Complexity

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All other things being equal, a bummer. A violation of Occam’s razor; a source of confusion, a time-sink, a material contributor to catastrophic normal accidents; a waste — yet in a distributed network of autonomous bodies, a total inevitability. The more sophisticated the group of individuals, the greater the rate of complexification.

Complication versus complexity

Things can be merely complicated without being complex. Complicated problems are naturally difficult, but you can solve them with rules and algorithms. The systems and processes, by which The Man commands and controls employees can manage this kind of complicatedness.

Algorithms, systems and processes don’t work for complex problems, however. Complex problems involve independent, autonomous agents interacting in un-anticipatable ways. No pre-defined rule-set can anticipate the interactions. Black swans, technology disruptions but also interlocking complicated systems (nuclear power plants, space shuttles, air-traffic control systems are complex.

Identify your systems

Is your system simple, complicated or complex?

• Simple: suitable for checklists, recipes etc, where heuristics can overcome the hubris that comes with treating simple processes as trivial. Disinfecting your instruments before performing heart surgery is simple, but not trivial. See: The Checklist Manifesto
• Complicated: complicated systems need skilled management, but the right hands can usually manage them successfully. You know you have a complicated system when there is a comprehensive and robust set of axioms and rules, and thus it is a matter of making sure that the proper models are being used for the situation at hand. Chess is a complicated system. Alpha Go is a complicated system. Do you hear that, Daniel Susskind?
• Complex: Complex systems are dynamic, constantly changing, and interact with themselves and the environment in unexpected ways. They may comprise multiple other simple, complicated and indeed complex systems interacting with each other. So step one is to manage the simple and complicated sub-systems as effectively as possible — deploy checklists, simplify, homogenise — but even after that you are still left with a system which is innately unpredictable. It will do unexpected things. Like blowing up. So have your plans for dealing with those normal accidents.

See also

• Barnacles
• Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies by the magnificent Charles Perrow.