Early systems thinkers were still ultimately aiming to improve their ability to better predict and control the system in question. The introduction of insights from chaos theory and non-liner mathematics into systems science sparked the development of complexity theory.

Interconnectedness, unpredictability, and uncontrolability are key characteristics of all complex dynamic systems. In dealing with complexity rather than mechanisms, the aim of science shifts from improving our ability to predict and control to aiming to better understand the dynamics and relationships of the systems we participate in so that our participation can be more appropriate.

“Complexity theory is becoming a science that recognizes and celebrates the creativity of nature. Now that’s pretty extraordinary, because it opens the door to a new way of seeing the world, recognizing that these complex dynamic systems are sensitive to initial conditions and have emergent properties. We have to learn to walk carefully in relation to these complex systems on which the quality of our lives depends, from microbial ecosystems to the biosphere, because we influence them although we cannot control them. This knowledge is new to our western scientific mentality…”.

— Brian Goodwin (et al., 2001, p.27).

The sciences of complexity are a variety of process-oriented areas of research exploring non-linear dynamics within complex systems. The simplest definition for a complex system is any system with more than three interacting variables. Complexity is thus a common feature of the world we inhabit.

When we speak about chaos theory it is important to understand that chaos does not refer to a state of absolutely incoherent disorder, rather “the scientific term chaos refers to an underlying interconnectedness that exists in apparently random events.” Briggs and Peat explain: “Chaos science focuses on hidden patterns, nuance, the sensitivity of things, and the rules for how the unpredictable leads to the new”(Briggs & Peat, 1999, p.2).

Chaos theory provides a radically different framework for studying complex dynamics. It highlights the limitations that are inherent in a reductionistic and mechanistic — linear cause and effect based — analysis of complex systems.

“Chaos theory teaches us that we are always a part of the problem and that particular tension and dislocation always unfold from the entire system rather than from some defective “part.” Envisioning an issue as a purely mechanical problem to be solved may bring temporary relief of symptoms, but chaos suggests that in the long run it could be more effective to look at the overall context in which a particular problems manifest itself.”

— Briggs & Peat (1999, pp.160–161)

In Seven Life Lessons of CHAOS, John Briggs and F. David Peat unfold seven lessons for embracing some of the deeper insights of chaos theory in our daily lives:

• Be Creative: engage with chaos to find imaginative new solutions and live more dynamically.
• Use Butterfly Power: let chaos grow local efforts into global results
• Go with the Flow: use chaos to work collectively with others
• Explore What’s Between: discover life’s rich subtleties and avoid the traps of stereotypes
• See the Art of the World: appreciate the beauty of life’s chaos
• Live Within Time: utilize time’s hidden depths
• Rejoin the Whole: realize our fractal connectedness to each other and the world.

In my 2006 PhD thesis I wrote a chapter on ‘Understanding Complexity: A Prerequisite for Sustainable Design’. The work seems to be gaining in significance and interest with the years. I am grateful that back then the lack of post-doctoral funding for the kind of trans-disciplinary work I was doing on ‘Design for Human and Planetary Health’ invited me to leave mainstream academia and work in the fruitful and fertile intersections of the disciplines and the sectors. It has helped me hone my neo-generalist skills in education, facilitation, whole systems design, consultancy, research, communication and weaving complex alliances and partnerships for transformative innovation and change.

The for me most significant insights I gained from systems science, chaos and complexity are summarized in these articles:

Facing complexity means befriending uncertainty and ambiguity

Why do we need to think and act more systemically?

Donella Meadows recommendations for how to dance with and intervene in systems

Avoiding extinction: participation in the nested complexity of life

In preparation for a recent keynote I gave at the 6th International Conference of Reporting 3.0 I summarised some of the lessons I learned in my by now 20 year exploration of how to embrace the paradox of emergence and design. On the one hand I believe it is vital to accepts uncertainty, not-knowing, and unpredictability fully to the point of deep humility. On the other hand, I also believe that we need to choose to act from the conviction that we can design for positive emergence in complex systems even if it is not an exact science and we cannot know with certainty how our efforts will turn out to affect transformative change.

