective local response is based on the ’timely exchange of information’ between local actors, facilitated by social and human capital and information infrastructure. (This chimes with the best-case use of social technologies by aid agencies, discussed here a couple of weeks back.)

As Comfort puts it:  

…when the complexity of interacting scientific, social, political and economic conditions exceeds the existing capacity for organisational control, decisions taken by local actors govern the direction of the evolving process… investment in improving capacity for organisational response at the local level is likely to see the greatest benefit to the community…”

The importance of self-organised local responses echoes with the findings of the Tsunami evaluation, which found that most of the life-saving work (over 90%) was done by the local population and not international agencies. Similarly, in Haiti, despite the media attention focusing on dramatic efforts of international search and rescue teams, the maajority of the life-saving work will have been undertaken by Haitians themselves.  

The third area of relevance for complexity science is in the delivery of international humanitarian aid, where ideas of adaptation and networks are increasingly important. This is perhaps the least advanced of the three areas in terms of systematic academic research. Aid agencies, it is argued, are far too reactive and need to reform to become more attuned to local contexts and realities. And aid processes need to take account of the dynamic nature of humanitarian needs. Here too there are growing numbers of studies, for example:

The overall underlying message of much of the work covered above is that the classic ways of approaching natural disasters - seeing them as one-off events, disregarding local self-organised capacities for response, the way in which aid itself is conceptualised and delivered - tend to be based on simple, linear theories of cause and effect. 

Such theories inform many disaster-related practices in ways that echo that famous quote from John Maynard Keynes: practical people who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, frequently owe a debt to some defunct theorist. This is not just true of disaster aid, but applies to many social, economic and political issues.

In working to improve our understanding of and approaches to natural disasters - and indeed other pressing issues of our time - we may need to start to acknowledge and move beyond these implicit intellectual debts.

As is illustrated above, complexity theory gives us a set of useful starting points. How we use it to change our ways of seeing the world, and then use this to change our practices, is the real and enduring challenge.

Posted in Knowledge and learning, Natural disasters, Networks, Organisations, Public Policy, Reports and Studies, Resilience | 2 Comments »

Is Your Job An Open System?

January 14, 2010 by bramalingam

Bill Tate is a leadership specialist who focuses on the use of systems approaches to understand and improve leadership development.

On his new Systemic Leadership blog, he has written about the challenge of writing and fulfilling job descriptions in a complex environments. His ideas have some resonance with a  popular November 2009 post on the Peter Principle and how incompetence spreads around hierarchical organisations.

It is thought-provoking stuff, especially in the context of international aid where:

  • working in partnerships and networks is increasingly important
  • where contexts are complex and therefore jobs have an inherent ambiguity and uncertainty 
  • where each project or programme demands different, sometimes opposing skills and capabilities, and
  • where worryingly few people actually have useful job descriptions, that fully and accurately describe their day-to-day work and responsibilities

Over to Bill: 

On the train two days ago I sat next to someone reading a job description. These ritualistic documents continue to look important. Yet they fit with an image of the organisation as a machine, with each jobholder in the role of a reliable cog. The aim is to produce reliable and predictable output. Everything and everyone has its correct place.
But is this what makes organisations tick any more? Systems thinking, complexity science, and shadow-side dynamics suggest otherwise. If it is the individual who holds pride of place in an organisation’s success and its productivity, then a formal, detailed, fixed job description that defines what lies at the heart of a job might make some kind of sense. But organisations succeed because of what happens in the spaces between individuals – whether smooth-running or sparky. It is the quality of those relationships that matter.

We live in an organisational economy. Services are successfully supplied to customers by systems, not by individuals. Arguably, what goes at the periphery of a job and between jobs is more important than what goes on at the heart of a job, but this receives little if any attention in job descriptions. Similarly, it is what goes on between partner organisations that is increasingly significant. Organisations are open systems not closed ones. A job is an open system too.

When Alistair Campbell appeared before the Iraq Inquiry yesterday, he gave a most creditable performance. He seemed to see his job as protecting Tony Blair, protecting his own skin, and laying into the media. Campbell’s successor sees his job very differently.

What matters is interpretation, one’s personal gifts, what the boss calls for, and what is changing in the environment. The machine metaphor fails because it can’t be redesigned quickly enough for fast-moving and unpredictable times. Complex organisations need to be capable of adapting quickly as demands and environments change. Job responsibility needs sharpening while becoming less pinned down – a modern paradox.

The most valuable things people do are often not what is contained within the defined job, but what lies beyond it – in special tasks and projects connected with improvement and change. Appearing before the Iraq Inquiry was surely not in Campbell’s job description, but what he did mattered, couldn’t be ducked, and he made a good fist of it.

