From the turbulence of the past few weeks — or one might say years — one thing is clear. Nothing is ever what it seems. No one explanation ever seems to be good enough. Social, political, economic and cultural issues are multi-layered and as you get a sense of one layer, the next one emerges, sometimes adding to and sometimes contradicting the first level of understanding. The same goes for organised systems of knowledge, whether physics, history, or economics. There are few rules that don’t have caveats and riders, and few rules that can be universally applied without the important phrases “it depends” or “there are exceptions”.
Through most of school, we learn about certainties and simple truths. We spend a lot of time learning definitions and equations — which, by their very nature, reduce relationships and interactions to their bare bones. This is of course, an important way to be introduced to the nature of the physical and social world, so that we at least have a very broad idea of how things work. This early education gives us a skeletal picture, an outline of sorts, which we continue to fill in as we learn more about the details. Depending on what we choose to study at higher levels, we will acquire a fuller appreciation of specific parts of the skeleton, while the rest remains at the level of the bare skeleton.
However, even as we immerse ourselves in a chosen area of study, it is important to retain the awareness that other fields too have depth and detail. In fact, it is important to develop an appreciation for the immense complexity of most things in life. Nothing is as simple as it seems on the surface, and nothing in the real world is ever as we study it in the lab or in textbooks.
Many jobs these days require what is called “complexity thinking” — the ability to grasp the intricacies of systems and their basic unpredictability. A couple of decades ago, everyone was talking about the need for “systems thinking”. This refers to the idea that we need to understand the nature of interdependent mechanisms that make up most entities — biological and social. Hence the need to think of the body as a whole system with parts that work together and affect each other, or a company as a system where each department depended on and contributed to the other. So even if your interest is only in one part of the system, you understand how that part fits with the others and how they all work together.
While systems thinking is about recognising the shape and nature of an organisation or biological entity, complexity thinking looks deeper into the parts of the system as well as the whole, all the while appreciating that it may never be possible to know everything about everything.
Experts suggest that complexity thinking includes the ability to go back and forth from the small to the large, to see the relationships between things, to synthesise information and ideas from different conceptual fields, combined with a willingness to collaborate. It is also the ability to see the problems and challenges that come up when you take something from planning to implementation.
Complexity thinking is useful in many fields, including (but not limited to) economics, theoretical physics, cellular biology, diagnostic medicine, sociology, anthropology, cognitive science and computer science. All of these fields deal with small and large systems with lots of moving parts, and they all apply complexity thinking to varying extents.
To actually be able to apply complexity thinking may take years of study and practice in a particular discipline while remaining aware of related developments in other related fields. So, if you are in architecture, you would have to keep up with ideas in sustainability, resource planning, materials science, environmental engineering, geography, and so on, to come up with designs that are efficient, aesthetically acceptable and meet regulatory standards. If you manage a school, you would need to keep track of policy, urban growth, child development, socio-economic patterns in the neighbourhood of the school, and so on, in order to plan strategically. It is also true that some activities and occupations benefit from avoiding this kind of thinking just to retain focus. For instance, if you work in the armed forces, it does not help to analyse the deep-rooted causes and outcomes of war (where there is no clear bad and good, only loss of life and property on both sides) — although it would help to understand complexity if you are a strategist, policy maker or planner.
How does one cultivate complexity thinking? It is as much an attitude of mind as a mental skill. The first stage is to appreciate the system-ness of the thing or the field you are studying, to know that activity in this sphere has its limitations and to recognise the need to reach out to other disciplines. The second stage is to get comfortable with uncertainty and opaqueness, to accept that you may never have a clean and simple explanation — or, by extension, not even a straight and simple solution or answer.
Finally, it’s about realising that no matter how neat the equation or diagram looks on paper, or how beautifully a laboratory model or a computer simulation might look, there’s a lot going on underneath, around, and inside those lines and spaces. It’s about preparing to be constantly surprised by the things you do not, and cannot, see.
Source:-
the hindu.
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