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Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Engineering Systems Division Working Paper Series

ESD-WP-2000-02

IDEAS ON COMPLEXITY IN SYSTEMS -- TWENTY VIEWS

COMPILED BY: JOSEPH M. SUSSMAN
JR EAST PROFESSOR
PROFESSOR OF CIVIL AND ENVIRONMENTAL
ENGINEERING AND ENGINEERING SYSTEMS

FEBRUARY 2000

ESD Working Paper ESD002: IDEAS ON COMPLEXITY IN SYSTEMS -- TWENTY VIEWS

The purpose of this note is to catalogue the ideas of a number of systems thinkers in the area of complexity. I have either quoted directly or done my best to properly paraphrase these ideas. I hope that this note will be useful as we begin to think through the "discipline" of engineering systems to be developed by the ESD faculty.

Source Table

These are various concepts, in no particular order. Click on "More..." to get the full listing:

1. Complexity as per Joel Moses in his memo "Complexity and Flexibility", which uses node and link structures. "More..."
2. Detail complexity vs. dynamic complexity as per Peter Senge in "The Fifth Discipline", page 71: "More..."
3. Complexity as in CLIOS (Sussman, "The New Transportation Faculty: The Evolution to Engineering Systems", Transportation Quarterly, Summer 1999). A system is complex when it is composed of a group of related units (subsystems), for which the degree and nature of the relationships is imperfectly known. "More..."
4. Complexity in internal management of a system (like the space program) vs. complexity in the objectives of a social system -- the space program had a simple objective -- a man on the moon and back safely by the end of the 1960s. "More..."
5. Complexity as per Rechtin and Maier in "The Art of System Architecting", page 7, 8. "More..."
6. From "Dealing with Complexity", by Flood and Carson, after Vemuri in "Modeling of Complex Systems", 1978, New York: Academic Press. Complex situations are often partly or wholly unobservable, that is, measurement is noisy or unachievable (e.g., any attempt may destroy the integrity of the system)."More..."
7. From "Frontiers of Complexity" by Coveney and Highfield: "Complexity is the study of the behavior of macroscopic collections of such units that they are endowed with the potential to evolve in time." "More..."
8. From "The Economist", June 5, 1999, an article entitled "Complex Equations": The article discusses "complexity management" in the context of banks and insurers, referencing work by BAH -- Tim Wright in the London office."More..."
9. From "Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge" by Edward O. Wilson: This book is a tour-de-force, working toward tying together much of what is known and will be known. "More..."
10. From "The Social Psychology of Organizations" by Katz and Kahn (provided to me by Tom Allen): They note that it is a big mistake to use biological metaphors to describe patterned human activity (Allport). "More..."
11. From "Rescuing Prometheus" by Tom Hughes: Social scientists and public intellectuals defined the baffling social complexity to which the systems approach enthusiasts believed they could respond as a problem involving indeterminacy, fragmentation, pluralism, contingency, ambivalence, and nonlinearity. "More..."
12. From "The Idea of Economic Complexity" by David Warsh (the Boston Globe columnist) -- his ideas on economic complexity don't add much to our mix, suggesting that economic complexity is fundamentally hierarchical. He does include some useful characterizations of the thinking of others."More..."
13. John H. Holland -- Hidden Order: How Adaptation Builds Complexity -- Holland is from the Santa Fe school of complexity. (Gell-Mann, et al.). This is a good little book that captures much useful thinking. "More..."
14. David Levy, UMASS/Boston has several papers "Applications and Limitations of Complexity Theory in Organizational Theory and Strategy" to appear in "Handbook of Strategic Management", and "Chaos Theory and Strategy: Theory, Application, Management Implications", Strategic Management Journal, Vol. 15 (1994). "More..."
15. A. O. Hirschman and C. E. Lindblom, Economic Development, Research and Development, Policy Making: Some Converging Views, Behavioral Science, vol. 7 (1962), pp. 211-22. The authors consider the three fields of interest noted in the title, each of which can be characterized as a complex system in the social-political-economic realm. "More..."
16. W. Brian Arthur, On the Evolution of Complexity -- in Complexity by Cowens, Pines and Meltzer (eds.). Arthur speaks about three ways in which systems become more complex as they evolve."More..."
17. Murray Gell-Mann, Complex Adaptive Systems -- in Complexity by Cowens, Pines and Meltzer (eds.). In an article on complex adaptive systems (CAS), Gell-Mann discusses the CAS cycle."More..."
18. Charles Perrow, Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies. Perrow argues that our systems have become so complex and closely coupled that accidents are "normal" and cannot be assured against. He discusses the idea of components being joined by complex interactions, so that the failure of one affects many others. "More..."
19. John Sterman, in his book in preparation on Business Dynamics. His underlying world view is system dynamics, emphasizing the "multi-loop, multi-state, nonlinear character of the feedback systems in which we live". "More..."
20. Stuart Kauffman, At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity. Kauffman is of the Santa Fe School. His framework is biology, primarily. He thinks that Darwin's chance and gradualism cannot have been enough of a theory of evolution to get us where we are today. "More..."