The most important question a jobholder can ask is “Why am I continuing to do what I am continuing to do the way I am continuing to do it?” No doubt it is someone’s job to write job descriptions. Perhaps they should be asking themselves this very same question.

Posted in Institutions, Leadership, Organisations | 2 Comments »

Coping with Complexity in Agricultural Water Management

January 12, 2010 by bramalingam

An 2009 IFAD report highlights the importance of complexity for improving agricultural water management. It suggests that conventional project management approaches are not suitable for coping with complexity-oriented interventions, and also emphasises the importance of combining professional competence and complexity-related capabilities for achieving programmatic success.

The paper is ‘geared towards promoting further discussions and reflections, in the conviction that coping with complexity is one of the key future challenges for Agricultural Water Management’. It’s well worth reading - recommended for generalists and water specialists alike. (More complexity-related reports and books can be found on the Publications page of this blog.) 

An extract from the executive summary follows.

Overall water use and competition for increasingly scarce water resources are rising fast. Although this makes the excessive consumption of water for agriculture no longer sustainable, demand is growing in the wake of the current food crisis.

Depletion of surface and groundwater is putting unbearable stress on ecosystems. Water pollution degrades the remaining water bodies. And external factors such as urbanization and climate change compound these constraints. This is placing unprecedented burdens on agricultural water management.

As a result, agricultural water management professionals in developing countries feel confronted by ever-increasing complexity and uncertainty, which threaten to make interventions… unmanageable. This leads to a critical gap between the increasing sophistication of concepts for interventions to improve agricultural water management and the reality of implementation on the ground.

This paper suggests that complexity is one of the main stumbling blocks for agricultural water management practitioners as they struggle to achieve social, economic and ecological sustainability. Complexity will become a more important issue in the future, in the rapidly changing context of agricultural water management. The paper discusses essential aspects of meeting this challenge – of coping with complexity.

An important distinction is made between systemic and non-systemic interventions… Systemic interventions are tasks and services – such as the reform of water user associations or the drainage of wetlands – that need to take account of the complexity of the ‘target system’. Non-systemic interventions are those that do not have to do that, such as simple construction tasks. This distinction results in the differentiation of groups of interventions… that call for different management approaches. In particular, it highlights a central separation between two types of systemic interventions.

First, there are interventions that lend themselves to in-depth analysis and the elaboration of solutions… by professional experts. Second, there are interventions that squarely confront the limits of expert advice. Here, attempts to assume the role of expert – who conceives ways to change or ‘improve’ a complex system – may even be counterproductive. Neglecting this crucial differentiation is one of the most frequent reasons for the management failures of interventions in agricultural water management.

The essential differences in management approaches required by the various types of interventions are specified and discussed. These reflections result in the grave observation that conventional project management approaches are not suitable for coping with complexity-oriented interventions. The paper presents different management models compatible with the different types of interventions.

Coping with complexity requires capacities of those involved that go beyond the usual disciplinary competence. The paper examines the professional capacities needed by those who provide agricultural water management interventions. Moreover, it draws attention to the special capacities that clients of systemic interventions must acquire if they are to retain ownership. This sheds light on the crucial difference between professional competence and complexity-related capability and on the consequences of ignoring it.

Agricultural water management practitioners face specific pitfalls when confronted with complexity. These relate to the inscrutable nature of complex systems, which tend to encourage opportunistic behaviour such as rent-seeking and corruption. These ‘principal-agent problems’ often result in the misallocation of scarce (water) resources and discriminate against poor rural people. The causes of such problems are described, together with ways of counteracting their emergence.

Agricultural water management systems are nested systems. They are embedded within and contain other complex systems. Moreover, they are highly context specific. Given the importance of institutions to the management of agricultural water, special attention is attached to the issue of specificity of institutional context. The paper presents a ‘quick and dirty’ approach to assessing different institutional contexts that can serve as a basis for strategy discussions… This is an important step when coping with complexity. It can help avoid intervention designs that are incompatible with the prevailing capacities and capabilities.

Finally, the main implications for IFAD are highlighted. A range of suggestions are put forward for future steps and initiatives on how to cope with complexity in agricultural water management. Considering the emerging problems of water scarcity, food security and impact of climate change, IFAD needs to embark on a process of adjusting its future operations in agricultural water management to deal with complexity.

Posted in Agriculture, Institutions, Reports and Studies, Resilience, Water | Leave a Comment »

Social media, complexity science and an age-old information challenge for aid agencies

January 7, 2010 by bramalingam

There is a visible and growing interest in complexity science among social media specialists. This interest is highlighting  once again some longstanding flaws in the information approaches of aid agencies.

