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Reflections on a workshop – exploring ‘complexity sciences’ in development

Posted in Knowledge and learning, Meetings, Reports and Studies on June 15, 2011 | 1 Comment »

Following on from the recent UK Collaborative on Development Sciences (UKCDS) workshop on complexity science and international development, I shared some thoughts on the day and the ways forward. This is a cross-post from the UKCDS website.

Last month the UK Collaborative for Development Sciences held a workshop to explore the potential of complexity science for international development. ‘Complexity science’, an area of growing interest for the aid sector, is an umbrella term for a range of tools and methods that focuses on a systemic understanding of interconnected problems, on the dynamic and nonlinear nature of change, and on the adaptive, self-organising behaviours of individuals and groups.

One of the key goals of the UKCDS workshop was to identify areas where such ideas may be of concrete value for the development research agenda. This area is of growing relevance as policymakers and practitioners seek out new ways of making sense of a turbulent world. Although there have been some useful theoretical and conceptual advances, and a steadily growing number of studies, there has been a lack of resources for sustained efforts to bring these ideas to bear on specific development and humanitarian issues.

Speakers came from a range of different disciplinary backgrounds, and focused on different issues:

  • Eric Beinhocker of Mckinsey talked about the evolutionary nature of economies, and how growth can be better explained through ‘complexity economic’ than traditional neoclassical economics. (click here for presentation)
  • Yasmin Merali and James Porter of Warwick University Complexity Centre discussed methodological approaches to complexity, and some of the challenges of bringing these ideas to bear in situations of cultural diversity. (click here for presentation)
  • Melissa Leach talked about the work she and her colleagues led at the STEPS Centre at the UoS, and in particular how different conceptions of risk can be established through a complexity lens. (click here for presentation)
  • Danny Burns of IDS talked about the use of systemic action research to explore interconnections between social, ecological and economic systems in different parts of Africa – in particular how health and education – need to be understood through a systemic lens in order to be able to develop appropriate interventions.

There were some common threads through all of the presentations, namely that the ideas and concepts of complexity science do have considerable potential relevance for development work. Areas highlighted as worthy of further exploration included economic growth, innovation, institutional change, sustainability, implementation and networks.

There were also some common caveats. Complexity sciences should not be seen as a new ‘flashy’ technical approach to developing the right answer – instead, it should be seen as vital that this agenda is taken forward in a way that acknowledges and respects diversity of perspectives, cultures and opinions, especially across the so-called ‘North-South divide’.

Intriguing suggestions came up from the group discussions about a future research agenda. Key points included:

  • the need to use clear and jargon-free language and not drown audiences in complexity jargon
  • the need to identify some clear case studies of how complexity science ideas have been applied in practice
  • the need for resources for basic research in this area, especially in those areas where there is sufficient data
  • the need to analyse the institutional resistance to systemic approaches.

The key will be to ensure that this work moves ahead in a concerted fashion, and with due regard for the principles at the heart of this work. While this won’t be a ‘quick win’, the meeting closed with a real sense of energy and enthusiasm. Watch this space for more developments.”

For further information on the workshop, download the Workshop Note (PDF 206KB).

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New ODI Working Paper on ‘Taking Responsibility for Complexity’

Posted in Knowledge and learning, Public Policy, Reports and Studies on June 6, 2011 | 2 Comments »

Last week saw the publication of a new ODI working paper on the implications of complexity for development agencies. In his latest paper, Harry Jones examines the role of information and knowledge in improving results and ways of working.

The first half of the paper focuses on ways in which readers can determine the nature of the problems they face and explains how complex problems challenge “traditional approaches to implementation.” The second half of the paper provides an overview of different approaches that can be employed in order to navigate complex problems, focusing on “when, where and how” complexity needs to be addressed.

Well-written and thought-provoking, the paper is a concise summary of some of the key ideas ‘out there’ about how to navigate complex problems. Harry also provides a good series of annotated ‘sign-posts’ to tools and approaches which will be useful for anyone looking to learn more about this important area of work. The paper provides a useful complement to the 2008 ODI working paper on complexity and aid (which Harry and I worked on together, along with other colleagues at ODI), looking at some of the ideas presented there through fresh eyes.

As leading development thinker David Booth notes in his foreword, there is much here for readers to engage with, “arrive at their own conclusions, and be enriched in the process.”

