As a Systems Engineer working on a huge system-of-systems, complexity is a part of my daily life.  (I’m not complaining – I love it!).  But not everyone involved always recognizes the situation as complex, as opposed to simply complicated.  Of course, not everyone is in a position where they see the complexity; it all depends on your perspective.  But I think the people who will see the most success in life are those that put themselves in the position to see, understand, and take advantage of the complexity of things.

Anyway, here are the 5 C’s of complexity from Dave Snowden:

  • Coherence is the measure and concept by which you judge the validity of an action in a complex domain. A lightly constrained system modifies as agents interact with it, but it does constrain. The constant change means that is it difficult to provide absolute proof of an idea or approach (by the time you did the situation would have changed), but it is possible to create tests (including mathematical tests) of the degree of coherence that an idea has.
  • Connectivity is key to a complex system, where agent proximity has a massive impact on agent action. Of course the nature of connections is also key (just connecting things is not enough. If I increase connectivity I can increase variety and thence novelty by the right selection of links. But I can also increase connectivity of like with like if I want to exploit existing knowledge. I may generate a higher or lower degree of coherence, or at least test my ability to do so.
  • Context is vital. I remember a great advert for the Guardian newspaper. In the first scene you see a skinhead running towards a women; the perspective shifts and you see him about to grab a middle aged man with a briefcase; the perspective shifts and you see him drag the man into the doorway before a skip of building material would have fallen on his head and killed him. We need to acknowledge perspective but it doesn’t follow that we can never be objective.
  • Coalescence is an alternative to categories which are all to common in management speak. We like to put things into little boxes so we have them properly organised. Its better to think about things as the centre of a coalescence with fussy boundaries Interestingly we are starting to understand that this is the nature of our own mind. Its a distributed function of our brain, hormones, nervous and tactile systems and in all probability toe environment. Categories lead to stereotyping, coalescence to meaning

Of course, the “C” that is missing is “complexity” itself.  But that is a much larger discussion.