“Copying nature’s ideas allows people to harness the power of evolution to come up with clever products. Now a group of researchers has taken this idea a step further by using an entire living organism—a slime mould—to solve a complex problem. In this case, the challenge was to design an efficient rail network for the [...]
Archive for the ‘Knowledge and learning’ Category
Slime mould, simple rules and the politics of self-organisation
Posted in Knowledge and learning, Leadership, Networks, Organisations, Public Policy, Reports and Studies, Self organisation on February 15, 2010 | 3 Comments »
“There is no such thing as a natural disaster”: crises, complexity and the role of theory
Posted in Knowledge and learning, Natural disasters, Networks, Organisations, Public Policy, Reports and Studies, Resilience on February 3, 2010 | 2 Comments »
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 [...]
Lessons in Distributed Leadership from the Obama Campaign
Posted in Campaigns, Knowledge and learning, Leadership, Networks, Organisations, Public Policy, Strategy on December 4, 2009 | 2 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 1960s [...]
Technology and development: a symbiotic relationship?
Posted in Knowledge and learning, Reports and Studies, Technology on November 27, 2009 | 1 Comment »
In “The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves,” W. Brian Arthur, a noted complexity economist who works at Santa Fe, has put forward a new theory of the relationship between science, economy and technology. McKinsey Principle Eric Beinhocker has described it as “The most important book on technology and the economy since [...]
Latest Asian Development Bank ‘Knowledge Solution’ focuses on Complexity and Development
Posted in Evaluation, Knowledge and learning, Public Policy, Reports and Studies, Strategy on November 21, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Olivier Serrat, Head of Knowledge Management at the Asian Development Bank, has just published a short paper on complexity and development, as part of their Knowledge Solutions series. Brief excerpt and link below.
Development is a complex, adaptive process but—with exceptions—development work has not been conducted as such… development assistance often follows a linear approach to achieving [...]
Network analysis and the challenge of emergence
Posted in Knowledge and learning, Networks on November 19, 2009 | 2 Comments »
“…One of the great mysteries of large distributed systems – from communities and organisations to brains and ecosystems – is how globally coherent activity can emerge in the absence of centralized authority or control… in many systems, usually those that have developed or evolved naturally, the source of control is far from clear.
Nevertheless, the intuitive [...]
How to Organise a Childrens’s Party – Based on the Nature of Systems
Posted in Facilitation, Knowledge and learning, Organisations on November 14, 2009 | 3 Comments »
This short clip sees Dave Snowden of Cognitive Edge use the metaphor of a childrens party to present three different kinds of systems, and the organisational approaches relevant to each. His delivery is typically insightful and acerbic.
FYI Dave ran a meeting in 2008 for the aid & complexity community, and will also be keynote speaker at the [...]
Latest Outcome Mapping report highlights central role of complexity sciences in improving aid planning, monitoring and evaluation
Posted in Evaluation, Knowledge and learning, Reports and Studies on November 3, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
A recent report from the Outcome Mapping Learning Community highlights that ‘insights from community members have shown that the underlying principles of Outcome Mapping acknowledge and resonate very well with complexity theory.”
This is because Outcome Mapping explicitly recognises:
that social systems are made up of large numbers of independent agents who interact in interdependent and unpredictable [...]
Knowledges, Capacities and Learning for Development: Insights from Complexity approaches (4th meeting in the emergent series)
Posted in Knowledge and learning, Meetings on September 29, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
The 4th in the emerging series on aid and complexity took place at the Institute of Development Studies at Sussex on 3rd October 2008. Pete Cranston blogged about it shortly thereafter – here is an extract from his thoughts.
“I was at an IDS seminar last Friday – “Knowledges, Capacities and Learning for Development: Insights from Complexity approaches”. If the title is alarming [...]
