xplain what ABIDE is.   It is a mnemonic for the things that can be managed in a complex system.  ASHEN did something similar for knowledge management.   I got increasingly irritated with consultants asking people what they knew when this did knowledge audits.  To my mind that was a meaningless question in a meaningless context.   So I developed one of the first narrative enquiry methods focused on identifying decisions made in an organisation, clustering those decisions and then asking people When you make these types of decisions: What Artifacts did you use?  What Skills are needed?  What Hheuristics are in play?  What Experience is necessary?  What (if any) Natural Talent is needed.   The results where then clustered in to knowledge objects, matched to business needs and used to create a portfolio of knowledge management projects.

description of ABIDE - attractors, boundaries, identity, diversity, environment

Jean Tabaka discusses using design thinking and complexity theory in order to balance and Agile adoption.

Cities are made up of physical networks of infrastructure, from buildings to roads and subway lines. But they are also made up of flows of people, vehicles, information and goods. It’s these cities of flow and networks of interaction which I call the living city. The living city is hard to spot, as it doesn’t tend to manifest itself in a tangible way. We move around cities. We interact with each other. But these actions leave little physical residue. The living city defines a multiplicity of invisible cities.

Here is a  new book on complexity and cities entitled “Complexity Theories of Cities Have Come of Age: An Overview with Implications to Urban Planning and Design” edited by Juval Portugali, Han Meyer, Egbert Stolk and Ekim Tan with the intriguing title that what we do has come of age. Well maybe, maybe not, I leave you to be the judge of that. But it does represent a sea change. The book has a wide cast of authors and the focus is on implications for urban planning and design. My own contribution written with Stephen Marshall reviews the origins of the field, returning to Geddes, Jacobs and Alexander, and is entitled: The Origins of Complexity Theory in Cities and Planning”. Amongst those contributing are Hermann Halken, Peter Allen, Nikos Salingaros, Bill Hillier, Jeff Johnson, Hans Meyer, Egbert Stolk, Ekim Tan, Denise Pumain, Harry Timmermans, Stephen Read, Ward Rauws, Carl Gershensen, Dirk Sijmons, Theodore Zamenopolous, Katerina Alexiou, Michael Bitterman, Sevil Sarijildiz

A wicked problem is a social or cultural problem that is difficult or impossible to solve for as many as four reasons: incomplete or contradictory knowledge, the number of people and opinions involved, the large economic burden, and the interconnected nature of these problems with other problems. Poverty is linked with education, nutrition with poverty, the economy with nutrition, and so on. These problems are typically offloaded to policy makers, or are written off as being too cumbersome to handle en masse. Yet these are the problems—poverty, sustainability, equality, and health and wellness—that plague our cities and our world and that touch each and every one of us. These problems can be mitigated through the process of design, which is an intellectual approach that emphasizes empathy, abductive reasoning, and rapid prototyping.

articles from ECO and others

The Institute for Research in Complexity and Society applies findings and insights from the scientific and mathematical study of complex systems to the challenges and opportunities facing today's world community. We hold that the disciplines making-up of the fields of complexity science can be of great value in fostering requisite innovations in the social, political, economic and technological arenas.

I also made the strong point that complex adaptive systems thinking is not the same thing as systems thinking (at least in terms of the popular meaning of that term, technically systems dynamics). I think this was well illustrated by a session earlier in the day which was advertised as being led by Peter Senge, but in practice his presence was required in Austria so we had a video recording in three parts. My tweet stream (@snowded) of the session I leave to those interested to follow. The critical point here is the difference between a CAS approach and that advocated by Senge. He also creates a false dichotomy between industrial society and a romanticized, nostalgic and inaccurate view of ancient wisdom and its connection with the land. The latter is in my opinion idealistic in the wrong sense of the word. There is far too much attention to language not action in Senge's work and we saw that with quotes from the Communist Party and Unilever. Wonderful words, but the actions ....

After lunch Joseph Pelrine talked about multi-ontolgical sense-making, Stacy's model, the Cynefin model and so on. What stuck with me was: High agreement in the face of high uncertainty is religion, disagreement in the face of certainty (that something has to change) is politics. Assuming uncertainty and that there is no universally applicable solution is science.

presents and futures

Cities are systems of information architecture. Here, "architecture" refers not to the design of buildings, but to how the components of a complex system interact. Information exchange includes visual input from the environment, personal contact and interactions, telecommunications, as well as the movement of people. Information networks provide a basis for understanding living cities and for diagnosing urban problems. This paper argues that a city works less like a commercial electronic system, and more like the human brain. As a functionally complex system, it heuristically defines its own functionality by changing connections so as to optimize how components interact. An effective city will be one with a system architecture that can respond to changing conditions. This analysis shifts the focus of understanding cities from their physical structure to the flow of information.

