Field Notes from the Liminal Space of Pre-Hype Anthro-Complexity
Reflections on reflections of reflections
Interesting phenomena occur when two or more rhythmic patterns are combined, and these phenomena illustrate very aptly the enrichment of information that occurs when one description is combined with another.
Gregory Bateson
A couple weeks ago I attended a retreat focused on complexity in human systems put on by The Cynefin Company. The format was a sort of hybrid conference / symposium / workshop they call Triopticon, (which, naming conventions aside, will look quite familiar to fellow educators of a certain persuasion), and it’s designed to engage participants with diverse backgrounds and subject matter expertise in transdisciplinary exploration, collaboration, and reflection. I enjoyed a heady couple days immersed in conversations about physics, philosophy, learning, design, anthropology, sociology, semiotics, narrative, organizational dynamics, and of course, the behavior of complex adaptive systems.
Since then, I’ve been reflecting on which ideas, questions, and topics seemed to resonate most among the group, filtering what I noticed through what others noticed, and blending it all up in the summary below; it’s somewhere between an ethnographer’s field notes and personal journal.
We can understand diffraction patterns — as patterns of difference that make a difference — to be the fundamental constituents that make up the world.
Karen Barad
Quick context: I’ve been a student of complexity science for two decades, but largely as a solo pursuit. I’ve integrated more and more of this thinking into my design strategy and consulting work over recent years, but I’ve been reluctant to pay for formal educational offerings because a) it’s still a nascent field and there are relatively few advanced options and b) everyone’s got an agenda, which is often at odds with pedagogical quality. It’s been generally more rewarding for me to learn via independent study, though it’s also been a lonely endeavor without the accompanying community of practice.
But I’d been impressed with the quality of the facilitation and learning experiences I encountered in a couple online sessions from folks at The Cynefin Co, so I signed up for this in-person retreat, specifically curious to see what social learning looks like in this particular community, and I’m so glad I did.
The retreat included remarks and provocations from three eminent voices in complexity science: Dave Snowden, Alicia Juarrero, and Michael Garfield, (all of whose work I was already a fangirl — er… well acquainted with, and I highly recommend to anyone interested in complexity science). I’ve long appreciated Dave’s thinking, from ye olde Cynefin all the way to the more recent Estuarine framework. I also cannot overstate how valuable I’ve found Alicia’s work, especially her fantastic recent book on context and constraints, and Michael’s thinking on, well, all kinds of awesome stuff.
But, more than anything, lately I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to engage in design praxis, in the current business landscape, in ways more deliberately and explicitly informed by complexity science.
What does it actually mean to practice complexity-informed design?
Is it simply a return to design’s supposed origin story, to naturalize sense making and faciltate decision making that helps us “devise courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones,” or is it something else?
I’d love to chat more about that with anyone interested…
But in the mean time, the experience delivered a healthy dose of intellectual overstimulation, and revealed several themes that were clearly resonant among the community of folks (designers and otherwise) who I can tell are eager to apply complexity science and naturalized sense making more directly in their own work. I’ve spent a couple weeks in continued conversations and figured, for the benefit of those collaborators and anyone else who might be interested, I’d note them here as an invitation for even more exploration.
Language is a gateway, and a gate
I’m noticing a lot of interest, and some consternation, around the language of complexity. Specifically, in the desire for consistent and concrete terminology, the ‘right’ words and metaphors, and the contrasts we might draw against everything complexity is not. Which makes sense, given how abstract some of the concepts can be; we use language to attach new ideas to existing mental schema, and even more importantly, to communicate these concepts in collaboration with others. Complex systems and their non-linear, emergent, context-dependent dynamics represent a pretty significant paradigm shift for most folks, and the esoteric language around complexity science adds a layer of, well, complexity.
For many folks, I’d liken this to discussing quantum physics, in German, with a non-native speaker who has only taken a beginner course in German. The concepts are weird enough on their own, a real departure from many of the familiar frameworks we hold dear, and learning new vocabulary and grammar on top of it just to be able to access and discuss it can be quite daunting.
(Relatedly, this retreat was one of the first opportunities I’ve enjoyed to engage with others fluent in the language of complexity, and it was a unique experience to be able to move quickly beyond the threshold of vocabulary, grammar, and even semantics to immerse more directly in the rhetorical arts of complexity and sense making. So I understand the desire to create shared language, which seems a common refrain in the community.)
But part of that refrain implies a drive toward more concrete (less abstract), more explicit (less tacit) as a general principle. And that’s where I get itchy; the very nature of complex systems themselves make it counterproductive to over-index on convergence, or collapsing of the wave function, or codifying of the practices.
At some point, yes, language matters, especially to inoculate against the dangers of locking into a typical hype cycle, but in many of the scenarios where the language is foreign enough to be a barrier, teaching vocab or grammar gets in the way of meaningful collaboration, and we can definitely achieve shared goals without it. To further abuse the language metaphor, I have found that focusing more on the tacit connections people make to complexity, enabling them to operate with more of an immersion experience, (while we facilitators hold firm to the science that informs the work), can be a more meaningful entry into the language and engender more intrinsic motivation among the individuals who do end up wanting to learn and embrace the concepts more explicitly.
Speaking of the tacit dimension…
In the words of Michael Polanyi, who introduced the very concept of tacit knowledge,
We know more than we can tell.
To wit, Sonja Blignaut argues, “All human beings actually have a lot of lived experience in complexity, we simply forget about it (or disregard it as irrelevant) in professional or work contexts. As we negotiate city life, traffic, social complexities in families or friendships and raising children, we are effectively engaging complexity.” We need not over-intellectualize complexity in every context; we can also simply hold space for others (and continue ourselves) to cultivate habits of mind that enable us to engage with it, such as openness, awareness, and a bias toward action.
