How can we think the complex?

TL;DR

This chapter explores foundational concepts for understanding complexity, emphasizing the importance of adaptability, self-organization, and distributed intelligence in managing complex systems.

Contribution

It introduces basic conceptual frameworks for thinking about complexity, highlighting the limitations of classical models and proposing adaptive, self-organizing approaches.

Findings

Classical thinking has intrinsic drawbacks with complexity.

Models of complex systems must incorporate indeterminacy and unpredictability.

Adaptability and self-organization are key to managing complex systems.

Abstract

This chapter does not deal with specific tools and techniques for managing complex systems, but proposes some basic concepts that help us to think and speak about complexity. We review classical thinking and its intrinsic drawbacks when dealing with complexity. We then show how complexity forces us to build models with indeterminacy and unpredictability. However, we can still deal with the problems created in this way by being adaptive, and profiting from a complex system's capability for selforganization, and the distributed intelligence this may produce.