Customer Reviews

Harnessing Complexity: Organizational Implications of a Scientific Frontier

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

HARNESSING COMPLEXITY is a breakthrough book on complexity science. It provides the first useful framework and vocabulary for evaluating complex adaptive systems, while giving you the first guidelines for considering how to use the circumstances of your complex adaptive system to your organization's advantage.

All of this is beautifully summarized in a brief concluding chapter. I suggest you begin by reading that chapter, so you will have a better idea of why you are learning what you are learning.

This approach will also be improved by keeping in mind some problem or opportunity that you want to think about in terms of complexity science as you read the book. You'll get more out of the book that way.

But do be warned that the book starts off like a typical popular book on a technical subject by academics. There are lots of references to the work of others, lots of pages of definitions, and a very long introduction. But don't be fooled; it's just laying the groundwork for enabling you to apply a new framework to your situation. But the writing is simple and clear. The examples are varied and interesting -- drawn from computer sciences, evolutionary biology and social design. One of those areas is bound to interest you.

The framework is pretty simple: Variation (we usually encourage too little of it -- that's our old friend complacency fooling us, again); Interaction (connections cause ideas and physical changes to grow in significance -- showing the importance of overcoming the communications stall); and Selection (watch the tendency to close off experimentation too quickly or to reward the wrong behavior -- avoiding the misconception and disbelief stalls).

I found that the framework immediately worked in thinking about problems that I have been considering, like how to spread the awareness of superior practices.

In fact, the framework itself is a good example of a theoretical best practice thinking exercise. I highly commend it to you.

Unfortunately, the book will appear to be too difficult and too abstract in concepts for many. I suggest the authors plan to follow this book with one more along the lines of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Complexity Harnessers (I'm sure they'll find a better title). The point is that most readers will want more help with application, and less development of the framework.

I strongly recommend this book to those who want to understand more about complexity science. The nontechnical overview is excellent. But more importantly, I strongly recommend that you try to apply the book's principles as expressed in the conclusion to your own issues, those of your organization, and those of humanity and the other species on Earth. I think this book can be a big help in speeding human-led progress.

As usual, more buzzwords and hype about complexity from the self-proclaimed gurus, with praise from the gurus' co-workers at the same institutions (check the back cover for praise from people from the same places where the authors work -- no branch of science would tolerate this).

The book is 160 pages. The pages are small. The typeface is big. This "book" could easily be read in 2 hours by anyone with an interest in complex adaptive systems. I suppose that is good. But what you can read in the two hours is basically fluff. Sorry, but it is. Here's a rule "Arrange organization routines to generate a good balance between exploration and exploitation." Wonderful advice. How do you know what that balance is before you do the experiment? If the payoff for exploration is large, but the odds of success are low, then what? OK, I could build a simulation, right. How do I know that the simulation contains the necessary elements of the complex system and their interactions? (silence)

The book is a collection of platitudes that aren't much better than "look before you leap" and "he who hesitates is lost" -- there is always an addage that fits a scenario. The authors have eight scenarios that fit their addages. I'm sure we could find 80 that don't.

I expect more from these guys. Maybe the average manager at a company won't. But the average manager at a company won't gain any real sense of knowledge from this book, anymore than they would if they read the back cover praise: "You can't judge a book by its back cover"...if the people giving the praise all work at the same places as the authors. Can we cut the cronyism and publish some science? Or is it that Maynard Smith was right after all: complexity is fact-free science.

It's time for a new wardrobe for the emperor, because this clique has no clothes.

In the first paragraph of the preface of this book, Axelrod and Cohen ask, "In a world where many players are all adapting to each other and where the emergring future is extremely hard to predict, what actions should we take?" As a "reader from Boston" recommended, providing recommendations for practical application (7 Habits of Complexity?) would have helped answer this question.

Unfortunately, even the authors' anectodal examples provide little insight into HOW to "harness" complexity. While this book is primarily aimed at "designers and policy makers," it may actually be most useful to consultants looking to add new buzzwords to their bs lexicon.

I would recommend Briggs and Peats's "Seven Life Lessons of Chaos" for those who are looking for a more nuts-and-bolts approach to these issues.

How anyone can rate this book at 5 stars is beyond me. This book is not only one of the weaker contributions to the literature on complexity in the past two years, it fails to live up to the title. No one who reads this book will know how to take the first step toward "harnessing complexity." At best, they will have the broadly useful idea that it's good to experiment with new ideas (exploration) every now and then, and then pick the ideas that work (exploitation). That hardly seems like a great breakthrough. Organizational Implications of a Scientific Frontier?! Get real.

In clear, non-technical prose, the authors spell out the practical implications of complexity theory for a variety of domains. They use lots of examples to illustrate their points, and deliberately keep the discussion at a level accessible to non-experts. If you were baffled by Stuart Kauffman's writings, you'll be surprised to learn that complexity theory has practical applications!

As my first venture into the world of complexity and complex adaptive systems this was an interesting book. A lot of what I anecdotally thought about complexity was reinforced through the authors' own anecdotal examples. The examples were from a wide variety of situations, but were explained in a way to be understood by someone without a background in those various areas. However, I think the title was somewhat misleading. It seemed that a lot of the value of the book depended on having at least the initial, possibly intuitive, understanding of the interrelatedness of events, structure, and environment.