How do we design for positive emergence in complex dynamic systems?

I believe we can live partially into the answer to this questions by charting pathways based on constant feedback generated by asking ourselves the following guiding questions. They might inform a deeper understanding of how to participate appropriately in these complex systems:

Who are the participants in the systems and what is meaningful to them?

Who is connected to whom & what are the qualities of their connections?

What information flows in the system & what is the quality of the information?

Which actors/agents/participants need to be engaged more/better?

What kind of qualitative and quantitative information needs to flow between participants?

What connections in the system need to be woven and nurtured?

Are we paying enough attention to context, relationships, patterns, qualities, uniqueness of place and health/wholeness?

…

This is not a complete nor definitive list, simply reflections on the way. Asking such questions can — I believe — contribute to the emergence of diverse regenerative cultures carefully adapted to the bio-cultural uniqueness of place. It can do so everywhere, but differently and appropriately.

Daniel Christian Wahl — Catalyzing transformative innovation in the face of converging crises, advising on regenerative whole systems design, regenerative leadership, and education for regenerative development and bioregional regeneration.

Author of the internationally acclaimed book Designing Regenerative Cultures

The post A Brief History of Systems Science, Chaos and Complexity appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Frederik Moberg: Around the world, innovative agroecological farmers increasingly challenge the dominant industrial way of farming. Combining local and scientific knowledge, they put resilience thinking into practice to feed growing populations and cope with climate change, water scarcity, market volatility, and more.

Twelve years ago, in 2006, Haregu Gobezay was unemployed and her family with six children relied on her husband’s salary to cover all their expenses. Today, Gobezay and her husband manage a 12-hectare farm with mango, orange, mandarin, and avocado plantations in Mereb Leke District of the Tigray Region in northern Ethiopia. They also keep a few dairy cows, and chickens for egg production.

They no longer rely on a single crop. The finger millet they used to grow often suffered from weed invasions and termites, and the yield was low due to thin and nutrient-poor soils. Now they grow a wide range of different crops. This has helped them tackle many challenges, and made it possible for them to employ almost a hundred people and make a good profit from selling mango and other fruits.

Agroecology has the explicit goal of strengthening the sustainability of all parts of the food system, from the seed and the soil, to the table, including ecological knowledge, economic viability, and social justice.

Gobezay started with planting vegetables; she then added fruit trees, and peanut plants as cover crops that fertilise the soil by fixing nitrogen from the air, with the help of bacteria living in their root systems. Eventually, she brought in dairy cows and started cultivating pasture plants such as alfalfa, Rhodes grass, and elephant grass under the trees.

To improve soil fertility further and to increase soil organic matter, the family now prepares compost in 20 big pits. In addition, a biogas plant on the dairy farm produces bio-slurry compost and energy for cooking.

The family also uses “push-pull” technology as an additional source of income. The technology was developed in Africa to control Striga weeds and insect pests, particularly stemborer moths, without using chemical pesticides. It involves growing maize, sorghum or mango trees together with flowering plants such as Desmodium that repel, or “push”, the pests, and planting other plants such as elephant grass around the crops to attract, or “pull”, the pests. Desmodium eliminates Striga weeds and repels the stemborers, which are instead attracted to the elephant grass. By growing Desmodium, the family’s farm has become a source of seeds for scaling up the push-pull technology in the whole region.

