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 [...]
Archive for December, 2009
Launch of 4 UK research programmes on complexity and society is great news (but watch out for the illusion of control)
Posted in Reports and Studies on December 22, 2009 | 3 Comments »
What Complexity Theory Owes To Pacifism
Posted in Pacifism, Public Policy, Reports and Studies on December 18, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
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 [...]
Bank of England Director uses complexity theory to explain global financial crisis
Posted in Economics, Financial crisis, Networks, Public Policy, Resilience, Strategy on December 16, 2009 | 5 Comments »
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 [...]
Lessons in Distributed Leadership from the Obama Campaign
Posted in Campaigns, Knowledge and learning, Leadership, Networks, Organisations, Public Policy, Strategy on December 4, 2009 | 4 Comments »
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 [...]
An Equation for Copenhagen: Conformity + Rapid Change = Collapse
Posted in Climate change, Public Policy, Resilience, Strategy on December 1, 2009 | 3 Comments »
American scientists using agent-based modeling techniques have linked excessive conformity to societal collapse and even mass extinction. The implications for the Copenhagen negotiations next week seem stark. The researchers at Dalhousie University and the University of California-Davis have modeled how well different learning strategies work in different learning environments, and found that under certain circumstances societies can be [...]
