Are We Ready for Complexity ?
only complex adaptive systems . An organization is a group of people . Those people interact with each other in many ways , some of which are complex and some of which are not . Organization and self-organization are inextricably bound up together in organizations , and saying that an organization " is " one without the other is usually meant to entice ( or control ) rather than inform . There are no only-complex patterns in human life . Every gathering of ten huts has a chief . Every lunch meeting takes place in an engineered space . Every forum has rules . That is what we do . We organize and self-organize at the same time .
Instead of telling people that everything is suddenly complex and no longer complicated , authors should explain that everything has always been and will always be both complex and complicated — complexicated , I like to call it . The good news is that organization and self-organization can work to mutual benefit . I saw a perfect example of this when I worked at IBM . The smart people there knew how to recognize the complex and the complicated , which to use when , and how to combine them . Smart people have been doing that for millennia .
When we can stop seeing complexity as a whole new world dominated by a falling sky or a feast of opportunity , we can put away our over-simplified stories about it . We can learn to recognize complex phenomena , work with them , and welcome them — with open eyes — as old friends .
Another Generation to Sink in
If we tell second stories about complexity because we are not ready for the first stories , I think our children are ready . In many of my narrative projects , I ask people about the predictability of events in stories . I use the question to map perceptions of stability and instability across conceptual space . I have noticed a pattern : Older people are more likely to associate instability with negative outcomes in stories . Younger people are more likely to mark stories as both unstable and positive .
One day I was thinking about this while watching a movie with my son . It was called Clifford ' s Really Big Movie . In it there was a lovely song called “ Until I Go ” ( Gordon , 2007 ), which my ( then ) six-year-old understood immediately . The song goes , in part :
You ' ve gotta get lost if you wanna get found
Gotta wind up to get unwound
Things only look up from down below
And I can ' t come home until I go
When I heard these lyrics , I was immediately reminded of my productive-unproductive system diagram , and of the uncertainty of the butterfly , the keystone species , and the wandering climber . It made me wonder if our children will come to terms with complexity in ways we cannot .
In the novel Voyage to Yesteryear ( Hogan , 1999a ), a ship filled with
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