In a recent interview, Arthur L. Jue, co-author of ‘Social Media at Work‘ has suggested that both social media and Open Space Technology share a common basis in the ideas of complexity science. As he said to Tom Clifford:

Open Space Technology (OST) draws on principles of chaos and complexity theory, such as self organizing systems, to offer a methodology for facilitating critical conversations in face-to-face meetings that achieve breakthrough outcomes in relatively short timeframes.

…It occurred to me that OST and social media are really quite similar – they’re both applications of chaos and complexity theory in different socio-technical contexts. Whereas OST reflects microcosms of complex adaptive systems at work in the physical world, social media reflects the same thing in the virtual world.

During an OST facilitated meeting, for example, practitioners adhere to a “Law of Two Feet,” moving from one cluster of conversation to another wherever they feel that they are learning and contributing optimally. Similarly, social media involves an organic flow of self-organized, emergent interactions online. Whoever shows up in OST is considered the right person because s/he cared enough about the subject to attend. The same is true for social media. Whenever people comment on or contribute to blogs, they are “showing up” because they care about the topic under discussion.

Social media is really one grand OST experiment using the Internet as our meeting place. That said, studying principles of OST in designing online experiences can help organizations gain valuable insights about how to best utilize social media internally.

In December, Venessa Miemis wrote an article entitled ‘Is Twitter a Complex Adaptive System?‘, and concluded that there was “…a striking similarity between many… key properties [of complexity science and] what’s occurring on Twitter…”

What is the relevance of this for aid agencies? A recent report by the Vodafone Foundation that suggested that many aid agencies have so far failed to take advantage of new social media tools. This has been explicitly linked to the way in which aid agencies are structured and managed. As one of the report authors, Diane Coyle, noted in a BBC interview:

The top-down and centralised nature of aid agencies fails to take advantage of the potential offered by [new] technologies. It’s really quite a different approach from what they’ve done traditionally…

The report suggests that aid agencies could work best by providing a framework for the use of social media technologies, coordinating their use by people in poor and disaster-affected communities, and allowing the free flow of information among people.

This idea, whilst in keeping the ideas of emergence and self-organisation from complexity science (see previous Aid on the Edge posts on distributed leadership in the Obama Campaign and on the use of Open Space in conversation) stands in sharp contrast to the traditional information biases common to aid work. As highlighted by numerous researchers, agencies place greater emphasis on their internal knowledge and capabilities compared with the knowledge of aid recipients and local and national organisations.

The fundamental change called for is spelled out by Coyle:

I think the frame of mind of aid agencies is that it’s their job to help… but it may be that actually the best help you can give is letting other people do it. For the first time the people in affected populations could do more to help themselves, but they can’t do that if the structures of the people trying to help them don’t change.

Posted in Networks, Organisations, Reports and Studies, Technology | 4 Comments »

A Complexity Science Primer

January 5, 2010 by bramalingam

For all ‘Aid on the Edge’ readers wanting a straightforward, clear and above all short introduction to complexity science, your wishes have been answered with a well-written 16 page primer, adapted from Brenda Zimmerman & co’s work on health systems. It doesn’t answer all complexity-related questions, but it is certainly a very useful entry point for those starting out their journey on the complexity sciences. As the abstract notes:

This paper is called a ‘primer’ because it is intended to be a first step in understanding complexity science. In house painting, the primer or prime coat is not the finished surface. A room with a primer on the walls often looks worse than before the painting began. The patchy surface allows us to see some of the old paint but the new paint is not yet obvious. It is not the completed image we want to create. But it creates the conditions for a smoother application of the other coats of paint, for a deeper or richer color, and a more coherent and consistent finish. As you read this primer, keep this image in mind. This paper is not the finished product. Ideas and concepts are mentioned but only given a quick brush stroke in this primer. You will need to look to the other resources… to get a richer color of complexity.

Download the paper here, and do share any thoughts and ideas using the comments function. And for more reports on complexity with specific relevance to development and humanitarian work, take a look at the Publications page of this blog.

Posted in Healthcare, Reports and Studies | 1 Comment »

Launch of 4 UK research programmes on complexity and society is great news (but watch out for the illusion of control)

December 22, 2009 by bramalingam

The UK’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) has announced a new investment of £11 million to fund four new complexity science research projects.

Funded under the banner of “Complexity Science for the Real World”, the four teams of researchers will will use tools and techniques of complexity science to address fundamental problems facing society, including health care, banking systems, natural disasters, sustainability and immigration. Of special interest to development and humanitarian specialists is the work being done by UCL on ‘Explaining, Modelling, and Forecasting Global Dynamics’, where researchers will study trade, migration, security and development aid on a global scale, as well as the interaction between these systems.