Haregu Gobezay runs an agroecological farm in Ethiopia. Photo courtesy of A. Gonçalvés

More and more farmers around the world are turning away from chemical-intensive single-crop farming in favour of production methods based on diversity, local inputs of for example compost, and ecosystem services. This kind of “agroecological” farming has seen a revival in recent years as a response to the many challenges facing agriculture globally. There is growing evidence that agroecological farming systems keep carbon in the ground, support biodiversity, rebuild soils, and sustain yields, providing a basis for secure livelihoods.¹

Today’s agriculture produces enough food for the global population, but it has not given everyone everywhere access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food. Agriculture has also contributed to soil degradation, a misuse of natural resources, and the crossing of crucial planetary boundaries that have kept Earth in a relatively stable state for the past 11,000 years, since before agriculture was invented.

Agriculture takes up almost 40% of the planet’s ice-free land surface, accounts for 70% of the freshwater used in the world, and produces about 30% of global greenhouse gas emissions.² The current food production system increases humanity’s dependency on fossil fuels and contributes to climate change. Meanwhile, climate shocks and extreme weather events can cause food price volatility that affects both consumers and producers around the world – hitting hardest in poor countries.

The agricultural system has also doubled the flows of nitrogen and phosphorus around the world predominantly through the use of chemical fertilisers, causing severe water quality problems in rivers, lakes, and the ocean. It is also the single biggest driver of biodiversity loss. A growing number of international studies and assessments stress that more attention, public funds, and policy measures should be devoted to the agroecological approach in order to avoid these negative environmental impacts.^3-7

Biodiversity is key for soil health and fertility, and resilience. A multitude of organisms inhabit the soil, decomposing organic matter and making nutrients available. Illustration: E. Wikander/Azote

Strengthening the resilience of farmers

Agroecology is the “ecology of the food system”⁸ and a farming approach that is inspired by natural ecosystems. It combines local and scientific knowledge and applies ecological and social approaches to agricultural systems, focusing on the interactions between plants, animals, humans, and the environment. Agroecological methods can also help farmers cope with climate change by enhancing resilience.

Agroecology has the explicit goal of strengthening the sustainability of all parts of the food system, from the seed and the soil, to the table, including ecological knowledge, economic viability, and social justice. To reach this goal, agroecological methods strive to minimise or exclude the use of fossil fuels, chemical inputs such as fertilisers and pesticides, and large-scale monocropping – cultivation of a single crop on vast tracts of land.

An agroecological approach includes a number of agricultural methods, such as diversification of crops, conservation tillage, green manures, natural fertilisers and nitrogen fixation, biological pest control, rainwater harvesting, and production of crops and livestock in ways that store carbon and protect forests. It also emphasises the importance of local knowledge, farmer empowerment, and socio-economic regulations, such as environmental subsidies and public procurement schemes.

Agroecology has become something of a buzzword in recent years, and the big question is: can agroecological farming feed a global population estimated to reach almost 10 billion people in the coming decades? A growing mound of evidence says yes – the approach can help change the world’s food production for the better, and produce enough food to feed the world.

“Today’s scientific evidence demonstrates that agroecological methods outperform the use of chemical fertilisers in boosting food production where the hungry live – especially in unfavourable environments,” said Olivier De Schutter in 2011, in his role as United Nations special rapporteur on the right to food.

De Schutter and many others have also concluded that agroecology is a good way to increase the resilience of farming systems. But few have really investigated in depth how agroecology and resilience are linked in practice among smallholder farmers around the world.

In 2014 André Gonçalves, a professor of agroecology at Instituto Federal Catarinense in Brazil and technical advisor at Centro Ecológico Brazil, took part in the third international resilience conference in Montpellier in France. He became increasingly fascinated with the concept of resilience and wanted to incorporate it into his work on agroecological farming methods.

After the conference, he decided to organise a series of field trips around the world together with the Swedish Society for Nature Conservation (SSNC) and their partner organisations, to look for practical examples of how agroecological methods affect farmers’ resilience.

