Complex Adaptive Systems, by Nancy Chek

I am so used to looking at life as a mechanistic process, that the notion of life as “a complex adaptive system” requires me to give up thinking my usual way. It’s not that I find complex adaptive systems hard to understand or even illogical. I just notice that, left to my own automatic devices, I can be counted on to regard phenomena of all kinds in a linear, mechanistic fashion, whether or not the phenomenon in question is living or inert.

Most of what we care about is in the realm of life (family, social systems, stock market) rather than the realm of machines (bridges, levers and dials).  We all went to college for levers and dials—even me, in the College of Education.

As a student teacher in a classroom with 25 college-track seniors who just wanted the formula for getting A’s in English and were quite peeved I didn’t provide it, I was on my own when Miss Mallory, my supervising teacher, was out sick the last day of school. I had graded their compositions, and one boy came up to tell me after class that I had made a mistake: I had given him an A-.

“I couldn’t give you an A, Richard, because, as I’m sure you know, your spelling is really terrible.”

I will never forget how puzzled he looked. “No, Miss Crawford. You don’t understand. I’m a D student. I can’t get an A.”

In the time I had, I tried to have him appreciate that his essay was the best in the class—the most creative, well-organized, well-written, the most moving. Spelling was nothing, just a matter of learning a few new habits. He shook his head and looked at me with very old, resigned eyes and walked away. In that moment, I hated Miss Mallory more than I have ever hated anyone. And now I know why: Over the course of the school year, she had taken a stunningly alive complex adaptive system named Richard and treated him like a clock, and he was doing his best to impersonate one.  

We produce mechanical systems like clocks and buildings using end-state design and destination thinking. In that world of the inert, the assumption is that everything is stable and the state of change is temporary.  We naturally need more control procedures so we get the product we want.

Back in college, I was young and untrained in destination thinking, with its formulas and controls. It’s now no surprise to me that my “practice teaching” felt more like practice in enduring failure and scorn than in teaching. Although I decided I never wanted to teach English, I did finally learn to fit in.

I learned that when it comes to getting people to do something, you go for that end state and interact with people in the same way you deal with clocks:  Build them, wind them up, set them down, and—don’t you make me have to stop this car!—expect them to stay where you put them. Many people think this way. It’s institutionalized.

On the other hand, the world as a living system is characterized by “directional” thinking rather than end-state thinking. To get what you want, you ask “What do I want more of or less of?” in the realm of direction or velocity rather than “What do I want?” as an end state. Then you poke a little and see what happens; if you like it, you poke more in that direction; if not, you poke in another direction. You can’t predict what your interventions will do.

In a recent speech by Alan Cohen on complex adaptive systems, he said the press and the police were upset because the Occupy Wall Street movement was “leaderless,” so there was no one person to negotiate with. In fact, there were simply a lot of leaders: 800 people in coordinated action without an HR department or middle management.

In the non-linear, living world, things meander. There are fits and starts. Change emerges from the bottom up rather than the top down. Then we go and impose management on top of self-organization—sometimes several layers of management.

From Alan again:

Complex adaptive systems self-organize (or they don’t form).

Complex adaptive systems self-regulate (or they blow apart).

Complex adaptive systems self-adapt (or they don’t survive).

Seems simple, and I find myself screaming in the back of my mind: BUT I WANT TO BE IN CHARGE! Just like Miss Mallory.