An interesting comment was made by an EPSRC senior manager upon announcing these funds: “The world is made up of interwoven orderly, disorderly and complex parts. Many of these complex systems have a big impact on everyday life and this new research will enable us to understand and manipulate them to the advantage of society.” (emphasis added)

The jury is still out as to whether complex systems can in fact be ‘manipulated’ – in fact this is at the heart of a fundamental debate about how all of us working on social, economic and politcal issues position our efforts in complex systems.

The experience of many in the aid sector would indicate that complex systems cannot actually be ‘manipulated’. But the lack of control implied by this is hard to accept. As Vicky Cosstick writes in her  latest paper:

Problems that cannot be easily resolved create ambiguity, discomfort and anxiety. This anxiety may be particularly intolerable for those individuals in organisations who need to be seen to have the answers, or who feel the need to be seen to have the answers. And yet the work we do, whether as managers within INGOs or as external consultants, is rife with situations in which frankly we don’t know what to do, or we don’t know what the answer is, or we don’t really know what will happen as a result of our actions or a given intervention.

If they can effectively navigate these issues, the funded programmes really do have the potential to move forward our shared understanding of the relevance of complexity for real world problems. Watch this space for more on these exciting efforts as they unfold.

Posted in Reports and Studies | 3 Comments »

What Complexity Theory Owes To Pacifism

December 18, 2009 by bramalingam

The December edition of Nature features as its cover article a summary of new research on complexity theory and war, entitled ‘The Ecology of War’.

It argues many collective human activities, including violence, have been shown to exhibit universal patterns. The research team, led by Neil Johnson, had previously shown that the  distributions of casualties both in whole wars from 1816 to 1980 and terrorist attacks follow approximate power-law distributions (for an explanation of power laws, see a previous ‘Aid on the Edge’ blog on power laws in the context of international trade).

The latest work by Johnson’s team shows that the sizes and timing of violent events within different insurgent conflicts also exhibit power law properties. The article has already been the focus of a Big Think piece by David Berreby, on what complexity theory owes to pacifism. Berreby’s piece is well worth reproducing here:

Some time in the early 1960’s, the mathematician Benoît Mandelbrot was asked by a university librarian to give his advice about some dusty journals no one consulted–should they be thrown out? In one of these, an issue of General Systems Yearbook, a paper described how badly the smooth mathematical functions of curves and straight lines were fitted to the real world’s squiggly, irregular shapes.

The author, the English physicist Lewis Fry Richardson, had wanted to measure the precise length of national borders. But surveyors’ tools smoothed out the wriggly shapes of such boundaries: If you make a smooth curve out of the border between Portugal and Spain, for instance, you lose precision about its length, in the same way that you would if you were to round up the price of your lunch from $5.89 to “about six bucks.”

In such cases, the final answer depends on the instrument being used to measure the border. The shorter each unit of measurement, the longer the border would turn out. Which meant that conventional geometry, when asked “how long exactly is the west coast of Britain?” couldn’t give a final answer. Of course, some borders are more irregular than others, and Richardson had expressed that degree of irregularity mathematically as a precise but fractional number, greater than 1. For example, the Portuguese-Spanish border’s degree of irregularity, Richardson calculated, was 1.14.

Mandelbrot had long been interested in these un-smooth shapes, but his mathematical colleagues had dismissed his ideas as exotic curiosities. Here, he realized, was a real-world example of the importance of the subject. A few years later, he published a paper in Science in which he treated Richardson’s “degree of irregularity” as a dimension. In the earlier scientist’s calculations, he wrote, you could see why it was both practical and important to develop a math that could treat such “fractional dimensions.” We know them today as fractals, and we know Mandelbrot as their pioneer.

The defining trait of fractal forms is that each piece is like a miniature image of the whole: ten yards of coastline will exhibit the same irregularities as ten miles. One way to express this fact is to say that fractal forms obey a power law: each point on a fractal curve is related to the others in the same way, whether the scale be an inch, a foot, or a mile.

From Richardson’s interest in national borders, then, we get Mandelbrot’s breakthrough introduction of fractal geometry to the world. Fractals greatly spur interest in power laws. From that work on power laws, we get yesterday’s Nature paper which proposes a power law in data about guerrilla war, which can help us understand those conflicts.

But here’s the odd thing: Richardson’s interest in national boundaries was motivated by his desire to explain war by equations.  Complexity theory, when it turns to organized violence, isn’t branching away from its origins. It is coming home.

