Why research needs complexity entrepreneurs

36 thoughts on “Why research needs complexity entrepreneurs”

1. Your concept of the complexity entrepreneur connects with something I am exploring: the deliberate use of analytical lenses.

   I find it useful to distinguish between who is involved and the perspectives through which a situation is examined. A diverse team may still converge on a familiar framing. Equally, although an individual can consider several lenses, applying them with sufficient depth requires multiple participants bringing different knowledge and experience.

   For example, an emerging change might look promising through a technological lens, fragile through an institutional lens, and exclusionary through a cultural lens.

   Could part of the complexity entrepreneur’s role be to identify which lenses matter to which aspects of an issue, bring together people who can inform them, and help the team interpret the resulting insights and their relationships?

   This would also involve checking whether those perspectives actually inform the relevant conversations, recognising when an important lens is missing, and seeking contributions to address that gap. Having someone in the team does not necessarily mean their perspective is being heard or examined.

   Might this offer a practical way to support the collective judgement you describe?

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   • Thanks Sean. I dont disagree and, beyond that, I think what interests me in this is that the complexity entrepreneur is trying to surface something that sits beneath lenses – which I agree you can get some way to surfacing what happens reflexively between lenses. So part of the question for the complexity entrepreneur is systemic, about reflexive integration – how does the technological shape and get shaped by the institutional and the cultural and vice versa; and in that way to surface a more nuanced perspective on, say, fragility. In addition, part of the question is about, as you say, asking what is missing; and part of the question is about what is changing/emerging/shifting/unravelling. So I would invite those with a complexity entrepreneur bent to explore the unexplorable, spot patterns that dont easily fit into any common lens; part of that is seeking knowledge in unusual places and part of that is an instinct and intuition for spotting dynamically stable patterns of behaviours, and/or spotting signs of the newly emerging.

     And then the other gift, I think, that separates the complexity observer from the complexity entrepreneur is the courage and ability to spot opportunities and to seize them.

     (As an analogy, if I were trying to understand what made a family tick, or what causes some towns to be vital and alive and others not, I could get so far surfacing and tracking issues through defined lenses; but also there may be aspects that are either too subtle, or qualitative or minor that are key; equally it might be the interplay, over time of many disparate factors laced with particular events or quirky characteristics that is key. It would take a skilled social worker (in the case of a family) or skilled social scientist (for a town) to uncover such factors that go beyond the conventional lenses which might unlock a deeper understanding.

     Hope that makes some sense!

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2. Thank you for the invitation to comment on “Why Research needs Complexity Entrepreneurs”.

   I see a strong connection to military theory, an area of analytical philosophy aimed at understanding the conditions of international conflict. I would summarise military theory as being about characterising unbounded numbers of particular instances in a set of famously tortuously complex phenomena from across all of history, to yield abstract invariance properties for use in informing future decisions. The core of military theory is strategy, which is a term I hold is used widely today but without much real clarity. In military theory terms, strategy is the alignment of limited capability means and open-ended goals. Goals are just as susceptible to revision via this dance as capability means are changed by their use in pursuit of the goals. Strategy is not about solving fixed problems; strategy is about problem situations that evolve into new problem situations under the combined effect of all actions of all parties in pursuit of their policy goals. Moreover, the predictability of this evolution is inherently very limited because of the intensity of paradoxical effects, which, even after the fact, are impossible to completely pin down. Strategy relies on an understanding of how decision options lead not to solutions but to scopes of plausible future possibilities.

   This rings similar to how you describe an evolving situation where new problems to solve emerge in ways that cannot be fully predicted; indeed, I would say this is the true mark of scientific knowledge development. So it seems to me that your stated goals for Complexity Entrepreneurs of acting skilfully in a complex problem situation means that Complexity Entrepreneurs are strategists in precisely the military theory sense, and that seems to me to lead us to a fundamental issue about the need to study history to identify reliable invariances to inform decision-making, where decision-making might be explicitly cast in scientific programmes formulates as the alignment of open-ended knowledge goals and limited resources.

   The limited nature of resources brings me to an economics theory perspective as well, which was raise initially for me in the use of “entrepreneur”. Complexity in decision-making occurs because we must choose investments under economic conditions of capital rationing, meaning that our total resources are always less than the potential aggregate demand. We therefore operate under conditions of economic scarcity. If instead our potential demand cannot exceed resources – conditions of economic abundance – then we could evaluate all our raw options independently of each other and invest everything to the maximum degree that promises a positive return, with respect to our goals. The implications of not enjoying economic abundance for decision-making are profound: the objects of decisions are not the raw options, but complex combinations of those raw options, which interact in tortuously complex ways, and value pertains not to any individual option or component but to candidate packages consisting of combinations of them. Furthermore, as scarcity increases (so as means fall increasingly short of potential goals), decision complexity blows out combinatorially, not linearly.

