Why Complexity should be Embraced for Transparency
At a time when misinformation runs rife in social media and while governments are grappling with keeping up with controversial public discussions, how we allow for complexity will play an important role in progressing forwards.
Every policymaker’s manual has some fine print on ‘complexity’ — and if you’re lucky, you might find a chapter or two about it. There’s an unspoken reluctance to open the Pandora’s box on complexity to the wider public. Why? There may be a multitude of reasons on the checklist, but you’ll find ‘explainability’ featuring strongly in there somewhere — like a prickly cactus no one wants to touch.
The nature of complexity means that it’s difficult to end up at a pre-determined outcome by following a prescribed path — assuming that outcome even solves the problem you’re working with. Yet, in a world where countries aspire to provide more transparency, complexity is often side-stepped or hidden behind a series of tweets, political slogans, announcements, action plans or reduced to tables, charts, dashboards and fancy infographics — or worse, cited as a reason for a lack of transparency!
Now, don’t get me wrong — there have been many successful action plans, and visual representations have been invaluable in helping people better understand and explore information. But if we take a step back to the issues of concern, there are many questions that need to be asked at the outset — “How have the issues been framed?”, “How do we determine what information is relevant?” and “How does the way we scope a problem affect the solution?” amongst others.
And this is where the ‘taming’ of the complexity is actually taking place…
Framing the Problem is putting it in a box
The complexity within which an issue is held — in contrast to the complexity within the issue— is ‘reduced’ through the articulation of the problem itself. And what we often perceive as the ‘problem’ is a representation that’s derived from this reductionist approach.
Some will recognise this as seeing the problem through the lenses of various political propaganda, social media filters or subconscious biases. There is the potential for an enormous amount of variability in even defining the problem.
So the process through which a policy problem is articulated is where the transparency ought to begin! Before the problem is framed… with observations of and across the many contexts around the issue.
Policy modellers may recognise this as having to explain the rationale as to how they came up with their models in the first place, what they perceived as the problem, their assumptions and modelling limitations — not just releasing their models as open source, which in itself is a step forward in the Open Government movement.
Daunting? Yes, but this may be because the original ‘complexity ecosystem’ is no longer present to support the many contexts that have been stripped away while articulating the problem. That, and explaining rational decisions in complex living systems doesn’t come without a hitch… sooner or later you’re going to have to confess using that secret ingredient — your gut feeling!
And this takes us back to the source of the complexity…
Can’t see the Forest… without looking at the Trees
“The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think” — Gregory Bateson
There have been a lot of discussions on how complexity should be ‘managed’ or ‘reduced’ — and many a policymaker has been challenged with delivering a ‘simple’ message or solution for the masses to ‘understand’. Indeed the study of ‘complexity’ itself and the many steps, tools and frameworks to ‘tame’ it can be intimidating enough for most people.
Then there’s the language around it — complexity vs complicated (I’m particularly like Mark Foden’s metaphor of cats for understanding ‘complexity’ and clocks for ‘complicated’, but it gets trickier when you notice that some cats act like clockwork at mealtimes…!), linear vs non-linear or lateral thinking, static vs dynamic, stable vs chaotic…
Can you picture a diagram of boxes and circles on a whiteboard, with arrows pointing outwards and inwards in at least half a dozen colours? Or circular flowcharts describing processes? While these may be useful abstractions in ‘modelling’ complexity, they are still a step away from the complexity itself!
So how is transparency ever to be achieved amidst all this? Is a reductionist approach that aims to define a problem at the outset inevitable?
At this point we find ourselves at the perceived dichotomy between complexity and transparency…
In a previous article, we discussed the relationship between ‘transparency’ and ‘openness’ — and how information may be ‘open’, but without ‘sense-making’ there can be little transparency or understanding.
While the purpose of ‘Open Government’ is to allow for citizens to have some public oversight into the workings of government, the sense-making involved in this process is critical for genuine transparency.
This means that any interpretation or articulation of the issues might actually distort or even obscure the true nature of the complexities involved rather than serve to simplify them. So where does a policy maker start when looking at issues within society?
There is a distinction to be made between ‘reducing the complexity by simplifying a problem so that it may be easily understood’ and ‘creating the conditions for allowing a deeper understanding of the complexity’. One implicitly re-frames the complexity for public consumption through a pre-determined lens, while the latter allows for the public to re-frame the complexity using their own sense-making faculties directly from the source.
While there are many overlapping moral and ethical contexts involved in comparing the two, this takes us into the hazy space of ‘trust’ in government— and the articulation of public and social issues. But it also touches on the perception of the capacity of the general public to understand or be willing to work with the raw complexity.
But just as in nature, people are working within and with complexity all the time …
Pure, Unadulterated Complexity
“We can liberate ourselves by trusting our own instinct and finding the thought-lenses which show us our world in the way we need to see it…” — John O’Donohue
In continuing the work of three generations in her family, Nora Bateson and the International Bateson Institute have carefully created group processes known as ‘Warm Data Labs’ that allow people to develop a deeper understanding of complexity through multiple contexts.
Warm data labs create the conditions required for people to work with complexity through ‘trans-contextual’ lenses — be it economic, educational, cultural, ecological, health or technology, amongst others — so that they are able to develop a deeper understanding of the interdependencies within and across these many contexts.
The embodied mutual learnings that occur in warm data labs allow for new patterns and insights to be identified. In doing so, they also deepen the understanding of the issues themselves, so that new societal responses may be possible.
So here is one example where carefully allowing for complexity actually allows people to find new pathways for sense-making in ways that suit their individual needs. And far from increasing the barriers to understanding, the way in which complexity is worked with provides more avenues for sense-making — and therefore a deeper comprehension of the underlying issues. Better transparency into public policy and open government might be possible on a whole new level!
Considering the issues with a deeper, more nuanced understanding might allow for better and more effective solutions at a systems level. Of course, publicly communicating and implementing these solutions would also be susceptible to the same reductionist traps we discussed earlier!
Perhaps there’s a reason why the origin of the word “complex” stems from the latin word, “complectere”, which means embrace…
Phoensight is an international consultancy dedicated to supporting the interrelationships between people, public policy and technology, and is accredited by the International Bateson Institute to conduct Warm Data Labs.