Known today for having figured out the mathematics of weather forecasting, Lewis Fry Richardson volunteered to drive an ambulance in the first World War. His experience on the front convinced him he should turn his tools to forecasting a different kind of complex system: the one whose pushing, pulling forces somehow caused millions of people to end up armed and uniformed, spending years trying to kill one another.

Richardson was a Quaker, a pacifist and a scientist to the core. The delusions and mass emotions of wartime never held him (in fact, he burned some of his work on turbulent fluids, lest it be used in poison-gas research). “Everyone admires a soldier’s courage,” he wrote, “and if he is on their side they see nothing else. If he is on the other side his cruelty fills the foreground of the picture. It is as if every soldier had courage printed across his back and cruelty across his chest.”

Richardson always hoped that well-performed science could be an antidote to delusions about warfare (“Counting,” he said, “is an antiseptic against prejudice.”) So he spent four decades of his life on the mathematical analysis of “deadly quarrels.” Almost nobody cared, which probably didn’t surprise him. In this life, he once said, “some of the best work passes unpraised.”

Then, yesterday, his approach was on the cover of Nature. For once, let him not go unpraised. Fractals, power laws and complexity theory have roots in his patient, noble struggle to end war.

Posted in Pacifism, Public Policy, Reports and Studies | Leave a Comment »

Bank of England Director uses complexity theory to explain global financial crisis

December 16, 2009 by bramalingam

Andrew Haldane, Executive Director of Financial Stability at the Bank of England gave a speech earlier this year which focused on the idea of the global financial system as a complex adaptive system.

In his speech, Haldane focuses on applying the lessons from other network disciplines – such as ecology, epidemiology, biology and engineering – to the financial sphere. Using the complexity lens, he provides an account of the structural vulnerabilities that built-up in the financial system over the past decade. He concludes by suggesting ways of improving the robustness of the financial system in the period ahead.

As Yasmin Merali of Warwick University notes:

The global financial system as a CAS illustrates the importance of network topology and diversity in system robustness and resilience. The density and complexity of the financial network led to profound structural vulnerabilities and amplified uncertainties in the pricing of assets, causing seizures in certain financial markets. Network feedback effects under stress (hoarding of liabilities and fire-sales of assets) coupled with the dominant positions of big players and the erosion of diversity in institutions’ business and risk management strategies resulted in the current crisis.”

Posted in Financial crisis, Networks, Public Policy, Resilience, Strategy | Leave a Comment »

Lessons in Distributed Leadership from the Obama Campaign

December 4, 2009 by bramalingam

The Obama presidential campaign owed its victory not to a single charismatic candidate, but to the efforts of a disciplined and motivated organisation whose influences go back to landmark civil rights movements. Many of the principles were consistent with the emerging ideas of ‘complex adaptive leadership’.

A recent MIT lecture featured Marshall Ganz, veteran of the 1960s civil rights movement and key activist in the Obama election campaign, who described how the principles and practices he learned over decades of voluntary organising and leadership were applied in last years ‘against the odds’ victory.

Ganz’s view was that leadership involves “taking responsibility to enable others to achieve purpose in the face of uncertainty.” Leaders “recruit, motivate and develop others, constructing a community around common interests, and building capacity from within the community”. Effective volunteer-based organisations cannot rely on rigid hierarchies or command-and-control strutures but must instead engage and enable lots of people to become innovators who are adaptive in the face of uncertainty.

Such “distributed leadership” draws from and resonates with emerging theories  of complex adaptive leadership. From this perspective, leadership is not about a person, but is rather an interactive dynamic, within which any particular person will participate as leader or a follower at different times and for different purposes. Leadership is not limited to a formal managerial role, but rather emerges in the systemic interactions between diverse actors. As Charles Heskscher puts it:

There is a growing sense that effective organization change has its own dynamic, a process that cannot simply follow strategic shifts and that is longer and subtler than can be managed by any single leader. It is generated by the insights of many people trying to improve the whole, and it accumulates over [time]” 

This kind of “distributed leadership” is precisely what the Obama campaign cultivated and invested in, says Ganz. Thousands of people acquired the skills and practiced “the arts of leadership necessary to self-govern in democracy.”

Some unique conditions made this campaign so successful, including Obama’s story of hope, which drew on a persuasive personal narrative. There was also the campaign’s strategy of developing grassroots capacity to win caucuses and close primaries; its use of the Internet to attract an army of small-scale, repeat contributors; and its capacity for “continual learning” about what was and was not working.

Ganz’s 90 minute lecture can be seen here: http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/662

Posted in Campaigns, Knowledge and learning, Leadership, Networks, Organisations, Public Policy, Strategy | 1 Comment »

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