   Entrepreneurial investment occurs under a combination of economic scarcity and risk that is not measurable (so much for the cult of risk management). There are measurable risks, meaning meaningful probability distributions of known sets of outcomes which can therefore be cast as costs, But this is very often not true of any if not all of the important risks, and this is especially so for entrepreneurial investment. Entrepreneurial investors face primarily risks that cannot be measured; Knightian uncertainty means knowable outcome sets without any basis for probability measures, and this is precisely what explains entrepreneurial behaviour, as well as being key in explaining economic profit and market system organisation. There is also Keynesian uncertainty, which means sets of possible outcomes are also far from fully knowable because of paradoxical effects.

   So it also occurs to me that your proposition of Complexity Entrepreneurs has quite a deep basis in economics. It suggests to me that Complexity Entrepreneurs may use the appropriate investment structuring mechanism of nested barbell strategies – each barbell has a safe side to protect against unacceptable loss and a speculative side for leveraging opportunities with unmeasurable risk and occasional extreme pay-off – rather than risk management rituals.

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   • Many thanks, Darryn, for this thoughtful and thought-provoking comment. It provides a really neat example of where complexity entrepreneurship is needed and the kinds of knowledge and skills complexity entrepreneurs need to cultivate, a skill set which you epitomise.

     Your thoughts stimulate thinking about an important discussion that we need to have, namely around how can we most effectively train complexity entrepreneurs, as well as provide an environment where continual learning is possible? How do we provide more general training so that what complexity entrepreneurs bring to the table is valued and fostered? Given that one person cannot possess all the knowledge and skills required, how do we assemble teams of people with complementary skills and help them work together effectively? What kind of ontological and epistemological diversity is ideal? And how do we manage the real-world constraints on that training individuals and teams that your comment highlights.

     I agree with you about drawing deeply on what existing disciplines have to offer. I’ve also suggested Integration and Implementation Sciences (i2S) as a new discipline which provides complementary skills to those of the existing disciplines drawing on what systems thinkers, inter- and transdisciplinarians, post-normal scientists, action researchers and others have to offer. Thinking about how the key elements could be put into an effective curriculum is a worthwhile challenge.

     A second set of thoughts stimulated by your comment is that the challenges you describe apply to all policy decision making. I’d go further and suggest that they apply to the individual lives of anyone trying to make a difference in the world. I wonder if, as individuals, we rationalise the limitations of what we can actually do in ways that run counter to effective thinking about the real challenges that you outline? That could have two consequences – one is that a better understanding of the limitations you highlight could make us more effective as individual change-makers. The other is that bringing the unhelpful rationalisations that we use as individuals into policy and military decision making could derail effective ways forward.

     So much to think about… so much to do… Welcome any further thought by you, Jean and other readers.

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     • Excellent discussion. I think you pose an important set of questions here; I’m going to go way out on a limb and make the wild suggestion that every one of them points at something at which our institutions may often leave a wee something to be desired. In asking these questions, I think you’ve more or less set up a draft set of policy goals: indeed, in military theory, strategy itself does very much apply to the problem of the development of ability to do strategy. Furthermore, I’ve proposed elsewhere that our positive measures of goodness are best supplanted, in relation to strategy, with negative goals about terminal (or unacceptable) failure avoidance, and I think that is also applicable here: if one aims at entrepreneurship, then one aims at protecting from unacceptable loss while leveraging disproportionate success, the occurrence of which is subject to severe limitations in predictability.

       So, as a postulated starting point, I’m going to draw another parallel, and hypothesise that detailed studies of historical cases but – this is vitally important – with an emphasis on identifying invariant properties that can inform strategy choices in future situations would be crucial. Given that’s basically what military theory is all about in a nutshell, it therefore seems to me that this substantiates your call for a new discipline.

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       • Thanks, Darryn, for these further reflections, as well as those on Jean’s response below. I agree that gathering detailed cases from a wide range of decision-making situations that used both analytical and non-analytical methods to tackle complexity would provide a useful foundation for further improving thinking, processes and methods for dealing—as well as possible—with the inherent (and inevitable) imperfections.