A very good contribution to the growing literature in this area.

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Philippines turns to complexity science to strengthen disaster preparedness

Posted in Climate change, Innovation, Institutions, Knowledge and learning, Natural disasters, Networks, Public Policy, Reports and Studies, Resilience, Strategy on March 15, 2011 | 3 Comments »

Following the Japanese earthquake, the Philippines government have announced plans to explore the use of complexity science in better understanding disaster vulnerability and risk.

The effort is to be taken forward by the Congressional Commission on Science Technology and Engineering, in collaboration with the Philippine Disaster Science Management Center.

Senator Edgardo Angara, Chair of Congressional Commission was quoted in a press release making a clear connection between the Japanese earthquake and this new initiative. He said that the tragedy served as another wake up call for the Philippines to invest in the science of disaster management and preparedness. The Senator also said that this will be taken forward as an international collaboration with Japan, Taiwan and others.

A particular inspiration for this work has been the OECD’s report from the 2009 global science forum, which highlighted resilience and vulnerability to extreme events as areas that could benefit from the application of complexity science (Click here for more on the report).

This is the latest example of a growing trend to apply complexity science in disasters, as noted in a previous Aid on the Edge of Chaos post. Complexity-inspired approaches are increasingly being put forward as alternatives to the ‘classic’ ways of analysing and understanding disasters. Indeed, one of the studies quoted in that earlier post suggested that:

…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…”

One grim example focused on Manila itself:

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).

More recently Wired magazine ran a fascinating account of an attempt to understand the catastrophic  interconnections between hurricanes, deforestation and the 2010 Haiti earthquake (available here). The following is an excerpt from this excellent write-up:

…cause and effect in Earth systems is distinctly nonlinear. Inputs and outputs may not be proportional: a cause with ever-so-slightly different parameters than the previous instance might result in a wildly different effect. Additionally, systems and their component sub-systems interact to produce feedback loops that can either amplify or stabilize resulting effects. Feedbacks blur the line of what is cause and what is effect…”

There is much for this important initiative to consider going forward, not least how the scientists involved will work to get international aid agencies – often insensitive to history, context and dynamics of change - to take account of the emerging findings.

More on this important new initiative to follow soon.

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Can Grand Challenges disrupt economic orthodoxies?

Posted in Biology, Economics, Evolution, Innovation, Public Policy, Reports and Studies on November 30, 2010 | 1 Comment »

In October, the US National Science Foundation put out a Grand Challenge asking economists and social scientists to draw up “grand challenge questions that are both foundational and transformative”. Respondents to the 2020 challenge were asked to look forward 10-20 years, explain the challenges ahead and propose a strategy for addressing them.

The wording of the Challenge was as follows:

At the end of the first decade of the 21st century, the social, behavioral, and economic sciences face extraordinary opportunities to address next-generation research challenges. The landscape is vast and complex, stretching across temporal and spatial dimensions and multiple levels of analysis — from studying the human brain to implications of decision-making in a dynamic and fragmented yet interconnected world. As we look forward 10 or even 20 years, [we] seek to frame innovative research for the year 2020 and beyond that enhances fundamental knowledge and benefits society in many ways.

The Challenge has been covered by various media outlets and blogs. One of the most interesting has been a Newsweek series which argues that the scope for truly groundbreaking responses is worryingly limited because of the prejudices that plague economics. As a whole, the economics profession is seen as having become:

…much more intolerant of divergence from orthodoxy… The range in which dissent happens is so narrow. In a sense they still cannot imagine the system can operate to undermine itself. That is not a position that is allowed anywhere in the economics profession. The field got rid of methodological self-criticism…

The piece goes on, echoing a previous Aid on the Edge post:

Indeed, the joke on economists… is that they create simplistic models that depend on people behaving as rational actors motivated by self-interest, yet “they have a blind spot regarding themselves.” The way they squabble mulishly to defend now-indefensible positions is itself evidence of how flawed those rational-actor models are…