Exystence produced several focus documents during its lifetime concerned with the science of complex systems. These documents offer an overview of complexity research, as well as discussions on key objectives, challenges and ways forward.

But a more readable paper is by Turo Uskali, which formed his PhD submission. See Innovation Journalism, Vol 2 No 11 2005 or ISBN 1549-9049. Uskali reviews weak signals from a journalistic viewpoint, and discusses the four main categories of weak signals in his definition: feelings, uncertain signals, almost certain signals and exact signals.

50 Posts and Articles that Made Me Think in 2011

So my feeling has been that the whole concept of how things are created and organized has been shifting for the last 40 or 50 years, and as I said, this sequence of science as cybernetics, catastrophe theory, chaos theory and complexity theory, are really all ways of us trying to get used to this idea that we have to stop thinking of top-down control as being the only way in which things could be made.

A literary essayist, distinguished professor, veteran derivatives trader and hedge fund manager, Nassim N. Taleb explores ways to live in a world we don't quite understand. His New York Times best-seller The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable uses a multi-disciplinary approach to examine the role of the black swan—a rare, unpredictable event that has a major impact—across philosophy, economics, finance, engineering, cognitive science and history. The book was hailed by The London Times as "one of the 12 most influential books since World War II."

Attention Ottawa. Go and see @snowded on Oct 12. http://t.co/fLm9URjT Best 3 hrs you will spend all year. #complexity #cynefin

Attention Ottawa. Go and see @snowded on Oct 12. Best 3 hrs you will spend all year. #complexity #cynefin

I have now read through this book three times. Every reading was enjoyable and informative. I make these comments at the beginning of this review because when I saw this book announced, I dreaded reading it. The title suggested that the reader might be in for a trudge through a turgid and unintelligible assertion of the absolute relativism of knowledge with the general postmodernist programme reinforced by a turn to chaos and complexity. That is pretty well exactly what the text is not. It is clearly, indeed beautifully, written and although it seeks to reconcile poststructuralist perspectives and complexity, Cilliers is adamant in dismissing the notion that such a reconciliation provides a license for absolute relativism. This is an important book with a substantial argument to make. It is full of good things. At the same time there are important and suggestive absences in it, absences which are of very considerable significance for the general project of 'simulating society'.

Organizational ecology (also organizational demography and the population ecology of organizations) is a theoretical and empirical approach in the social sciences that is especially used in organizational studies. Organizational ecology utilizes insights from biology, economics, and sociology, and employs statistical analysis to try and understand the conditions under which organizations emerge, grow, and die.

For the agile software development community, agility is defined by the values expressed in the agile manifesto. But in concrete terms, what does it mean for a software project to be agile? US Air Force Colonel John Boyd defined agility as the ability to operate the Observation-Orientation-Decision-Action (OODA) loop faster than an adversary. Agility therefore depends on the tempo at which we can exploit the OODA loop, and it is culture, not methodologies or tools that determine our OODA loop speed. This definition of agility has implications for the software development community. This short paper introduces Colonel Boyd, the OODA loop, the factors which influence OODA loop speed and the possible research opportunities into software engineering culture we are considering.

I have been arguing this for some time, and over the years have found various ways to express it. On this occasion I found a neat way of summarising the differences with three I-words relating to the individual, and 3 C-words relating to the community of collective.

Path dependence explains how the set of decisions one faces for any given circumstance is limited by the decisions one has made in the past, even though past circumstances may no longer be relevant

Seems #HBR has finally understood the tenets of #complexity "Six Common Misperceptions about Teamwork by Hackman"

Seems #HBR has finally understood the tenets of #complexity "Six Common Misperceptions about Teamwork by Hackman"

While Jacobs could only speculate on the value of our urban interactions, West insists that he has found a way to “scientifically confirm” her conjectures. “One of my favorite compliments is when people come up to me and say, ‘You have done what Jane Jacobs would have done, if only she could do mathematics,’ ” West says. “What the data clearly shows, and what she was clever enough to anticipate, is that when people come together, they become much more productive.”