That said, the larger theme of tacit vs. explicit is another strong current among complexity and related sense making discourse, including the means by which knowledge transforms from one form to the other. A lot of what I see bubbling to the surface in these conversations reminds me of parallel themes from K-12 and higher education spaces, and probably adult and organizational learning more broadly. It raises interesting parallels in the role of manipulatives and other material or experiential ways of engaging with people’s embodied knowledge of complexity.
Folks with a bit of initiation in knowledge domains tend to know the SECI model, (or at least something like Kolb’s Experiential Learning model, of which I am not a fan), which in turn always reminds me of this piece on the intersections of SECI + design-as-learning from Hugh Dubberly & Shelley Evenson.
But even more than the above, I am increasingly convinced that a foundational understanding of Max Boisot’s I-Space is more relevant for complexity-curious folks and complexity-informed practice than almost anything else on the subject. I continue to find new ways to link ideas back to this concept all the time.
Don’t tell me
If we know more than we can tell, (and I deeply appreciate the double duty tell is doing here, as both “express” and “determine”), how are we to actually make decisions or solve complex challenges with insights we can’t always express or determine?
We approach them indirectly. Obliquely, as the phrase goes. Working around a complex problem instead of running directly at it often reveals unintended insights and opportunities we could not observe if we attack it head on via myopic goal-oriented strategies.
In conversations about complexity, I’ve noticed themes around abductive reasoning and lateral thinking often feature prominently, along with with the concepts of metaphor and analogical thinking. All of these concepts are in near orbit around the fact that we often benefit by approaching and connecting complex ideas indirectly.
To be clear, complexity itself is not a metaphor. But, I’m finding that successful complexity-informed practice relies heavily on metaphor and abductive reasoning, not only for synthesis and shared meaning making to understand the “evolutionary potential of the current,” (as Snowden likes to say), but also for integrative ideation and identification of the “adjacent possibles” (in the words of Stuart Kauffman).
The aforementioned retreat, by the way, inspired me to dig out out my well-worn copy of Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies and fall in love with it all over again. From the creators:
The Oblique Strategies constitute a set of over 100 cards, each of which is a suggestion of a course of action or thinking to assist in creative situations. These famous cards have been used by many artists and creative people all over the world since their initial publication.
Most folks I know have assumed these cards are meant for a narrow category of “creative situation” associated with music, art, or writing, but I don’t think they require any adjustment at all to be highly useful to anyone engaged in sense making or decision making, especially in complex domains. However, it’s really no surprise to me that they were developed by folks who spent their careers in music.
Lyric thought is a kind of ontological seismic exploration and metaphors are charges set by the seismic crew.
Jan Zwicky
Other Metaphors Worth Watching
Energy
I’m also noticing that the word energy does a lot of heavy lifting in the wider complexity community of practice. It’s present as both a literal concept and often as a metaphor. Complexity science is, after all, a science, and its physics origins require folks to engage with physical, real-world ideas like energy gradients, costs, or transfers. At the same time, energy is often used as analogy in human systems for team resources, attention, or social-emotional potential.
It’s a lot to ask of one word. I’m curious to see how the concept of energy, literally and metaphorically, evolves over the next few years as complexity thinking grows more popular in business and design landscapes.
Territory
Folks seem similarly intrigued by the the concept of deterritorialization, another word that has both common metaphorical use and very specific (and esoteric) origins in the work of Deleuze, Guattari, and friends. I can imagine as folks within the complexity community talk more about assemblage theory and related concepts, this word in particular may be at risk for widespread misunderstanding. In everyday language, the concept of an organization or of people being territorial is so common that it’s tough to engage with the word minus that semantic baggage. But the philosophical concepts of deterritorialization and reterritorialization are relevant not for any focus on some type of utopian deterritorialized future state but rather on the transformative potential in facilitating new connections, linkages, becomings, and assemblages in the broader sense.
Granularity
At the retreat, I also sensed a lot of interest in the concept of granularity, especially following some back and forth on the idea of resolving conflict by moving to the lowest level of granularity where coherence or agreement can be found and progressing from there. Granularity seemed to pique folks’ interest to that end.
I’ve used similar language in the past, such as how high or low resolution our understanding of a problem frame, decision space, or conceptual model might be. In recent years I’ve had to be extra careful to differentiate (in collaboration) the resolution or detail of something, from the scale or altitude at which we’re considering it. It’s interesting to note the semantic differences between nouns like granularity, scale, and resolution, along with verbs like zoom that link, and possibly confuse, them, and the ambiguity in most of these words’ colloquial use.
This topic also reminds me of stasis theory, a strategy in classical rhetoric that outlines the stages of discourse that must be resolved in order for a discussion to progress or a conflict to be resolved. For example, we must determine and agree whether something exists before we can move on to deciding whether it’s good or bad, whether it should be addressed and by whom, and then what should be done, if so. In order for discourse to be productive, the participants need to be engaging at the same stasis. If one is arguing about the cause of a phenomenon while the other is arguing about its existence, not much progress will be made until they arrive at the same place, or stasis, to litigate the topic further.
What next?
I’m grateful to be immersed in the wider community of folks who engage with complexity science and naturalized sense making as praxis, not just theory. I’ll be curious to see what impact these and other salient concepts have on the wider practices of design, strategy, and organizational leadership, as complexity science inevitably gains well deserved attention, and, likely, some level of problematic hype. So, I’ll end on this note:
A concept is a brick. It can be used to build a courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window.
Gilles Deleuze