The diversity of the areas affected by complexity would seem to make it difficult to formulate a simple step by step approach for using complexity. However, it would have been helpful if the authors spent some time on what initial or environmental conditions might have been changed in their examples and how those changes would have affected the end system.

Overall, I think the book is too generic, only touching the surface of complexity/organizational theory. Hard for me to get any good action steps/tips for my practical job.

The author pointed out three points of "Complex Adaptive System"
- variation
- interaction
- selection

It looks like something new. However, the author only talks on the very surface level of these three concepts. He explained why variation/interaction/selection is good to corporate organization, just as it is good for living beings. Yet, you can't find specific action steps to work on. In addition, if we do not go into deeper level (or new meaning), these three concepts will be just like old concepts with new names (i.e. diversity/teamwork/performance evaluation).

Net, I find this book is hard for practical use, and only recommend it to people who are extremely interested in complexity theory.

The world of organizations in which we work and live tends to be swept with 2 major theories of functional organizational alignment: hierarchies and networks. For thousands of years, we have been applying hierarchies to the domain of organizational structure and management while allowing networks to thrive in marketplaces and alike. As we have moved into modern organizations, there have been ample studies that networks are also play a very important role in organizational survival and efficiency. Hierarchies effect on markets is not part of this discussion. Although the concept of the networked part of organization is very popular in management literature, it tends to be actualized poorly, and worse, is often not connected to solid underlying theory. Axelrod and Cohen's work is a step towards remedying this situation. They appear to have taken their insights from their theoretic work on complex adaptive systems (CAS) and empirical insights into how organizations function and created a new framework of applying networks in organizations. This framework links together many different, often opposing ideas. For example, the authors claim the need for variation amongst types of roles people (which they call agents) play as well in the routines that used in a system. Yet, these differences cannot be too varied, as to cause to much agent confusion, e.g. chaos, or to orderly as to having the system, e.g. organization, susceptible to large scale breakdown due to un unforeseen, possibly malicious, external events. Another example is the balance between exploitation of current organizational resources and systems, and exploration of new resources and systems. It is in these ways that the idea of complexity, the region between order and chaos, is eloquently presented. As the reader progress through the book, many of the core concepts or complexity are introduced and integrated into the overall framework. In the end, what is presented is a delicate, yet solid foundation in understanding and applying complexity theory insights to the networked aspect of organizations. This framework is presented in such a way that is can be applied to networked based, complex issues facing managers in modern organizations. This brings up a few cautions for the readers as well as opportunities for further research in this area. First there is little to no discussion to how organizational hierarchies and networks, e.g. CAS, can be adequately combined. This could make it very difficult to apply this framework across most modern organizations. Next, there is no discussion on how to create a viable CAS from `scratch.' In other words, it is not obvious how to create an organization with this framework. The framework only addresses how to affect change in a currently `thriving' organization. Also, some aspects of complexity theory have not been integrated into the framework, some of which are aggregation, building blocks (ala Holland) and fitness landscapes (ala Kauffman and others). Still, the framework presented is a step in understanding and applying the inherent power of an organizational CAS to difficult complex, adaptive problems. It also allows for expansion from both the complexity theory and organization science fields. Either way, it contains ideas that will inform and possibly assist all readers in dealing the dilemmas that occur when facing and functioning within our own complex adaptive systems.

As my first venture into the world of complexity and complex adaptive systems this was an interesting book. A lot of what I anecdotally thought about complexity was reinforced through the authors' own anecdotal examples. The examples were from a wide variety of situations, but were explained in a way to be understood by someone without a background in those various areas. However, I think the title was somewhat misleading. It seemed that a lot of the value of the book depended on having at least the initial, possibly intuitive, understanding of the interrelatedness of events, structure, and environment.

The diversity of the areas affected by complexity would seem to make it difficult to formulate a simple step by step approach for using complexity. However, it would have been helpful if the authors spent some time on what initial or environmental conditions might have been changed in their examples and how those changes would have affected the end system.

Complexity theory sounds so cool, since it has developed its own unique vocabulary to describe things like plant growth, iterations of patterns in things like tree root systems or mammalian lungs, or long causal chains of actions. There even seems to be a belief system of orthodox Darwinism to supply the "Black Box" of impulse and explanation to seemingly irreducible complexities, like how one shred of a cell could live apart from the rest of the cell, or how the whole cell could live without each part. Interestingly, these authors bow low to Mr. Darwin (perhaps to stay in communion with the high priests of the Santa Fe Institute) but don't really plug much Darwin into their business and military analyses, which seem full of volition, and free of macro-evolutionary assumptions.

So the Darwinism is meta-hooey, but then so is a great deal of macroeconomiics, and management theory. Unlike some complexity writers, these authors do seem to work out a few interesting implications of 1) business managers/leaders not knowing everything; 2) and people not behaving like mathematical averages. Yet they end up affirming the imperative of leaders leading, and people behaving in hard-to-manage ways.

Did they need all the science and evolution-speak to draw these conclusions? How are they any different, as they face the technological uncertainties inherent in our own age, from the orthodox puritan capitalist 200 years ago, trying something new with steam cylinders and gears, while referring to his Bible and trusting his God to "direct his paths?" How to lead a company of workers, and invent new products simultaneously? Look for good people to develop, and for new people with needed skills, I guess. Same thing here with this book.