However, there may be some hope for the 2020 Grand Challenge yet. One specific proposal has had an extraordinary show of support – over 50 signatories including Elinor Ostrom, Yaneer Bar-Yam, Eric Beinhocker, Paul Ehrlich, Jonathan Haidt, Simon Levin and many others. The proposal, entitled The Relevance of Evolutionary Science For Economic Theory and Policy is a submission by evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson and economist John Gowdy (and can be downloaded here). Wilson, Gowdy and their supporters suggest that evolutionary science provides an “exceptionally useful set of theoretical and empirical tools for integrating the many disciplines…  required to formulate economic theory and public policy for the 21st century.”
The table below illustrates the differences between the evolutionary / complexity perspective on economics and the more traditional neo-classical thinking, drawing on work by Eric Beinhocker and W. Brian Arthur:

Complexity / Evolutionary Economics Traditional Economics
Dynamic - Open, dynamic, non-linear systems, far from equilibrium - Closed, static, linear systems in equilibrium
Agents  

- Modelled individually; use inductive rules of thumb to make decisions; have incomplete information; are subject to errors and biases; learn to adapt over time; heterogeneous agents

 - Modelled collectively; use complex deductive calculations to make decisions; have complete information; make no errors and have no biases; have no need for learning or adaptation (are already perfect), mostly homogeneous agents
Networks  

- Explicitly model bi-lateral interactions between individual agents; networks of relationships change over time

 - Assume agents only interact indirectly through market mechanisms (e.g. auctions)
Emergence  

- No distinction between micro/macro economics; macro patterns are emergent result of micro level behaviours and interactions.

 - Micro-and macroeconomics remain separate disciplines
Evolution  

- The evolutionary process of differentiation, selection and amplification provides the system with novelty and is responsible for its growth in order and complexity

 - No mechanism for endogenously creating novelty, or growth in order and complexity
Technology - Technology fluid, endogenous to the system - Technology as given or selected on economic basis
 

Preferences

  

- Formulation of preferences becomes central; individuals not necessarily selfish

 - Preferences given; Individuals selfish
 


Origins from Physical Sciences

 - Based on Biology (structure, pattern, self-organized, life cycle) - Based on 19th-century physics (equilibrium, stability, deterministic dynamics)
Elements - Patterns and Possibilities  

- Price and Quantity

Perhaps the most serious challenge to the traditional orthodoxy on the right hand side of the table has been the recent financial crisis:

it was largely because the field of economics came to be dominated by “neoclassical” thought—or the idea that markets are rational and can reach “equilibrium” on their own—that so-called financial innovation on Wall Street was allowed to run amok in recent decades. That led directly to the crisis of 2007–09. No matter how crazy or complex the products got, the theory was that, with little government oversight, the inherent stability of markets would keep things from getting too out of hand.

Or as Alan Greenspan put it, rather more succinctly:

[Our] whole intellectual edifice has collapsed.”

Despite the apparent failure of existing thinking and the potential benefits of evolution and complexity-inspired approaches, the experience of evolutionary economists has not been an easy one. J Doyne Farmer is a physicist at the Santa Fe Institute who is trying to bring the idea of complexity and evolution into economics by making use of advanced computing power to map human economic behavior the way weather or climate change is analysed. However, Farmer’s programme for studying systemic risks in markets was only approved after a sympathetic case officer overruled negative assessments by “neoclassical economists who reject any model that doesn’t tend toward general equilibrium”. As Farmer puts it:

The established view just holds this stuff back. One of the dangerous cultural patterns that economics has fallen into is an excessive emphasis on theorem proof for its own sake rather than what gives you scientific results.”

The Newsweek article concludes on a note that somehow manages to be both visionary and pessimistic:

Should there not be a new economics that develops fresh concepts? Economics progresses one funeral at a time… In other words, it was necessary for the old lions to pass on before new seminal thinking took hold. But we may not have time to wait upon funerals. Policy is driving relentlessly ahead, and the economics profession and other sciences may get left far behind.
PS For more on how evolutionary thinking might help in development  policy and practice, do check out Owen Barder’s fantastic presentation from last month.

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One for all of us aid researchers…

Posted in Reports and Studies on October 5, 2010 | Leave a Comment »

H/t Michael Keizer

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History on the edge of chaos

Posted in Chaos, Financial crisis, Knowledge and learning, Public Policy, Reports and Studies, Strategy on September 14, 2010 | 9 Comments »

Earlier this year, renowned historian Niall Ferguson authored a piece in Foreign Affairs which presented human civilisations as complex adaptive systems, in contrast with the traditional view of civilisations as moving through a gradual cyclical of growth and decline.