Geoffrey West: "Why Cities Keep Growing, Corporations And People Always Die, And Life Gets Faster " @edge video-feature

From possible to probable to plausible: how does your organization develop anticipatory awareness? #cynefin #complexity

In this paper, we review the empirical evidence of discontinuous distributions in complex systems within the context of panarchy theory and discuss the significance of discontinuities for understanding emergent properties such as resilience. Over specific spatial-temporal scale ranges, complex systems can configure in a variety of regimes, each defined by a characteristic set of self-organized structures and processes. A system may remain within a regime or dramatically shift to another regime. Understanding the drivers of regime shifts has provided critical insight into system structure and resilience. Although analyses of regime shifts have tended to focus on the system level, new evidence suggests that the same system behaviors operate within scales. In essence, complex systems exhibit multiple dynamic regimes nested within the larger system, each of which operates at a particular scale.

Accommodating antisocial or even irrational qualities is a persistent challenge in planning practice. Doing so without condescension is an even greater one. Recognizing that an urban community needs to accommodate those who value impersonality and those who thrive in modernist landscapes and those who do not wish to have any eyes on their street is critical to developing urban planning practices that will have value and enjoy broad support. But when planners instead follow what is seen as the Jacobsian path and promote a narrow spectrum of essentially middle-class and nonurban values, it should not surprise us when the community or city they hope to shape fails to respond as expected. The city is essentially heterodox, beyond the effective control of even the best-intentioned ideology.

Treating an issue as complex implies that the approach to building an evidentiary base shifts and that an exploritory approach should be engaged. In the literature the point of difference is described as moving from robust approaches (complicated) to resilient and adaptive strategies (complex). The table below distinguishes what would be differences in the way in which the evidence is built.

Understanding how such transitions come about in complex systems such as human societies, ecosystems and the climate system is a major challenge. However, in a time where pressures on such systems steadily increase, insight the mechanisms for catastrophic shifts may help predicting such transitions, or even managing systems for enhanced resilience against unwanted shifts.

The adaptable corporation<br />
To survive, organizations must execute in the present and adapt to the future. Few of them manage to do both well.

This course examines global change and complex systems dynamics through the lens of panarchy theory. The term ‘panarchy’ was coined to describe the overlapping hierarchical structure of the complex ecosystems (lakes, forests, grasslands, etc.), human systems (governance systems, industrial sectors, corporations, settlements, etc.), and combined (socio-ecological) systems that now make up the ecosphere. Panarchy theory describes how all such subsystems are interconnected within a global hierarchy in characteristic, never-ending adaptive cycles of growth, accumulation, release [ also called ‘collapse’ or ‘creative destruction’] and renewal “that take place in nested sets at scales ranging from a leaf to the biosphere over periods from days to geological epochs, and from the scales of a family to a socio-political region over periods from years to centuries (Holling 2001, 392)”.

Why is social learning important for today’s enterprise?

The genius of the book is Eric Beinhocker’s grand synthesis of diverse fields of research, including physics, evolutionary biology, anthropology, psychology, game theory, information theory, and economic history, all to tell the big story about why traditional neo-classical economic theory fails, and how “Complexity Economics” works. The book includes sections on how to rethink the role of governments and private sectors, as well as how Complexity Economics might impact corporate management and strategic planning.

U-Lab is a research centre of the Delft University of Technology addressing the increasing complexity of the composition, construction, development and use of urban patterns and the role urban design can play to understand and manipulate this complexity.<br />
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The aim of U-lab is to strengthen urban design as a technical-scientific discipline by the development of new instruments and methods, which create new ways of understanding and interpreting present-day urban realities, as well as new ways of working at the urban realities of tomorrow.

The following is a list of the most influential theorists in the field of cybernetics and systems theory and related domains, with links to their biographies, info about their work or their home page (for those that are still alive). Their most important publications can be found in our list of basic books and papers on the domain. The role some of them played in the development of the field is discussed in our history of cybernetics and systems.

Michael Batty & Paul Longley (1994)<br />
Fractal Cities: A Geometry of Form and Function<br />
(Academic Press, San Diego, CA and London)

The mantra of resilience is early detection, fast recovery, rapid exploitation.

The connected company: Really great post from @davegray @dachisgroup on Social Business Design!!