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   • Thanks Darryn and Gabriele. I hope I manage to do your comments justice. In ‘Embracing Complexity’ (2015:OUP) we devote a chapter to economics which you may find interesting – I could send it to you if you would be interested. I agree with you about Knight and Keynesian uncertainty and I might put it the other way around – economists who embrace radical uncertainty – unknown unknowns – have drawn on complexity and evolutionary thinking. Indeed Prigogine’s work via the thermodynamics of open systems explicitly noted the resonance with evolutionary theory. And Veblen’s 1898 paper asked ‘why is economics not an evolutionary science’. Complexity economist Brian Arthur asks about increasing not decreasing returns and knocks on the head the idea that most economies sit near and return to equilibrium. So these ideas sit on the margins of economics but don’t ‘win’ as people prefer a hunt for certainty, and for models that purport to give it.

     I guess what the term complexity entrepreneur means to me is the work with information that cannot be surfaced by analytical means, however sophisticated. I completely agree with your definition of strategy (an area in which I have worked extensively). You put it beautifully. However, I feel cautious about your comments about abstract invariance. When we look backwards or even forwards we only work with what we know and what we can see (or expect to see) – and variance sits within a particular mathematics that works with the probability, not possibility and with the known and the stable – often with first order factors. The complexity entrepreneur is invited to look beyond, to see the qualitative, the subtle, the non-average, the just emerging; and to spot patterns between and across disparate factors. I think of the difference between a doctor who relies on metrics and one who shakes your hand, looks into your eyes and intuits that there is something more going on as well as using the data wisely. Hope that makes sense and thank you for such a rich and considered set of reflections

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     • Thank you, Jean. There is indeed a deep-seated drive for certainty, yet I have also seen an interesting shift in economics. Economic crises (most notably the Global Financial Crisis mid-2007 to about early 2009) have a strong tendency to produce shifts in this regard, but what I have seen increasingly in recent years is for the use of improved computational methods with an emphasis on the uncertainty that has otherwise tended to remain hidden underneath neat functional equations. As an example I used a few days ago: price elasticity of demand at a point is not enough, because price elasticity of demand can change wildly in an arc applicable to a given context, so even good estimates at the point are not automatically reliable for formulating and evaluating policy choices. Real outcomes can and do go in seemingly the opposite direction to good estimates because of this, yet even fairly simple game models can illuminate bounds and caveats pretty quickly.

       There is a subtle thing to the invariances in military theory (as in the above example of price elasticity of demand), which, in my haste, I didn’t really describe. These invariants are reliable as guidelines, and they come with an articulation of their limitations and caveats. They are about narrowing the range of options to consider so that decision-making then has a sufficiently limited scope for strategy to be viable within limited decision-making resources. I think this is also what you’re stressing, and I applaud you for doing so. We sometimes describe this effect of narrowing the scope so strategy is feasible within limited option generation and evaluation resources in terms of doctrine being guidance, not dogma, or in stressing that it is constant planning (and re-planning) that really counts, while plans are the mere artifacts of planning.

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3. Hello Gabriele and everyone who has contributed to this conversation, which I have been reading through. The comments that struck me were firstly the one from Catherine about taking responsibility for the moral imperative to care for human and planetary wellbeing. I am linking this to your point that researchers can surface sytemic patterns and then explore innovative options. But I saw you mentioned at some point that innovation implies “recognising the multiple dimensions of change, building on understanding of the constancy of change and resistances to it”. The resistance to change (e.g., to recognising and addressing the causes of climate change such as fossil fuel dependence, extractive economies, industrial agriculture relying on dangerous inputs that ruin people and planet) is often organised by those who have a profit-oriented stake in not making changes and indeed in stopping those trying to offer changes. So I am wondering how your complexity entrepreneurs can work in trying to ensure more responsibility and accountability? Thus for most of our global institutions are reproducing what you call the “current systemic patterns”. I see that you have agreed that accountability is an issue – but I am not seeing thus far how you are offering options for addressing those who are not rendering themselves accountable and who are resisting fundamental change due to their profit motives. (They have even managed to infiltrate the IPCC as far as I have gathered and they have indicated that this infiltration is not problematic!)

   Are you hoping that the complexity entrepreneurs will somehow have the skills to work against the dominant global forces/institutional structures? I am interested in your thoughts on this. Thanks (in anticipation)!

   Norma

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   • Thanks, Norma, for the comment and the important issues that you raise. Holding vested interests to account is a challenge for society as a whole and requires action by a range of key societal players. Within that context, the question of whether complexity entrepreneurs might have special additional skills to offer is very useful to ask. One thing that immediately comes to mind is that complexity entrepreneurs are likely to be sensitive to the interdependencies between the key societal players who need to hold vested interests to account and that they (complexity entrepreneurs) can potentially highlight when those interdependencies are threatened in a way that reduces the power of the societal players and strengthens that of the vested interests. Also that the skills that complexity entrepreneurs bring to this is an area where collecting case studies that illustrate the work of complexity entrepreneurs may shine some light. You have raised a “big question” which needs more time for reflection and discussion. I am very interested in what you and others think.