As Ferguson argues, the cyclical model of civilisations has been long shared by historians, political theorists, anthropologists, and the public at large. Writers as diverse as Vico, Hegel, Marx and Toynbee shared a common belief and assumption that the history of humanity had some kind of natural rhythm to it. There is a rather standard theory underlying all of this – that all societies will inevitably move through a number of stages, a kind of grand narrative of rise and fall.

“Rome” – the archetypal ‘rise and fall of civilisation’ story (in the West at any rate)

Different disciplines have their own distinctive take on this rise and fall, but with some strong underlying resonances. So, for example, economic historians such as Paul Kennedy suggest that great powers rise and fall “according to the growth rates of their industrial bases and the costs of their imperial commitments relative to their GDPs.” By contrast, ecological historians such as Jared Diamond argue something like this: “population[s] grew larger than their fragile and inefficient agricultural system could support. More people meant more cultivation, but more cultivation meant deforestation, erosion, drought, and soil exhaustion. The result was civil war over dwindling resources and, finally, collapse.”

Easter Island, one of the civilisations described by Jared Diamond in Collapse

However, alternatives theories are available, which are based on a more realistic understanding of how change actually happens. As Ferguson asks:

What if history is not cyclical and slow moving but arrhythmic — at times almost stationary, but also capable of accelerating suddenly, like a sports car? What if collapse does not arrive over a number of centuries but comes suddenly, like a thief in the night?”

Ferguson argues that great powers and empires can be characterised as complex systems, made up of a very large number of interacting components, that “more resembles a termite hill than an Egyptian pyramid.” As such, they operate between order and disorder, on “the edge of chaos”, and while they may appear to be stable and in equilibrium for long stretches, they are in fact constantly adapting to maintain the overall sense of stability.

But there comes a moment when complex systems “go critical.” A very small trigger can set off a “phase transition” from a benign equilibrium to a crisis.”

Bond Trader, London, 2008

This so-called sandpile effect is, according to Ferguson, all too often misunderstood and misrepresented by those who seek to explain past events.  The fundamental problem is that analysts who analyse such crises tend to explain low-frequency, high-impact moments – wars, crashes, collapses – by misunderstanding complexity and how it works.

Instead of looking at the interconnectedness of the events and the prevailing context, most analysts try to explain crises in terms of linear, long-term causes. This is the ‘narrative fallacy’ identified in popular works such as the Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, and this gives rise to a much more cyclical, and perhaps more comprehensible, model of change.

As Ferguson suggests:

Drawing casual inferences about causation is an age-old habit. Take World War I. A huge war breaks out in the summer of 1914, to the great surprise of nearly everyone. Before long, historians have devised a story line commensurate with the disaster: a treaty governing the neutrality of Belgium that was signed in 1839, the waning of Ottoman power in the Balkans dating back to the 1870s, and malevolent Germans and the navy they began building in 1897. A contemporary version of this fallacy traces the 9/11 attacks back to the Egyptian government’s 1966 execution of Sayyid Qutb, the Islamist writer who inspired the Muslim Brotherhood.

In reality, according to Ferguson, the proximate triggers of a crisis are often sufficient to explain the sudden shift from a good equilibrium to a bad mess. So, from his perspective:

World War I was actually caused by a series of diplomatic miscalculations in the summer of 1914, the real origins of 9/11 lie in the politics of US and Saudi Arabia in the 1990s… Most of the fat-tail phenomena that historians study are not the climaxes of prolonged and deterministic story lines; instead, they represent perturbations, and sometimes the complete breakdowns, of complex systems.

 

Ferguson concludes that “an understanding of how complex systems function is an essential part of any strategy to anticipate and delay their failure…” On the other hand, according to Taleb, the profound misunderstanding of the causal chains between policy and actions – what he terms ‘aggressive ignorance’ – can lead to triggering a multitude of Black Swans: “like a child playing with a chemistry kit”.

There is a lot of uncertainty in the application of ideas in complexity to social, economic and political problems (see for example the debates kicked off by Bill Easterly using fractals to describe inequality last week on Aid Watch). What is clear, however, is that establishing the kind of understanding Ferguson and Taleb call for is far from straightforward:

causal relationships are often nonlinear, which means that traditional methods of generalizing through observation (such as trend analysis and sampling) are of little use… Some theorists of complexity would go so far as to say that complex systems are wholly nondeterministic, meaning that it is impossible to make predictions about their future behavior based on existing data.”