Panarchitecture is a kind of hybrid thinking that combines insights and practices from architectural thinking with those from ecological thinking—specifically the ecological thinking known as panarchy. C.S. “Buzz” Holling coined panarchy as the name of his framework for understanding the dynamics of ecosystems. The pan- in panarchy is meant to connote the Greek god Pan, who is associated with both nature and disruption

Igor Nikolic graduated in 2009 on his dissertation: co-evolutionary process for modelling large scale socio-technical systems evolution. He received his MSc as a chemical-- and bioprocess engineer at the Delft University of Technology. He spent several years as an environmental researcher and consultant at University of Leiden where he worked on life cycle analysis and industrial ecology. In his research he specializes in applying complex adaptive systems theory and agent based modeling.<br />
On TEDxRotterdam Igor Nikolic left the audience in awe with his stunning presentation and visualizations, mapping complex systems.

Last week Jerry Mikcalsky’s Yi Tan Technology Community podcast was a discussion with Dave Snowden regarding his Complexity Framework Cynefin may have been the epiphany of the year for me. Jerry’s e-mail announcement provided background information so the conversation would have some depth of understanding needed to frame a good understanding (the email content is on the podcast page).

Ecologist Eric Berlow doesn't feel overwhelmed when faced with complex systems. He knows that more information can lead to a better, simpler solution. Illustrating the tips and tricks for breaking down big issues, he distills an overwhelming infographic on U.S. strategy in Afghanistan to a few elementary points.

In their extraordinary new book, Planning With Complexity (Routledge, 2010), Judith Innes and David Booher make the case for a new way of knowing and deciding. They call this new approach collaborative rationality. Instrumental rationality -- the traditional way of making the case for what needs to be done and why in the public arena -- has given way to collaborative approaches to generating and justifying decisions. Innes and Booher point to negotiation theory as the foundation for this approach and use complexity science to explain why it works. They have nicknamed their theory DIAD because it builds on Diversity, Interdependence and Authentic Dialogue. Anyone who works in the public policy arena needs to know what Innes and Booher have to say about collaborative rationality.

Analyzing emerging practices of collaboration in planning and public policy to overcome the challenges complexity, fragmentation and uncertainty, the authors present a new theory of collaborative rationality, to help make sense of the new practices. They enquire in detail into how collaborative rationality works, the theories that inform it, and the potential and pitfalls for democracy in the twenty-first century. Representing the authors’ collective experience based upon over thirty years of research and practice, this is insightful reading for students, educators, scholars, and reflective practitioners in the fields of urban planning, public policy, political science and public administration.

Many aspects of collaborative processes mesh well with interpretive way so fknowing. They focus on particular situations rather than look for general principles; participants offer knowledge for their experience as well as from research; they challenge statements of fact and causality; and they build shared meaning around issues. Indeed collaborative dialogue is, more than anything else, a process of negotiating meanings — of problems, of evidence, of strategies, of justice or fairness, and of the nature of desirable outcomes. If meanings and values were already shared, bureaucracy could handle the issue in a routine way and experts could use established positivist principles and methodologies to solve problems. In collaborative dialogues participants listen to each other’s information and to that of experts and engage in joint learning.

Some problems are such complex, entangled, multifaceted hairballs that we cannot approach them alone. They change and morph as quickly as our ability to understand them. They are known to academics as "wicked problems."

In modern enterprises, we need a new way to talk about these wicked problems, as well as new approaches to address them. Normal isn't normal anymore. Change is the norm.

Cynthia Kurtz on her personal history of sensemaking and cynefin, her confluence model and other frameworks.

Complexity corresponds to greater organizational differentiation. The more complex an organization, the more responses it has for a greater number of environmental events or external change and stimuli. In systems theories, complexity is an intrinsic characteristic. The question is not complexity, but adaptability. Complexity, if it stands in the way of correctly perceiving phenomena, and if it prevents proper and commensurate responses to those phenomena, is a bad thing. But only on the basis of the response to change; not in and of itself.

Networks that are resilient on their own become fragile and prone to catastrophic failure when connected, suggests a new study with troubling implications for tightly linked modern infrastructures.

Tainter’s thesis is that when society’s elite members add one layer of bureaucracy or demand one tribute too many, they end up extracting all the value from their environment it is possible to extract and then some.

The ‘and them some’ is what causes the trouble. Complex societies collapse because, when some stress comes, those societies have become too inflexible to respond. In retrospect, this can seem mystifying. Why didn’t these societies just re-tool in less complex ways? The answer Tainter gives is the simplest one: When societies fail to respond to reduced circumstances through orderly downsizing, it isn’t because they don’t want to, it’s because they can’t.

My view is that transformative work leads us to become insiders committed to the worlds we care about. Design becomes secondary, a skill, that supports larger commitments to the world. And this may be the biggest difference between “Design 1.0 and Design 4.0.”