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     • Thanks for this considered reply dear Gabriele. Yes, this is a “big question” and your answer is helpful.

       Norma

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     • Thanks Gabriele (a great reply) and Norma. Yes, sigh… you raise an important point. How to stand against those with vested interests and those who prefer not to dig too deep as it impacts their standard of living or sense of security. I think that the complexity entrepreneur plays a role in speaking out and sometimes in finding ways to try new things out, to show what can be different. People who stand against the norm both in saying the unsayable and in finding and trying out new solutions can at least seed the system with new ingredients. Speaking for myself, it encourages me to keep going – the idea that social change often comes through small voices and acts over time – the notion that we co-create the future and even small actions and intentions count. But I dont have an easy answer …

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       • Thanks for this answer dear Jean. As you say, there are no easy answers! But I agree that one way to proceed is to try to take on a role in speaking out and also seeking “ways to try new things out, to show what can be different. People who stand against the norm both in saying the unsayable and in finding and trying out new solutions can at least seed the system with new ingredients”. Yes, hopefully small actions and intentions when multiplied over and over across the globe will make a difference!

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4. Gabriele and Jean, I like your term ‘complexity entrepreneur’ very much – the reasoning behind it from each of you, the identified tasks for complexity entrepreneurs, and how i2S could provide ways forward. It has inspired quite a few thoughts, some of which follow.

   The newly-coined role is a name you have (thankfully) put to a role that already exists. It is already happening; hence your suggestion of gathering case studies. The terminology itself would very much help to establish and recognise that role, while also promoting it further. Things happen under the radar and the terminology needs to catch up. An example I can think of is that I worked for decades in local government before discovering that academia had more recently coined a name for the role I was playing (just because I thought it was necessary) – as a ‘boundary spanner’. The complexity entrepreneur role would of course need recognition in research commissioning as much as to research teams. I am very supportive of your aspirations.

   There’s an interesting paper from 2003 by John Law about ‘Making a Mess with Method’, in which he refers to the problems arising from repressing the possibility of mess in research. His concern is to ‘broaden’ method https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/fass/resources/sociology-online-papers/papers/law-making-a-mess-with-method.pdf Sadly, the restriction of research methods/methodologies can also be deliberate because people who talk about uncertainty, knowledge gaps and lack of ability to predict may not always be made to feel welcome at the table!

   In helping to run workshops about difficult social/environmental subjects in which I’ve provided summarised data as a basis for discussion, I’ve noticed that people don’t pore over the data – they speak from the heart about the things that they care about and wish to say. This is meaningful and represents our human resource that can be ‘othered’ if we are not careful.

   Your blog brings to mind the important research that Catherine Mangan and Catherine Needham have done around 21st Century Public Service which resonates to some extent with what you have written and includes working with complexity https://21stcenturypublicservant.wordpress.com/

   More generally, I could envisage a role of complexity entrepreneur, the responsibility for which is collective or shared, rather than always sitting with one person, rather like a role of complexity entrepreneurship for the team to engage with? In terms of tasks, documenting frames of questions or principles and suggested points of focus would be hugely helpful for a practice of complexity entrepreneurship in research.

   It remains of interest to me that some form of hard/soft divide runs through Complexity Science, Systems Science and Operational Research/Management Science. This is why the broad sweep of i2S which includes these approaches (and more!) is so important. I agree that a complexity entrepreneur role would thus need to draw upon a wide range of resources and not be limited to those approaches which sit more formally under the ‘complexity umbrella’.

   I do experience discomfort in the use of terms like ‘change’, ‘innovation’ and ‘intervention’ (or even ‘leadership’) without those terms being clearly rooted in purpose. Doing something because it’s morally a good thing to do (even though we may feel at sea) has to assist us in developing the human capacity to be better able to dynamically identify the ‘best possible’ way forward. A key thing for me is that we have to ‘learn to learn and adapt’ as we go along together (I have probably previously mentioned ‘triple loop learning’). As Jean and I have already discussed, this element of moral imperative looms ever large.