As argued in a previous aid on the edge of chaos post, the biggest challenges to the wider take-up of such complexity-inspired suggestions is that, if they stay both sensible and true to the principles of complexity, they tend not to provide recipes which can be followed. Rather, complex adaptive systems theory:

  • provides a set of lenses with which to look at the world,
  • helps pose questions which can help better understand the dynamics of real world systems, and
  • helps generate insights as to how these dynamics can be ‘sensed’ and ‘navigated’

There is much of relevance here for thinking about development and humanitarian work. As a recent interviewee suggested to me, complexity theory helps us understand processes of development as continuous, emergent and full of surprises.

But aid efforts – sometimes deliberately, sometimes unintentionally, sometimes because of contractual necessity, sometimes through sheer incompetence – tend to misrepresent these evolutionary processes of change in the complex systems that are developing countries.

And so at its simplest, the lesson to draw from Ferguson’s essay is that in order to….

 

…first we have to understand better exactly how history is made.

 

(Thanks to Rick Davies for bringing the original article to my attention)

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Global CEO survey reveals primary challenge as addressing the ‘complexity gap’

Posted in Financial crisis, Institutions, Leadership, Networks, Organisations, Reports and Studies on June 8, 2010 | 5 Comments »

IBM recently released the 2010 Global CEO Survey, its 4th such study since 2004, based on over 1,500 face-to-face interviews with private sector CEOs and senior public sector leaders from 33 different industries spread over sixty countries. A concise summary, drawing on work by Irving Wladawsky-Berger, is below.
In the  past three studies, CEOs consistently said that coping with change was their most pressing challenge. This time around, the primary challenge emerging out of the CEO conversations was pretty clear: complexity.  “CEOs told us they operate in a world that is substantially more volatile, uncertain and complex.  Many shared the view that incremental changes are no longer sufficient in a world that is operating in fundamentally different ways.”
 
 Given the realities of globalization, disruptive innovation, and profound changes across technology, markets and society, it should not be surprising that CEOs and their companies must now navigate a highly volatile and unpredictable business environment.  Nearly 80% of CEOs expect the business environment to grow significantly more complex over time, but less than half believe that their organizations are equipped to deal with it successfully.  This gives rise to what the report refers to as a Complexity Gap, that is, the difference between the expected complexity and the extent to which CEOs feel well prepared to manage it.
 
 Globalization is one of the major causes of this complexity gap.  “CEOs told us that the current trend toward globalization would not let up.  They anticipate shifting of economic power to rapidly developing markets, and foresee bigger government and heavier regulation ahead.  These shifts are unyielding and contribute to the sense of a world growing more uncertain, volatile and complex.
 
 Technology is a second major factor contributing to growing complexity: “… creating a world that is massively interconnected, with broad-based convergence of systems of all kinds, both man-made systems like supply chains or cities; and natural systems like weather patterns or natural disasters.  Our world is increasingly subject to failures that require systems-level and cross-systems-level thinking and approaches.  The consequences of any decision can ripple with unprecedented speed across business ecosystems the way the recent economic crisis has impacted nearly every market.”
 
Capitalizing on Complexity is the title of the 2010 study.  As the name indicates, the same complexity factors that can negatively impact or even kill a company can also open up new opportunities for those companies that are prepared to capitalize on the rapidly changing business environment.  This is not a new concept - almost seventy years ago, Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter wrote about creative destruction, the process of transformation that accompanies radical, disruptive innovation, does away with companies that are not able to adjust to changing market realities and opens up new opportunities for those companies that are ready to capitalize, adjust to and thrive on those same changes.
 
 The Study identified certain Standout organizations that have been able to deliver good business results even in the recent economic downturn and feel much more prepared to deal with complexity.  They come from every industry and every part of the world.  One CEO, for example, said: “Really, I am not afraid of complexity at all.  On the contrary, this just motivates me.”
 
