Informal systems

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There is much talk in these pages of models, narratives, complexity, systems theory, and high modernism As an all encompassing modern management dogma that knits all of these things together. Our fascination with algorithms, big data, artificial intelligence and exponentially accelerating technologisation this leads us into believing that we can reduce the world’s organisation and therefore its problems down to predictable, rationalisable, atomised units.

I suppose there is some irony that this blind trust in the model is itself guilty of mistaking the map for the territory. An over-reliance on the model caused by an over-reliance on a model.

A model only models what it can model. In Seeing Like A State, James C. Scott describes this is the problem of legibility — because a simplistic model is cannot adequately react to the nuances of an autonomous organic network, political administrations oblige, and incentivise, their populations to organise themselves to best fit the model rather than. The model itself, by its existence, queers the pitch, skews incentives. People optimise for the model, often undermining the model’s original goals — tax planning, right?

Thus, a model is not just an inadequate representation of how a system behaves; it is a politically-enforced model that corrupts the behaviour of the system in itself.

Also pitted against the reductionists and the high modernists are the systems theorists and complexity people, two of whom are featured in the video in the panel. Joe Norman (to the right) makes an interesting assertion that, in any system, informality — arrangements outside the model or that the model cannot see and therefore treats as non-existent — are fundamental to its operation. Indeed, the “formal” parts of a system are small islands in a sea of informal relations.