   At a time when ‘complexity’ is receiving ever more recognition – whatever people’s different perceptions and expressions of it are – the responsibility for the moral imperative in researching human and planetary affairs (as a living habitat for now and the future) surely lies with every individual within their potential spheres of influence? I’d be interested to know if you’ve any thoughts about how such a crucial expansive style of research could be recognised as ‘urgent’. Does the concept of ‘urgency’ or timeliness itself have an Overton window of acceptance that can be influenced positively?

   More recently, I’ve noticed a number of ‘accelerator projects’ in research. From the variety of responses your blog has already inspired, do you think there may be scope for a ‘Complexity Entrepreneur(ship)’ Accelerator Programme’?

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   • Thanks so much Cathy for your reply. And I think I see complexity entrepreneurism more as a skill or approach than a role per se – how do we enhance that approach in our teams and cultivate it in ourselves. And yes, the importance of both intention – ‘where are we heading’ – and values are central to change agents – ie I like you am concerned with how we engender a future that is fair, equitable and resilient for both people and planet, and how do we do that in a way that values in step in the sense that the future is co-created by our collective and entwined actions and intentions. But for researchers per se, I think allowing in the idea that using methods of critical subjectivity and having insights and aha moments which can be built on is captured by this term of ‘complexity entrepreneurism’, so glad it resonated with you. very best to you, Jean

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   • Many thanks, Cathy, for your detailed comment and for the useful references. It’s encouraging that the tasks resonate with you and that we may have found a name for the people who carry them out. I am probably more interested in ‘roles’ than Jean, given that none of us can do everything, so that specialising becomes an “ignorance arrangement” to share the load (as my colleague Michael Smithson has proposed). And indeed, there are several ways in which “complexity entrepreneurship” can be practiced, as you point out.

     In my experience, a key reason why “people who talk about uncertainty, knowledge gaps and lack of ability to predict may not always be made to feel welcome at the table” is that we don’t (yet) have much to offer, apart from articulating the problem. When the others at the table have well-established ways forward, simply highlighting that there are issues that are not being dealt with doesn’t add much that is immediately useful. Your suggestion of a “‘Complexity Entrepreneur(ship) Accelerator Programme’” would start to address this by looking for more concrete contributions and is therefore much needed.

     This is related to your useful articulation of the “hard/soft divide” – again I think accelerating the development of a community that can demonstrate useful approaches and evidence of success (on its own terms) would be helpful. We tend to look to others for affirmation, but I suggest we need to look to each other to push forward. After all, the physicists don’t look to the immunologists for affirmation, they look to each other for critique and progress on ideas and approaches – and we need to do the same.

     Thanks again for your thought-provoking comment.

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5. Dear Gabriele and Jean,

   What you have proposed speaks to heart and what I practice.

   Trained as an electrical engineer (we are taught signals/systems and control systems), systems thinking is embedded in the learning although not taught explicitly as a course or program. The boundary, however, was components of a mechanistic or engineering system – like power generation system, or electrical sub-system, etc.).

   I hail from an entrepreneurial family, and created business in my undergrad year with a friend to help pay my tuition fee. This is when I began to realize the concepts of thinking: stakeholder mapping and the relations to the business; emerging properties of innovative business ideas; feedback loops to see where would be the pivoting point (leverage point). After I worked few years in a very complex wireless technology inventory management system of a steel company, I went on to co-found a social business in Nepal to diffuse information technology in rural areas during the civil war of 12 years (ended in 2006). Then I really got to see the relevance of systems thinking as the stakeholders were those who had not touched computers let alone operating on, reliant on NGOs based funding for local initiatives (due to internal conflict, NGOs were many, and the new behavior had been emerged); without electricity and internet; and left with relatively younger people because of internal migration, again due to conflict.

   After the award-winning project, the reflection on the success, especially on the sustainable model of technology integration, I was convinced systems approaches are the right mindset to tackle complexities. After I returned to the US in 2014, I managed highly complex projects with great outcomes. I even played with the idea of calling it an ‘entrepreneurial change’ management because it pushes the boundaries while adding multiple perspectives to the problem being looked into. Essentially complexity entrepreneurs are practitioners who have failed or succeeded or both dealing with the complexities, and therefore are the source evidence-based data researchers may need.

   If there are opportunities to do research with you folks, let me know. https://www.linkedin.com/in/tikarai/.

   Thank you.

   Tika Rai, PhD

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   • Thanks Tika, glad this spoke to you – and maybe others who read this will reach out to you as well. very best, Jean

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   • Thanks Tika for your inspiring story. Good luck with your future entrepreneurial activities.

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7. Dear Gabriele and Jean,

   Your observation that even those embracing complexity may hope for methods that deliver “objective clarity” resonates with Post-Normal Science. Institutional demands for definitive answers sustain that hope and shape what research receives funding.

