[MUSIC] Social innovation always takes place in complex systems. And most of what we've been taught about how to solve problems in school, or just in life. Turns out not to be that useful in complex systems and often can even be counterproductive. So what's a complex system? It has two kinds of properties. One is that it has many, many, many variables, or elements. There's lots of people, material, rules. And so many that it's hard to catalog. And the second piece, which is even more important is that those elements. Those parts of the system are interacting with each other so much that the complexity increases exponentially. And this means that complex systems, even though they do have order. They have structure, there are patterns that we can recognise, are not predictable in advance, or not very predictable. We have a tough time. Cause and effect, the relationship between cause and effect is not obvious. There are causes and there are effects, but one cause may have many effects. One effect may have many causes. And those things may change over time. And so kind of figuring out how to interact with that system is quite tricky. That's quite abstract. So think about if you want to make it more concrete. Think about in a natural system. Something like a rainforest, or the weather. So the weather has so many parts and so many moving dynamics. That even though we have immensely sophisticated analytical tools now at our disposal and measurement tools. We still can't predict it with a great deal of accuracy. Anymore that we can predict exactly what's going to happen to something like a rainforest. Human systems, like culture and societies, cities, communities, families, organizations. They're even much more complex than natural systems. Because they have all the same properties of natural systems and human systems can think about themselves. We can think about our own rules we can change our own rules. So that adds another layer of making them very hard to predict. And even when we can predict them for a little while. That system might all of a sudden change kind of its fundamental under-structure. The rules that are governing it. So it gets harder. One of my favorite ways to make sense of this and think about it. So that I can really take it in comes from Brenda Zimmerman. And she distinguishes between simple and complicated, and complex. And she has a great example for each one of those. So simple, she says is like baking a cake. We can follow a recipe. Each time it's likely to come out with roughly the same result. It's got a relatively small number of ingredients, variables, and things we're putting together. I can learn how to do it pretty quickly. I don't have to have lots of expertise to do it. And I mean I make the best cake in the world but I'll be able to regularly produce a pretty decent cake, that's simple. Complicated in some ways are a lot like simple, but more so. So she says complicated is like sending a rocket to the moon. Obviously a lot harder than baking a cake. But if you look at it, you're still going to have a recipe. A detailed set of instructions of how to build that rocket and fly it to the moon. Now this set of instructions might occupy many rooms, many volumes, or many hard drives. But, it'll still have those instructions. And once we've figured it out, which might take many, many years, or decades figuring out how to do it. Once we've figured it out. We can do it again. If we can acquire the same material and the resources we needed. Now, we can do it over and over again. It's relatively reproducible. It takes quite a bit of expertise to do it. But once we've acquired the expertise. Then we know what we're doing and we can predict things. Complex is qualitatively different than either of those two. So, the example Brenda gives is raising a child, which I love. because right away we understand that this is a fundamentally different thing than sending a rocket to the moon. In some ways it might be easier, right? Because many more people raise children, than send rockets to the moon. On the other hand, there's clearly no recipe. Every child and the raising of every child is going to be different and unique. I can raise one child or two children or three children really well. And then the fourth time, things might be different. They might not go so well. I have different kinds of problems and a different person to work with. I can have some expertise. We can take advice. We can read books. But, that expertise may or may not apply in different contexts. And what worked yesterday will not necessarily work today. So we can see that if we're going to engage with raising a child. We're going to draw in a lot of different skills, temperaments and ways of thinking. Than if we're going to send a rocket to the moon or to bake a cake. And if you had to boil it all together. You'd say, the few things you want to think about are. How reproducible is this? So from very reproducible, to very reproducible, to rocket with lots of expertise, to fundamentally not really that reproducible. That's a child. What's the role of expertise? Simple, you don't need it that much. Complicated, you need lots of expertise brought to bear. Complex, expertise can be useful. But it's not the main thing. It can help us, but it can't really guide us. It can't be in control of living that out. Another thing about complex systems, about raising a child is you have to think about that child is part of a much larger system. You have to think about it holistically. You have to think about all of the other pieces, elements that might be relating with that child or the time other people in the family the community and culture that you live in, the kinds of institutions etc that the child is in the middle of, and that your family is in the middle of. And the last thing about complex systems that's quite different is you can't work on them. You can only work in them. You are part of any complex system that you're trying to change. I can work on a rocket, but I can't work on a child. I have to engage with that child. I have to engage with that community. I have to engage with that organization. I'm going to be changed as I work to change that child, that community, that organization. So the work of complexity is fundamentally about bringing yourself into the system, engaging with it, living with it, and innovating in yourself as you innovate in the system that you're working. [MUSIC]
