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What does complexity theory offer business?

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To what extent can we go with complexity thinking?

 A good starting place might be to consider the evolution of modern thought, beginning with The Black Plague.

Between the 1300s and 1700s the black plague swept much of the world killing around 1/3rd of the people on the planet. The social pressure of so many dying opened minds to concepts like bacteria and the potential of medical science which helped eradicated the plague, reduced the relative power of intuition, mysticism and faith - greatly increasing 'complexity'.  The ensuing "Age of Enlightenment" lead thinking to be heavily influenced by reductionist 'cause and effect', linear control style thinking. Many argue this pre-occupation has lead us toward the idea that a salvation for everything (including our environment, institutions and societies) can be found in scientism. (Lawrence 1994). As evidence of how far cause and effect salvation for every problem has been taken, consider anti-discrimination laws.

In the US, a fat man successfully sues a restaurant chain for discrimination against fat people because he could not fit his buttocks into their chairs! What was the cause of his butt not fitting? Discrimination of course! Salvation for being fat has been found in the unfair practices of others, with no need for the 'revelation' that being over weight can preclude you from being able to participate in certain aspects of life.

Lessons from the restaurant.

Two men dining at table.jpgWhilst this may be absurd, it can be fairly argued that an ability to control "cause and effect" is the dominant underpinning of western thinking – whether as obvious as in science, as subtle as in management or as distorted as in anti-discrimination.  How did this come about?

From the time of the black plague (less than 500 years ago or 1% of human evolution) Kant, Hegel, Mead and many others have sought to help us frame, explain or understand the nature of the universe and wrestled with the paradoxes that human behaviour poses to reductionist linear logic.
  •  Natural Law Teleology (the logical extension of reductionist cause and effect that grew out of the work of Galileo, Bacon, Newton and many others) argues that the whole is determined by the parts.
  • Formative Teleology argues that the only effective outcome of the emergent interaction of an acorn with its environment is an oak tree (or no oak tree), suggesting the parts are determined by the whole.
In human systems, are we to believe that each human uses "….autonomously chosen goals reflecting universal ethical principles. Notions of self organization are absent and both stability and change are human choices" (Stacey, Griffin, and Shaw 2002) thus preserving the basic 'cause and effect' process in tact.  [As an aside, it could be that the existence of universal ethical principles in the argument can be seen to preserve the role of God]

But if cause and effect were to remain the underpinning process, how then, do we allow for truly novel innovation or creativity?
 
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