   That hope recalls what Jean, following Morin, calls restricted complexity, in which better models are expected to uncover an underlying order. The Post-Normal Science account makes no such assumption. Complexity lies in the relation between a system and its descriptions: several non-equivalent descriptions are needed, and none subsumes the others. Better methods may reduce some uncertainties while leaving this ambiguity unresolved. Recognising it does not require us to settle the ontology.

   I would hesitate over “beyond reason”. Stephen Toulmin’s Return to Reason (2001) recovers the humanistic tradition of practical judgement in particular situations and distinguishes reasonableness from the narrower rationality of formal calculation. In this understanding, judgement, intuition, deliberation and learning from experience belong within reason. Their quality depends on opportunities for scrutiny, challenge and revision.

   A complexity entrepreneur must find “the conviction to take action”, and policy entrepreneurs, with whom you draw an analogy, advocate for proposals they favour. Your proposal to work critically with multiple perspectives raises a further question about the institutional arrangements that support this role. What makes these judgements accountable? Whose purposes guide the interventions, who assesses their contribution, and how can those affected question their assumptions or bring overlooked consequences into view?

   Extended peer communities offer one answer. As I describe in my quick guide to post-normal science (https://i2insights.org/2021/10/19/guide-to-post-normal-science/), they include people beyond the research team, with different experiences, responsibilities and stakes. They participate in defining the problems and assessing proposed responses, bringing the purposes and criteria of affected communities into the discussion. Naming a role may help secure recognition and resources. Its contribution will depend on whether it strengthens the quality of collective judgement and keeps that judgement open to challenge.

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   • Many thanks for your comments. I was interested to see the resonances with Post-Normal Science. Thanks also for raising the questions of accountability and evaluation – these are clearly critical in moving the role of complexity entrepreneur forward!

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   • Hi Silvio, thanks for your very interesting reflections. I’m a fan of Toulmin too and agree with your point about reason. I wanted to respond to this point “Complexity lies in the relation between a system and its description” – that may be a point of view, but it is not how I approach a definition of complexity, which, with Prigogine, I see as arising from the reflexive relationships amongst and between consitutive elements. It doesnt assume there is a system (which might mean something with boundaries and identifiable connections) – so ergo I wouldnt see complexity as in between system and relation, but rather something that describes the way things – people or elements in an ecology – interact reflexively such that more systemic patterns arise.

     In relation to multiple perspectives as a way of knowing ie as a way of exploring what is there – the way I work with this is to get decision makers to come together and tussle with multiple perspectives and take a judgment together as to what is there – ie what the systemic multi-perspectival exploration seems to surface – and then agree what is needed – or at least where to start. So I am not seeing a new (complexity entrepreneur) role or a need for institutional arrangements to support this – more of a developing a process of decision making that works with subjective as well as objective data to explore what is and agree how to move forwards. I do agree too – and use it myself – that whatever the focus – be it research or strategic management – bringing in voices from ‘outside’ – beneficiaries, critical friends, former colleagues, stakeholders – is always very helpful in saying the unsayable, bringing in new information and challenges and informing the rich picture that is being formed. I think I see approaching things as a complexity entrepreneur is more of a skill to cultivate rather than a role to establish.

     I hope that goes some way to respond to your interesting comments – very many thanks for taking the time

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8. I teach in a Master’s program called “Complex Systems Management and Engineering” here at the Delft Institute of Technology. It is an interdisciplinary program situated within a faculty that is working at the intersection of technology, policy and management and along with architecture and industrial design, the only faculty not working in the physical or engineering sciences exclusively. For this reason, one of our persistent challenges is in communicating the competences that they take along with them, in an environment that implicitly values quantitative skills and approaches (above interdisciplinary approaches) and broadening their view of what it means to “be an engineer” while also spending over half of their study time on topics related to policy and management.

   I think that the label of “complexity entrepreneur” might be a succinct way of terming a lot of the unique perspectives they are able to cultivate in this programme. It gives them the language to establish an identity and to articulate the need for these perspectives. At the same time, in our institution, we are completely reworking the competency frameworks for inter-/transdisciplinary education, in light of AI literacy and competence. I think the language and concepts used here can also help us to clarify the future purpose of higher education as we try to help our students navigate their paths forward. I’m very glad to have been introduced to this term (thanks Gabriele and Jean)!

   Looking forward to follow up with the additional references from this blogpost!

