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, [...]
Archive for the ‘Reports and Studies’ Category
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 »
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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, [...]
What happens when you are busy making other plans
Posted in Climate change, Institutions, Knowledge and learning, Leadership, Public Policy, Reports and Studies, Resilience, Strategy on April 10, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
John Lennon famously quipped that life was what happened when you were busy making other plans. A new book Dynamic Sustainabilities: Technology, Environment, Social Justice from the fantastic STEPS centre at the University of Sussex focuses on how much the same contradiction plays out in the global movements toward development, environmental sustainability and social justice. [...]
Three recent articles on complexity and aid-related issues
Posted in Institutions, Knowledge and learning, Networks, Reports and Studies, Self organisation, Strategy, Traffic on April 8, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
Owen Barder on the coming collapse of the development system and on the need for variation and selection in improving the aid system Bill Easterly on spontaneous order on getting cabs in New York, and the relevance for development. Susan Curran on the complexity of cooperation, drawing from a seminar at the James Martin 21st [...]
Complexity and Healthcare: Reformer, First Change Thyself
Posted in Healthcare, Public Policy, Reports and Studies, Strategy on March 26, 2010 | 1 Comment »
One of the biggest stories this week is that US President Barack Obama has signed a landmark healthcare bill into law – the largest expansion of the US federal social safety net since the 1960s. But work by leading healthcare analysts around the world would indicate that the safe passage of the bill is only the [...]
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 | 4 Comments »
“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 [...]
Evaluating Complex Development – Presentations and Meeting reports
Posted in Evaluation, Meetings, Reports and Studies on February 9, 2010 | 2 Comments »
October 2009 saw a seminar in Oxford on the topic of evaluation and complexity, the first in 2 such events planned by Mokoro, a development consultancy. Presentations from the seminar are available from the website, which include an excellent overview from Pip Bevan as well as specific examples of complexity-oriented evaluations. As the seminar summary states: [...]
