After the lecture and the articles “Confronting Economic Profit with Hierarchy Theory” by Allen et al. and “Understanding the Complexity of Economic, Ecological and Social Systems” by C. S. Holling and the video “Beyond Markets and States” by Ostrom, Elinor; I want to talk a bit about what I learned about complex systems. I hope I’m on the right way to understand System Thinking and how to look at the “change” that our society has to go through to create a “Sustainable community”.
“Complexity is different from Chaos” Elinor Ostrom
As the quotation (extracted from the video) says, “complexity” and “chaos” are completely different things; because “complexity” is, actually, organized. What it means is that we can analyze complexity by dividing it in smaller pieces. But there is a huge difference between “analyzing” complexity and “organizing” it, this leads us to de ideas of Hierarchy. And the results presented either on the video and on the articles, shows that polycentric systems can cope with complexity, what it means is that, when we have many self-organizing, small, pieces in a system, they can became more efficient (faster levels), but for that, communication between the different pieces is really important, so that it can create relations and evolve accordingly. This also reminded me the “Small is beautiful” book from Schumacher (1970), when he talks about the small scale, where communication and maintenance is easier because you can understand more easily the entire system.
They also talk about the different levels in an Up-Down Hierarchy, and they say that the higher the level, the slower it is (also, the lower the level, the faster it is); because for higher levels, they must spend their energy not only with the role of “experimenting new things within the level” but also with the role of “conserve and stabilize conditions for the lower levels”. (Holling, C. S. op. cit. Simon)
This brings us to the idea of sustaining a system, of growing rigidity until the day it can’t be supported and then collapse. Hollings defines sustainability as “the goal of fostering adaptive capabilities and creating opportunities”; I’m not going through the theory about adaptive systems and so on because I want to enjoy this space to rise some questions:
They say that the adaptive cycle and the future of a system is controlled by the three following characteristics: wealth, controllability and adaptive capacity. Take the economic system for example, by making a relation with all innovative ideas about post-economic era (supported by Domenico de Mase, Tucker Viemeister, and many others), we can see that it is not adaptive to new ideas, that it is just always struggling to keep the old model (getting rigid) going on. Therefore, how long can a system sustain rigidity before collapse?
Continuing in this direction, concerning people who are creating new ideas to change the present society and its systems to a sustainable model (one where we could rise social equality, environmental resilience, and still keep economic issue), how this group should be seen; as the “novel entrants” - who saw (remember) the lessons and models from nature and how it works (equality, interaction, panarchy) – who are entering the rigid system to bring it to the “collapse/change” or as the “potential” of the adaptive cycle been created?
Just to conclude, having in mind the idea of “elements of prescription for facilitating constructive changes “ from Holling’s article, we as designers, should create tools to foment social flexibility, to “teach how to change”, so that our society can have more acceptance to changes.
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