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   • Thanks BinBin. It’s always really interesting to learn more about the great teaching that you are involved in. If you haven’t already seen it, you might also be interested in Jean’s i2Insights contribution on restricted and general complexity:
     “The ontologies of restricted and general complexity” https://i2insights.org/2026/07/07/restricted-and-general-complexity/

     Getting students to appreciate general complexity especially when they are still mastering the fundamentals of mapping and modelling and related methods in restricted complexity is a key foundation if they want to become complexity entrepreneurs.

     Further, I don’t think every student or researcher should be a complexity entrepreneur. We also need good disciplinary experts, good inter- and transdisciplinarians, good systems thinkers and modellers etc. Ideally they should also appreciate the need for, and skill set involved in, being a complexity entrepreneur, without possessing that skill set themselves.

     Does that resonate with you?

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   • Thanks so much for your comment. And its a good point that engineering types can view entrepreneurism positively. One of the books I’ve often used to land some of this with those in engineering environments is ‘Disruptive Innovation’ (Christensen) which gives case studies from say Hewlett Packard which show the limits of relying too much on evidence and analysis. And stories of ‘creators on creating’ who describe the role of the imagination and how making sideways connections facilitated them – and how when that process gets stifled by listing what a new innovation might lead to in advance, it diminishes success. I also go to some of the evidence on the different approaches by different scientists/engineers – those who meticulously build up incrementally (much needed) but also those who take wild leaps and then explore them afterwards (Feynman and Einstein describe themselves in this way). So hope that helps a bit. Oh and Philip Streatfield wrote about the impossibility of turning some chemical processes into recipes (he was writing about the production of a particular drug) – a bit like trying to write down how to make a good Yorkshire pudding – you need to develop a sort of tacit visceral knowledge that doesn’t easily turn into a list of instructions.

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9. Wow! Thanks for introducing me to “wise navigation’ phenomena so eloquently described in practical wisdom in co-production by Guido Caniglia and Rebecca Freeth. I think this is what is missing in current state of affairs where people bring in their novel ideas but do not build upon the “pearls of wisdom” pragmatic solutions to common conundrums. Thanks again, Anil

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10. These questions are currently very topical. It might be interesting to readers to note that your thoughts also relate to those we have developed under the term Systems Intelligence. Very often, real-life complexities originate from human behaviour in social settings. A group or a team facing complexities needs to have competences and skills as a whole. Systems Intelligence (SI) is a concept defined as intelligent behavior in the context of complex systems involving interaction and feedback. SI is described by the following eight factors:
    Systemic Perception: Seeing, identifying and recognizing systems, patterns and interconnections, having situational awareness;
    Attunement: Engaging intersubjectively, being present, mindful, situationally sensitive and open;
    Positive Attitude: Keeping a positive outlook, not getting stuck on negative impressions and effects.
    Spirited Discovery: Engaging with new ideas, embracing change;
    Reflection: Reflecting upon one’s thinking and actions, challenging one’s own behavior;
    Wise Action: Exercising long-term thinking and realizing its implications, understanding that consequences may take time to develop;
    Positive Engagement: Taking systemic leverage points and means successfully into action with people;
    Effective Responsiveness: Taking systemic leverage points and means successfully into action with the environment, being able to dance with systems.
    It has been shown that successful managers score high in SI. We can also talk about Organizational systems intelligence. For more on SI, visit our website (http://systemsintelligence.aalto.fi/ ), which has research material on SI and a link to the SI test.
    There is some more discussions in our i2insights posts on Leadership ( https://i2insights.org/2021/02/02/leadership-in-participatory-modelling/) and Competence areas in participatory modelling (https://i2insights.org/2023/04/18/participatory-modeling-competencies/)

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    • Thanks, Raimo, for highlighting your important work on systems intelligence. While I don’t think systems intelligence is identical with complexity entrepreneurship, it’s a good reminder that there is a lot to take into account in effectively understanding―and acting in―complex situations!

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    • Amazing. I love this! The notion of systemic perception – surfacing the current systemic patterns; then attunement – attuning to both what is and what is changing; then spirited discovery (a lovely way of putting it), coupled with positive attitude – part of the ‘going for it’ that the entrepreneur needs. I’d emphasise all these at that beginning stage of the complexity entrepreneur working out how to taking first action. And then you also are implying (with wise action and positive engagement) the importance of acting with others, the planet and the future in mind – not central in a sense to the skill of being a complexity entrepreneur, but central to creating a just and resilient future. Thanks so much for sharing, Raimo.