Mark Schenk from Anecdote uses Pecha Kucha format to describe complexity using the Cynefin framework

he natural world is full of awe-inspiring examples of the way nature transforms simplicity into complexity

In some networks, a few "hubs" have lots of connections, while everybody else only has a few. This model shows one way such networks can arise.

Such networks can be found in a surprisingly large range of real world situations, ranging from the connections between websites to the collaborations between actors.

This model generates these networks by a process of "preferential attachment", in which new network members prefer to make a connection to the more popular existing members.

This is a brief introduction to concepts and tools of complex systems that can be applied to a wide range of systems. The central notion was the development of an understanding of the complexity profile which quantifies the relationship between independence, interdependence and the scale of collective behavior. By developing such tools we may discover much about ourselves, individually and collectively. The merging of disciplines in the field of complex systems runs counter to the increasing specialization in science and engineering. It provides many opportunities for synergies and the recognition of general principles that can form a basis for education and understanding in all fields.

NetAge Working Papers set out a network theory and practice for organizations

All these are certainly complex problems, but they are not problems of disorganized complexity, to which statistical methods hold the key. They are all problems which involve dealing simultaneously with a sizable number of factors which are interrelated into an organic whole. They are all, in the language here proposed, problems of organized complexity.

Knowledge games are the future of work: not in theory but in practice.

Now I agree with Tainter when he concludes that the only hope to forestall the collapse of a complex society is technological advance. I’d argue that this is what’s driving the field of networked urbanism at the moment. But, I'm not so sure we can do it. This is where my optimism rubs up against my nagging feeling that urban informatics, locative media, smart grids, and all the things that the cool kids at LIFT and SXSW are dreaming up are too little, too late.

What then drives this technological ecosystem? Arthur points to the human propensity to solve problems as the force that leads to new generations of technology, through recombination of existing technologies. This is a profoundly social and complexity-informed view of the relationship between economy, innovation and technology.

The nine books you must read to appreciate Emergent Urbanism.

Noah Raford – Collapse Dynamics – 26 May 2009 – London School of Economics

Collapse is endemic to many classes of complex adaptive systems, they tend to occur in certain regular ways, and we can use this knowledge to understand and prepare for radical change.

This is a short clip from a recent lecture I gave at the LSE Complexity Programme, integrating Dave Snowden's Cynefin Framework with Gunderson and Holling's Cycle of Adaptive Change.

This adds the time dimension to Snowden's Framework and adds a strategic knowledge dimension to the Cycle of Adaptive Change. This provides queues for knowledge and action during different kinds of transition, which provides a theory-driven evidence base for strategic action during times of dynamics uncertainty.

In this segment I introduce Dave Snowden’s Cynefin Framework of knowledge management, then adapt it to Gunderson and Holling’s resilience work on the Adaptive Change Cycle. The result is a new framework for strategy making in the context of different kinds of environmental change.

'Most textbooks focus heavily on techniques and procedures for long-term planning, on the needs for visions and missions, on the importance and the means of securing strongly shared cultures, on the equation of success with consensus, consistency, uniformity and order. [However, in complex environments] the real management task is that of coping with and even using unpredictability, clashing counter-cultures, disensus, contention, conflict, and inconsistency. In short the tasks that justifies the existence of all managers has to do with instability, irregularity, difference and disorder.'

Enterprise systems are inherently complex, often involving many business processes, people, and organizations across a company. Given this built-in complexity, it’s no surprise that failures abound; it’s amazing these systems function at all.

I think the essence of business problems are waiting to be solved by a combination of social network analysis (SNA), text analysis, and some good, old-fashioned, proper attention to human beings– not all things that have been here all along, but things that are readily accessible now.

The city of New York has been experimenting with closing parts of Broadway and Times Square to traffic in an effort to make the city more pedestrian friendly. Recently, they took it a step further to see if people would make use of seating.

Its main thesis is that when one is operating in arenas with significant amounts of uncertainty, that a different approach than is normally used in conventional planning applies.

When thinking about good times to collaborate, it’s useful to start with a simple model that helps us understand the nature of the types of issues we might encounter in an enterprise. Here I’ve illustrated the Cynefin (pronounced cun-ev-in) framework which categorises organisational activity into four domains [2]:

A complex system is one in which the co-evolutionary process between agents and system (people and government being one manifestation of that) is such that any future state is inherently uncertain, cannot be modelled and defining outcome based targets produced perverted behaviour.