Integration and Implementation Insights

The essential conditions for, and characteristics of, complexity

Community Member

By Jean Boulton.

jean-boulton
Jean Boulton (biography)

What are the underpinning necessities or conditions—the essential ingredients—that lead to and engender the qualities or characteristics of the complex world, especially its processual and emergent nature?

Three conditions for complexity: the essential ingredients

A watch or intricate machine is not complex. Nor is a saucer of water. So, when do we regard something as complex? What are the necessary conditions for complexity fully to be realised?

These are:

Let’s look at each of these in more detail.

Open boundaries

Almost all situations in the social and natural world are open to their surroundings. There are always comings and goings—indeed this applies to galaxies, and ecologies as well as to human communities. As examples:

An open engagement with the wider world is vital in order to energise and provide resources. As science demonstrates, isolated closed situations ultimately run out of energy and die. Interactions take energy and, if no additional resources can enter, then patterns of relationships cannot sustain. Equally, the exchange with the wider environment allows novelty, evolution, the emergence of new forms. Every living system exists within an environment and has a relationship with that environment.

Diversity

For situations to be adaptive and resilient there needs to be variety or diversity—a range of flora and fauna in an ecology, a variety in the features of any one type of fauna and the ability to shift and change the relationships between individual actors. Nothing is fixed and natural variation and uniqueness is maintained.

If we focus on human situations, let’s take the example of a playground: each child present is unique, and their behaviour varies with circumstance; furthermore, the links and bonds between children will also shift and change, depending on the nature of the play or the vagaries of friendship. This diversity and adaptability, particularly in groups that sustain—like a family or organisation—is one key factor which leads to the development and sustaining of patterns of behaviour.

Without diversity, there is a limit both to the propensity to adapt and to the potential for the emergence of something new. If we try to quell that diversity—through, for example, controlling who can engage with whom, or by insisting on conformity—then the group or ecology is constrained and less able to adapt and find new ways and modes of being.

Reflexive inter-relationships among constituents

Connections between people and any other constituent ‘ingredients’ are not independent of each other, but shape and are shaped by the myriad iterative interactions which tend to form a complex web—a relatively stable, self-regulating pattern of relationships. Such a pattern may shift, form and re-form as people, for example, interact, react, impact each other, change alliances and respond to different events and situations. But for such patterns to emerge and sustain, they need reflexive multilateral interactions.

Are all situations complex?

Are there situations in the social and natural world where these conditions do not exist? Are there any cases we can claim are not complex? Even when things may appear smooth and ordered on the surface, it is the myriad weavings of diverse aspects of its constituents that are busy maintaining that order. Even when diversity is suppressed (through harsh leadership or a desire for efficiency) or interactions with the wider world are minimised, complexity never goes away and to ignore it is to miss the very factors that ultimately create change.

Characteristics of complexity

Having established the essential ingredients that engender the complex nature of the social and natural world, then we must ask how do complex situations behave. What characteristics do we tend to see repeated in different milieux—from brains to communities to forests to galaxies? Through recognising these characteristics, we have the basis of understanding that can then shape action and intervention. This is the ontological ground of complexity, emphasising its processual nature, and building on the work of Ilya Prigogine (1980), captured in the title of his book ‘From Being to Becoming.’

A processual ontology gives primacy to change, flow and becoming (as opposed to stability, fixedness and separation). Stability arises through the reflexive interweaving between constituents—it is a world of processes in process.

There are seven characteristics and these do not stand alone but are themselves dependent on each other, and need to be considered as a whole.

  1. Systemic: situations are systemic when their properties rely on the interweaving and reflexive interconnecting between its elements. Qualities are pervasive and not present in its individual constituents.
  2. Patterned: patterns are the systemic consequence of mutually reinforcing relationships; patterns are sustained through the reflexive interweaving between their constituents coupled with engagement with their environment. Complex situations can be understood as the arising, stabilising and dissolving of patterns of relationships, patterns of behaviour.
  3. Path-dependent: the patterning process denotes a world that is always becoming, a world of change and flow. What occurs in actuality is shaped by the particularities of what happens along the way—major shocks, chance events, minor variations. The future is shaped but not determined by its past, and is sensitive both to the details of what is occurring along the way and to the current context.
  4. Particular: sensitive to context, to the specificities of the situation.
  5. Punctuated: highlights the episodic and nonlinear nature of change, which is often associated with periods of stasis followed by periods of rapid change (in comparison with smooth or incremental change), including tipping points, runaway change and collapse.
  6. Paradoxical: meaning ‘against common sense’; the coexistence of seeming incommensurable factors, eg., stable and unstable, structured and flowing. It implies there are no easy answers, no unassailable ‘truths’ and no aspects which can be reduced to unambiguous certainty.
  7. Emergent: Emergence is the process through which novel properties appear, properties that have not previously existed and could not have been predicted; often (but not always) refers to systemic properties of ‘the whole’ that are not present in the constituent elements.

Concluding questions

Do these ideas about complexity resonate with your understanding and experience? Are there issues, ideas or examples that you would add?

To find out more:

Boulton, J. (2024). The dao of complexity: Making sense and making waves in turbulent times. De Gruyter: Berlin, Germany. See especially Chapter 11 “The essential conditions for complexity” and Chapter 12 “Characteristically complex” and the following sections which address each characteristic in turn. These contain additional ideas and references.

Embracing complexity—Jean Boulton’s website. (Online): https://www.embracingcomplexity.com/.

Reference:

Prigogine, I. (1980). From Being to becoming: Time and complexity in the physical sciences. W. H. Freeman: San Francisco, California, United States of America.

Use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) Statement: Artificial intelligence was not used in the development of this i2Insights contribution or the work on which the contribution is based. (For i2Insights policy on artificial intelligence please see https://i2insights.org/contributing-to-i2insights/guidelines-for-authors/#artificial-intelligence.)

Biography: Jean Boulton PhD is a Fellow of the Institute of Physics and a visiting academic with the universities of Cranfield and Bath in the United Kingdom. She has been deeply involved in the science and philosophy of complexity since the mid-1990s and the honing of these ideas continues to inform her research, consultancy work and personal practice.

Exit mobile version