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11. I love that you have named a role specifically for engaging with complexity in the research experience. This passage touched my heart because it resonates so deeply with my lived experience as a team scientist:

    “It is hard not to feel at odds in a world seeking predominantly hard evidence and clear evaluation of alternatives to support conclusions and action strategies. And even with those intent on ‘embracing complexity’ there often lurks the hope that methods can be identified that will reduce that complexity sufficiently so that objective clarity is found.”

    I think of complexity entrepreneurs as inhabiting the “messy middle”—working across boundaries in ways that do not fit neatly into established categories. Sadly, in my experience, these roles are often among the first to go when funding is cut.

    This also brings to mind the opening of the Dao De Jing, which I understand as reminding us that the Dao we can name is not the enduring Dao. For me, the connection is that whatever we can name, measure, or establish as “hard evidence” captures something meaningful while inevitably leaving something out.

    I see the pattern::mystery polarity at play here. However clearly we articulate a pattern, it remains only part of the story. I wish we made more room to ask: What is outside our explanation? What might the other half of the story reveal?

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    • Thanks Gemma. I wondered if this might resonate with you. I agree that bringing in polarity thinking is potentially useful. Another polarity might be causes::patterns. As well as looking for causal relationships, we also need to look for non-causal relationships, especially patterns.

      Interested readers might look at:
      Navigating polarities: Fostering both/and mindsets in team science by Gemma Jiang and Joanna Kaniewska
      https://i2insights.org/2026/06/16/navigating-polarities-in-teams/

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      • Thanks Gemma from me too. The notion that the complex world entails paradox is one of the central characteristics of a complex world that I explore in the Dao of Complexity (2024). And I too refer to the work of Barry Johnson in developing polarity management as a way to surface the ‘excluded middle’ and the need for transdisciplinarity. I see this as much about a mindset change as an issue of roles, but do agree that some organisations resort to separation of specialisms that mitigate against a systemic way of working. I’m not sure we use the word patterns in the same way. I’m referring to the patterning of relationships that can lead to relatively stable cultures or norms of ways of working, or relatively stable synergies between flora and fauna in a particular wood or region -and these patterns do include the paradox you refer to – the stability is retained by the adaptability and flexing of the connections between elements and their diversity. So, responding to Gabriele’s point, I would say patterns in the social and natural world emerge as a result of the reflexive interactions between consitituent elements – and those patterns, in very stable contexts, can display causal interdependence at an abstracted level – like the relationship between supply and demand. But it all goes wrong when we give too much salience to that connection (in this case between supply and demand) and evidence it is unravelling is a sign that something is rearranging ..

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12. Very interesting and novel idea of coining “complexity entrepreneurs” that is very timely and much needed to solve complex problems emerging at broader spectrum level of galvanizing various thought processes and perspectives into meaningful coherent problem solving panacea for larger societal good. Having said that, entrepreneurs seem to have some sort of “novice” connotation attached to it, it could be brilliant mind in garage coming up with innovative ideas worth Billions and Trillions dollars worth of industries for the greater good of humanity, however, some “high-risk and high-reward” ventures are not guaranteed successful culmination into tangible outcomes that would have profound impact in improving the lives on global scale.

    Based on the background and enormous critical thinking of you two stellar subject matter experts in this arena, I would humbly suggest a seasoned versatile and wise “Navigator or Concierge” term beyond their age and experience to handle multitude of opinions, mindsets, perspectives to build a consensus among different thought processes and perspectives to amalgamate a unifying solution oriented person who could bring this visionary idea to fruition that is not only admired and accepted universally among competing demands and subject matter rivalries. For example, settling the differences and unique perspectives among health care providers, hospital systems, insurance companies and big pharmaceutical companies for providing quality health care delivery system to humanity world over!! My wishful thinking as an eternally optimistic person. Great write up enjoyed reading it! Much appreciated! Anil Wali

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    • Thanks for those thoughts, Anil. From my perspective “entrepreneur’ also conjures up innovation, risk and going beyond what’s known in a way that “navigator” and “concierge” do not. Of course, the navigation skills as you describe them are also critically important. If you haven’t already seen it, you might enjoy:
      Wisely navigating knowledge co-production: Towards an ethics that builds capacities by Guido Caniglia and Rebecca Freeth
      https://i2insights.org/2023/04/11/practical-wisdom-in-co-production/

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      • Yes, I like the word entrepreneur for the reasons you say, Gabriele – I feel entrepreneurs do sense into the wider context, and at the same time have a sense of the ‘cracks’ or opportunities opening up. For me that means using both hard and soft data, both intuition and more analytical ways of surfacing knowledge. And the entrepreneur seems to have a way, as Gabriele says, of conjuring up a new approach, and having sufficient confidence and flair to back it.

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