 While the average complexity gap was 30 percent the Standout companies had a complexity gap of just 6 percent.  At the other end, companies with poorer business results had a 52 percent complexity gap.  “Compared to their industry peers, Standouts had higher increases in year-to-year operating margin.  Even more striking, during the economic crisis, Standouts’ revenue growth was six times higher than the rest of the sample.  So, what is this group doing to thrive?”
  
Based on extensive analysis of the interview results, the Study concluded that Standout CEOs are capitalizing on complexity by focusing on three key areas:  embodying creative leadership; reinventing customer relationships; and operational dexterity.
 
Embodying creative leadership
“Creativity is the most important leadership quality, according to CEOs.  Standouts practice and encourage experimentation and innovation throughout their organizations.  Creative leaders expect to make deeper business model changes to realize their strategies.  To succeed, they take more calculated risks, find new ideas, and keep innovating in how they lead and communicate.”
The more successful leaders acknowledge, are comfortable with and welcome the disruptive innovations all around them, instead of fighting these changes, as so many do.  They also realize that embracing disruptive innovations implies a different, much more distributed and collaborative management style that engages with a new generation of employees, partners and customers.

“ . . . even before the financial upheaval last year, business executives operating in a fast-changing, global market were beginning to realize the value of managers who could think more nimbly across multiple frameworks, cultures and disciplines.  The financial crisis underscored those concerns – at business schools and in the business world itself.”

Reinventing customer relationships
“In a massively interconnected world, CEOs prioritize customer intimacy as never before.  Globalization, combined with dramatic increases in the availability of information, has exponentially expanded customers’ options.  CEOs said that ongoing engagement and co-creation with customers produce differentiation.  They consider the information explosion to be their greatest opportunity in developing deep customer insights.”

Building operating dexterity
 
 “CEOs are revamping their operations to stay ready to act when opportunities or challenges arise.  They simplify and sometimes mask complexity that is within their control and help customers do the same.  Flexible cost structures and partnering capabilities allow them to rapidly scale up or down.”
While creative leadership and customer relationships are relatively subtle concepts, operational dexterity is much more concrete.  It is all about leveraging advances in technology, systems architecture and organizational capabilities to help the business become more flexible and agile so it can quickly adapt to rapidly changing market conditions…

In its concluding words, the 2010 Global CEO Study observes:  “For CEOs and their organizations, avoiding complexity is not an option – the choice comes in how they respond to it.  Will they allow complexity to become a stifling force that slows responsiveness, overwhelms employees and customers, or threatens profits?  Or do they have the creative leadership, customer relationships and operating dexterity to turn it into a true advantage?”
I liked the report, not least because it triggered some interesting questions. I wondered what the ‘complexity gap’ would be among international aid agencies, and which if any are ‘stand out’ organisations in our sector? How much resonance do the suggestions from the business and wider public sector worlds  - leadership, relationships, dexterity - have for development and humanitarian work? And finally what are the connections between this business-oriented view of complexity – arguably more akin to risk – and the insights of complexity science? Watch out for future posts following up on these issues.

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Compiling evaluation and complexity resources

Posted in Evaluation, Knowledge and learning, Meetings, Reports and Studies on May 17, 2010 | 1 Comment »

For all those interested in or attending the Evaluation Revisited conference this week, here is a very rapid compilation of free-to-download presentations and reports plus details of meetings and websites which may be of interest.

Please do add more resources using the comments function below…

Presentations:

Mokoro Presentations on Monitoring and Evaluating complex development given in October 2009

Michael Quinn Paton: Evaluating the Complex – Given at NORAD 2008 Conference

Ben Ramalingam: Evaluation and the Science of Complexity – Given at NORAD 2008 Conference

Ricardo Wilson-Grau: Complexity and Evaluation in International Networks MDF 2006 Seminar

Reports and Studies

Evaluation and Complexity - full report of the July 2009 meeting in London

Outing the Tooth Fairy by Vicky Cosstick

David Byrne’s paper on integrated methods and their potential to further understanding of complex processes of transformation, written for UNAIDS

Evaluation evolution? Broker Article from June 2008

Pamela Mischen on public administration and complexity

Outcome Mapping Learning Community report which found “that the underlying principles of Outcome Mapping acknowledge and resonate very well with complexity theory.”

