Quotes About Complexity

Il y a une femme dans toutes les affaires; aussitôt qu'on me fait un rapport, je dis: 'Cherchez la femme'.

It was a strange thing: one never appeared to take a step forward int he heart or mind of this man. Those who wished, so to speak, to force their way into intimacy with him found the path blocked.

Pero soy de los que creen que en las cosas pequeñas está todo. El niño es pequeño, y contiene al hombre; el cerebro es estrecho, y alberga el pensamiento; el ojo es solo un punto, y abarca leguas.

Sometimes those who are easiest to love are hardest to respect. - Ashley Wilkes

I can no more understand the totality of God than the pancake I made for breakfast understands the complexity of me

The second flaw is that some activities, almost by definition, defy being broken down into steps.

You think that because you understand "one" that you must therefore understand "two" because one and one make two. But you forget that you must also understand "and.

a system must consist of three kinds of things: elements, interconnections, and a function or purpose.

So, what is a system? A system is a set of things—people, cells, molecules, or whatever—interconnected in such a way that they produce their own pattern of behavior over time.

Everything we think we know about the world is a model. Our models do have a strong congruence with the world. Our models fall far short of representing the real world fully.

This ancient Sufi story was told to teach a simple lesson but one that we often ignore: The behavior of a system cannot be known just by knowing the elements of which the system is made.

We know a tremendous amount about how the world works, but not nearly enough. Our knowledge is amazing; our ignorance even more so. We can improve our understanding, but we can't make it perfect.

Managers do not solve problems, they manage messes. —RUSSELL ACKOFF,

Systems thinkers see the world as a collection of stocks along with the mechanisms for regulating the levels in the stocks by manipulating flows.

Because of feedback delays within complex systems, by the time a problem becomes apparent it may be unnecessarily difficult to solve. — A stitch in time saves nine.

stop looking for who's to blame; instead you'll start asking, "What's the system?" The concept of feedback opens up the idea that a system can cause its own behavior.

Once you start listing the elements of a system, there is almost no end to the process. You can divide elements into sub-elements and then sub-sub-elements. Pretty soon you lose sight of the system. As the saying goes, you can't see the forest for the trees.

Model utility depends not on whether its driving scenarios are realistic (since no one can know that for sure), but on whether it responds with a realistic pattern of behavior.

The balancing feedback loop that should keep the system state at an acceptable level is overwhelmed by a reinforcing feedback loop heading downhill. The lower the perceived system state, the lower the desired state. The lower the desired state, the less discrepancy, and the less corrective action is taken. The less corrective action, the lower the system state. If this loop is allowed to run unchecked, it can lead to a continuous degradation in the system's performance.

The system, to a large extent, causes its own behavior! An outside event may may unleash that behavior, but the same outside event applied to a different system is likely to produce a different result.

The behavior of a system cannot be known just by knowing the elements of which the system is made.

Many of the interconnections in systems operate through the flow of information. Information holds systems together and plays a great role in determining how they operate.

Managers are not confronted with problems that are independent of each other, but with dynamic situations that consist of complex systems of changing problems that interact with each other. I call such situations messes.... Managers do not solve problems, they manage messes. -RUSSELL ACKOFF,' operations theorist

The trick, as with all the behavioral possibilities of complex systems, is to recognize what structures contain which latent behaviors, and what conditions release those behaviors—and, where possible, to arrange the structures and conditions to reduce the probability of destructive behaviors and to encourage the possibility of beneficial ones.