Complex Development
What is complexity science and how does it relate to our lives? I really find it the most fascinating lens through which to examine things, and I begin to apply it here to adult development.
Life is hard.
Amongst those that take the time to examine life and it’s many complexities, no other conclusion can be reached. There is a reason for this. Life is based on increasing scales of cooperation. The simplest forms of living matter cooperate with each other to create a more complex entity. This pattern continues as the structures get more and more large, complex, and influential. This can be witnessed in the human body as cells cooperate to form tissues (e.g. a liver tissue). The tissues cooperate to form organs (the liver); and the organs cooperate to form systems (the digestive system); and the systems cooperate to form the body. Further to this, bodies cooperate to create families; families cooperate to form communities; communities cooperate to form towns and cities; and they cooperate to form nations and whole economies. Each of these scales of cooperation, commonly known as systems, follows similar underlying dynamics but with ever greater levels of complexity. It has to be more complex because each level includes the underlying elements of complexity and additional emergent qualities.
Complexity science, developed through the mid 1900s and formalised in the 1980s, is an attempt to harmonise the different fields of research that science has explored. Science traditionally uses a reductionist method, where the context of a subject of inquiry is restricted or abandoned as a way of reducing the influential variables. In a lab setting, the goal is to reduce or control the impactful variables so much that the only one(s) left can be manipulated and the results observed. This is clearly an imperfect method of enquiry, but of course is extremely powerful in learning something of cause and effect relationships.
So complexity science is an attempt to examine cause and effect in context. It crosses different disciplines, in order to gain a more holistic perspective. It pays heed to the repeating nature of scaled complexity to derive lessons from one scale and apply them elsewhere. It has struggled to gain legitimacy, not because its methods are false, but because it makes people uncomfortable. See complexity doesn’t profess to know the answer. It is founded on a greater wisdom - one that accepts the very notion of having THE right answer as a somewhat misguided byproduct of the scientific method. It can show that even on the smaller, simpler scales of complexity, the scope of possibility is in effect infinite.
Consider this: the number of possible variations in a game of chess, taking into account every possible progression of moves a game can take to its conclusion, is a larger number than there are atoms in the universe!
…. I will let you digest that for a moment….
Chess is a fairly simple system with 32 moving parts, 64 available spaces to occupy, and highly restrictive options for interaction. We still don’t have a computer powerful enough to “solve” chess (in other words genuinely optimise) for a game with any more than 8 pieces left on the table. Now consider a collection of businesses within an industrial economy; or a collection of cells in a body. They are so great in number AND with such a vast space for exploration AND with less restrictive choices, that it should be clear to see the possibilities are infinite. So the notion of the answer to any of our usual life problems is absurd. While the world’s most powerful computer can’t solve chess, we humans are attempting to solve, for example, excess inflation. While the pursuit is warranted and we can often get closer as opposed to further from optimum, we are playing a game over our heads. A step towards stable inflation can be step away from full employment, or wealth distribution, or any other number of negative trends.
This concept of infinite possibility can be unsettling. This too is important because if we are to improve our understanding and functioning in this life, being settled is rather important. Our solution to this is to volunteer rules and restrictions to reduce the plane of possibility. It turns out this need for restriction is embedded in the very fabric of complexity. A necessary feature of a complex system is cooperation. Cooperation is a neat way of saying that the constituent actors abide by a common set of rules. Without cooperation we find chaos, a system with few emergent properties. Too many rules and we find order, where not much happens. So complexity it turns out is this amazing but precarious meeting point between order and chaos.
So we come back to my first pronouncement - life is hard. We are ourselves (extremely) complex systems, embedded in an even more complex system, and our success depends on holding the balance between chaos and order. We are compelled to action and averse to risk. We need chaos while we want order. The study of adult development is an intriguing story of negotiating this dichotomy. It turns out human development progresses very predictably in a to and fro manner between individualistic and collectivist mentalities. We go from opportunistic to conforming; from expert to optimiser; from contrarian to transformer. As we negotiate the benefits and costs of balancing our own free will with the collective potential, we unknowingly negotiate the perils of chaos with the safety of order; the gratification of individual freedom with the restriction of cooperation. Like it or not our lives are a balancing act between chaos and order and our developmental stages are an exploration of the complex terrain, punctuated by an increasing understanding of what actually is.
An interesting article. Isn't measuring the possible combinations of chess pieces seeking to map all possible journeys though? We do not really seek to do that in more complex situations or systems. What every individual cell does isn't known or understood and may not matter to outcome, but if enough do x or y then z is more likely to occur. Ultimately inflation is measured by outcome too. How we got there exactly will always remain somewhat of a mystery, though we can see over time that by pressing button x (be that interest rates or tariffs or whatever) then outcome y (higher or lower inflation) is more or less likely. Or at least we assume a causation though perhaps we mistake correlation with causation at times. If we were to measure just the outcome of chess then there are only 2 possibilities - white or black winning. Or perhaps white or black by x or y number of pieces. I mean if you were to measure someone's life as a sum of experiences the possibilities are, as you suggest, infinite. But if we were to ask them at the end of it to rate their life satisfaction from 1-10 we would only have 10 outcomes and I would wager 80% of people would probably land between 6 and 9. So what does that mean? That all roads lead to basically the same place? That trying to measure complexity with numbers is ridiculous? Not sure exactly what my point is and I need a nap but food for thought.