Bob Williams Evaluation and Systems Thinking Draft

Irene Guijt, Assessing and Learning for Social Change, IDS

Ian Sanderson’s paper on Evaluating Complexity given at the European Evaluation Society’s Fifth Conference in 2003

Rick Davies’ paper on Improved Representations Of Change Processes: Improved Theories Of Change presented at the Seville (2002): 5th Biennial Conference of the European Evaluation Society and the http://www.mande.co.uk website

Terry Smutylo’s paper ‘Crouching Impact, Hidden Attribution’ on Outcome Mapping case studies

Meetings and Conferences

Show me the Change A very well-documented event in Melbourne, Australia – a ‘National Conference on Complexity, and the Art and Science of Evaluation of Behaviour Change’

The Mokoro Seminars Two part seminar series run by Mokoro, an Oxford aid think-tank and consultancy operation, with some excellent presentations, notably from Pip Bevan

The 2009 London Dialogue the 6th in the emergent series of workshops and conferences, hosted by Panos and facilitated by Robin Vincent and Ben Ramalingam

The 2008 Norad Meeting A conference held by NORAD in Oslo, bringing together practitioners and policy makers from around the world

Websites

Rick Davies deservedly popular M&E website

The fast-growing Outcome Mapping Learning Community

The Pelican Initiative – a fantastic resource

The IDRC Evaluation Unit Website – the people who support so much of the work cited above

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Lessons rising from the ash

Posted in Financial crisis, Knowledge and learning, Leadership, Natural disasters, Public Policy, Reports and Studies on May 3, 2010 | 1 Comment »

In the 1970s, systems thinker Russell Ackoff argued that some of the greatest problems happen when messy problems are dealt with as if they were simple puzzles. The true extent of interconnectedness and interdependence of the world we live in is ignored or downplayed until a crisis – i.e. when it is already too late.

Time and time again, whether it is foot and mouth disease, terrorism, climate change, or the banking crisis, senior leaders and politicians display their inability to anticipate critical issues that are emerging. This is what I have described elsewhere as the “catastrophe-first” model of lesson learning.

The Icelandic volcano has led to a new wave of such analyses among journalists, often  drawing on the ideas of complexity science. A New York Times article featured on this blog is just the latest example. In the UK’s Guardian, George Monbiot drew on complexity in his piece entitled ‘What links the banking crisis and the volcano?’, and suggested:

beyond a certain level, connectivity becomes a hazard. The longer and more complex the lines of communication and the more dependent we become on production and business elsewhere, the greater the potential for disruption. This is one of the lessons of the banking crisis. Impoverished mortgage defaulters in the United States – the butterfly’s wing over the Atlantic – almost broke the global economy. If the Eyjafjallajökull volcano – by no means a monster – keeps retching it could, in these fragile times, produce the same effect.

(a previous Aid on the Edge post highlights a speech by the Bank of England’s director of financial stability in which he uses complexity adaptive systems theory to explain the banking crisis)

But what do scientists think? John Brockman, editor of the ever-impressive Edge.org, invited scientists, philosophers, psychologists, economists, artists and theoreticians from diverse fields to contribute their thoughts to The Ash Cloud- An Edge Special Event.

Brockman’s call was specific: he wanted the community of thinkers on the Edge to think about the ash cloud and the reaction to it, and tell him in 250 words something “that I don’t already know and that I’m not going to read in the newspapers”. Perhaps unsurprisingly, quite a few of the comments focus on different aspects of complexity science. These included:

  • Haim Harari, physicist, who echoes Monbiot in saying the ash crisis and the financial crisis have much in common:  Most decision makers don’t understand math and science, he says, and most mathematicians and scientists “have no feel for the real implications of their calculations.”  He says we need scientifically trained political decisions makers.
  • Peter Schwartz, futurist and cofounder of the Global Business Network,  is among those who say the consequences of the eruption are “a true Black Swan.”  He also says the event may not be over. If the volcano continues to erupt, or the even bigger adjacent volcano erupts, the ash cloud could be bigger, spread further, and have even greater consequences.
  • Emanuel Derman,  professor of financial engineering, who said  “Old technology-propeller driven planes-would not have been grounded by ash. More efficient, more vulnerable.”
  • Lawrence Krauss, physicist, who argued that the ash cloud demonstrates that with major events there is no such thing as local or regional, illustrating using the potential of a nuclear conflict between India and Pakistan to disrupt global climate for a decade. He adds, “If a simple volcano in Iceland  can immobilize much of the world, even a small scale nuclear conflict has the capacity to affect all of humanity so profoundly that mere airline flight cancellations would be the least of our worries.”

