Quotes About Complexity

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,

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. The system may be buffeted, constricted, triggered, or driven by outside forces. But the system's response to these forces is characteristic of itself, and that response is seldom simple in the real world.

The bounded rationality of each actor in a system may not lead to decisions that further the welfare of the system as a whole.

Dynamic systems studies usually are not designed to predict what will happen. Rather, they're designed to explore what would happen, if a number of driving factors unfold in a range of different ways.

Mental flexibility—the willingness to redraw boundaries, to notice that a system has shifted into a new mode, to see how to redesign structure—is a necessity when you live in a world of flexible systems.

Systems often have the property of self-organization—the ability to structure themselves, to create new structure, to learn, diversify, and complexify. Even complex forms of self-organization may arise from relatively simple organizing rules—or may not.

I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when looked at in the right way, did not become still more complicated. —POUL ANDERSON

most of what goes wrong in systems goes wrong because of biased, late, or missing information.

Hierarchies are brilliant systems inventions, not only because they give a system stability and resilience, but also because they reduce the amount of information that any part of the system has to keep track of.

The world peeps, squawks, bangs, and thunders at many frequencies all at once. What is a significant delay depends—usually—on which set of frequencies you're trying to understand.

You can see some things through the lens of the human eye, other things through the lens of a microscope, others through the lens of a telescope, and still others through the lens of systems theory. Everything seen through each kind of lens is actually there. Each way of seeing allows our knowledge of the wondrous world in which we live to become a little more complete.

System structure is the source of system behavior. System behavior reveals itself as a series of events over time.

Physical structure is crucial in a system, but is rarely a leverage point, because changing it is rarely quick or simple. The leverage point is in proper design in the first place.

The trouble with simple living is that, though it can be joyful, rich, and creative, it isn't simple.

What really fascinates me is this need that is so strong now that if you read a work of the imagination you instantly have to say, 'Oh, what this really is is so-and-so ' reducing it to a simple formula.

I am a person who continually destroys the possibilities of a future because of the numbers of alternative viewpoints I can focus on the present.

many are crippled for knowing an impressive word who would have had no such trouble if they had lived in a simpler and less self-indulgent society.

Two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is the way you can both hate and love something you are not sure you understand.

Don't call us saints, we don't want to be dismissed that easily.

Repressively, Lymond himself answered. "I dislike being discussed as if I were a disease. Nobody 'got' me," he said.

Man is a being of varied, manifold and inconstant nature. And woman, by God, is a match for him.

to remain alive inside was far more intricate and difficult and defeating.

I hate him for what he's done, but I still love him for the man he was.

The English language has a deceptive air of simplicity so have some little frocks but they are both not the kind of thing you can run up in half an hour with a machine.