Others wrote about our need to understand risk, the trouble with risk aversion, the fallibility of models, and our relationship with chaos.  Click here to read all of these  provocative essays.

I have two personal favourites. The first by Eduardo Salcedo-Albaran has implications for complexity in aid problems:

Two ideas should be kept in mind when dealing with this epistemological and methodological entity called “nature”. First, we do not have the “real” image of nature, and maybe never will. We only have models, theories and simulations, in which “facts” are defined by a partial number of variables. Second, we need more integrative thinking: Scientists working together will recognize the complexity of nature, have a more accurate image of it, and will stop proposing naïve models. This applies to understanding volcanoes, brains, markets and stars. We cannot surrender to the complexity. When we stop trying to explain nature through science, we try it through religion or myth. Curiosity is also a force of nature, and science is the best tool available to understand the world… That’s the best we can do with uncontrollable forces of nature: from volcanic ashes to emotions.

And a shorter contribution by Roger C. Schank, psychologist and computer scientist, who says, simply: “

We are confused, as we should be.”

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Powerpoint, complexity and the art of hypnotising chickens

Posted in Knowledge and learning, Public Policy, Reports and Studies, Strategy, Technology on April 27, 2010 | 3 Comments »

An article in yesterday’s NY Times launches a scathing attack on the use of Powerpoint in the US military, and draws some interesting conclusions about how such tools can inhibit understanding of complexity.

Exhibit A, below, is a now-infamous slide that is intended to represent the complexity of American military strategy in Afghanistan.

As General Stanley A. McChrystal, the leader of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, said when shown the slide: ““When we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war”.

The slide has done the rounds on the Internet, provoking derision and criticism of yet another military tool that has been over-used. Bill Easterly made a point of sharing the above diagram on Aidwatchers last year, and highlighting its risible conotations. But the post drew comment from another blogger who suggested that ”if we believe that these really are complex systems, then modelling them is surely one way to get a grip, and a map is simply an intentional way to simplify the world in order to discern important connections.”

It would seem that some in the military would agree. One General who had banned Powerpoint being used in his ranks has argued that the worst crime of these tools is not graphics like the one above, but in fact the opposite problem – that Power Point’s worst offences are “rigid lists of bullet points (in, say, a presentation on a conflict’s causes) that take no account of interconnected political, economic and ethnic forces”. As the General goes on to argue:

It’s dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control. Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable… If you divorce war from all of that, it becomes a targeting exercise”

Commanders say that behind all the PowerPoint jokes are serious concerns that the program stifles discussion, critical thinking and thoughtful decision-making. Or as to quote John Kay on decision making, as Owen Barder did recently:

It is hard to overstate the damage recently done by leaders who thought they knew more about the world than they did – the managers and financiers who destroyed great businesses in the pursuit of shareholder value; the architects and planners who believed that cities could be drawn on a blank sheet of paper; and the politicians who believed they could improve public services by the imposition of targets. They failed to acknowledge of the complexity of the systems for which they were responsible and the multiple needs of the individuals who operated them… Politicians imagined they could reconstruct the Middle East on the basis of an American model of lightly regulated capitalism and liberal democracy, although they had not the slightest knowledge or understanding of the societies they sought to remodel. The banking executives supposed they were in control of large institutions, when in reality the floors beneath them were occupied by a rabble of self-interested individuals determined to evade any controls on their activities. Financiers believed that models they did not understand enabled them to manage risks they did not understand, attaching to securities they did not understand. That is how the UK and US entered this decade with foreign policy in tatters, a financial system close to meltdown and a fiscal policy in disarray. Successful decision-making is more limited in aspiration, more modest in its beliefs about its knowledge of the world, more responsive to the reactions of others, more sensitive to the complexity of the systems with which it engages. Complex goals are generally best achieved obliquely.

As an aside, senior military officials have said, off the record, that the Powerpoint ‘does come in handy when the goal is not imparting information, as in briefings for reporters [which] often last 25 minutes, with 5 minutes left at the end for questions from anyone still awake. Those types of PowerPoint presentations… are known as “hypnotizing chickens.”’

(due thanks to Alexander Knapp)

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