The field trips took place over several years and took him to Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, the Philippines, Sweden, and various places in his home country Brazil. His travels resulted in new insights into how innovative farmers and organisations have been using agroecological approaches to cope with the challenges of climate change and other disturbances, such as degradation of soils, pest outbreaks, chemical pollution, and escalating prices of chemical inputs such as pesticides and fertilisers.⁹

Rainwater harvesting is one important strategy in Ethiopian agroecological farming that builds resilience to drought. Photo: A. Gonçalves.

Connecting agroecology and resilience

Gonçalves quickly concluded that agroecology is not a one-size-fits-all solution, instead it is about taking the local socio-economic and ecological conditions into consideration.

“In my definition agroecology is all about values such as social justice and economic aspects. Otherwise, it would be reduced to the technical dimension,” Gonçalves says. To capture these aspects his analysis focused as much on social and economic measures as on ecological ones to strengthen agricultural resilience.

In 2016 he organised a workshop at the Stockholm Resilience Centre (SRC), gathering practitioners and scientists from around the world to take a closer look at how agroecology and resilience thinking relate to each other. He co-organised the workshop with Karin Höök, a senior consultant and expert in agriculture and environment at NIRAS Sweden. She has collaborated with Gonçalves since the early 2000s. Through her previous work as head of the international department at SSNC, Höök became interested in resilience thinking and how it can be applied to make agriculture more sustainable.

“Resilience theory is extremely interesting and relevant for agricultural development, but it has often come across as more of a popular buzzword than concrete real-world applications,” Höök says. “Now that is changing and we see more and more concrete tools and practical examples of how it can contribute to sustainable agricultural development.”

In 2016, Elin Enfors Kautsky, researcher and research coordinator at the SRC, co-authored a paper suggesting different ways to put resilience-based interventions into practice in agricultural landscapes.¹⁰ The authors concluded that improving ecosystem services and the resilience of agricultural systems to a changing climate, extreme weather events, pest outbreaks, market volatility, institutional changes, and other pressures is critical to achieving a range of the UN’s sustainable development goals.

Following the workshop, where Gonçalves also met Enfors Kautsky, he continued to compare his observations and experiences from the field trips with the seven principles for building resilience,¹¹ which have become increasingly popular in analysing resilience and putting it into practice. The comparison revealed that certified organic farming and other agroecological approaches often go hand in hand with resilience thinking, and tended to improve both farm revenues and household income. For example, Gonçalves saw many examples of the first resilience principle in the extensive use of diversity of crops, farming techniques, and livelihoods.

The Tumaini Women Group in the Gatuanyaga Village, Kikuyu community, one of the communities that Andre Goncalves visited during his field trip, is an example of broadened participation, cooperation and social-environmental responsibility to improve living conditions. André Gonçalves is fourth from the left in the back row. Photo courtesy of A. Gonçalves.

Building resilience in agroecology

Gobezay and her husband in Ethiopia are by no means the only ones working for a diversity-based farming system. In Uganda, Gonçalves met Vicent Ssonko and Yakubu Nyende, who grow organic pineapples together with bananas and a variety of other plants such as beans, maize, and groundnuts. If the international market for organic pineapples collapses, they will still earn an income from selling bananas at the local market. Beans and groundnuts are important components of a balanced diet, increasing food security and nutrition. They also fixate nitrogen and improve soil fertility, without the need for chemical nitrogen fertilisers.

Diversity is also used to tackle other challenges. Pepito Babasa, a Philippine rice farmer from the Southern Luzon region, often experiences typhoons and floods. He makes sure he plants a diversity of different rice varieties known to withstand floods and droughts to secure his harvest.

The second principle of building resilience – managing connectivity – manifests in many ways in agroecology. Gonçalves found examples ranging from how farmers had access to markets to sell their crops, to the distance of their fields to the habitats of pollinators, and natural enemies of pests. Recycling nutrients and organic matter from one field to another is also an important way of managing connectivity in the agricultural landscape. An example of where this is put into practice can be seen in farmers making and using compost as a natural fertiliser on agroecological farms in Ethiopia. Agroecological methods also support ecological connectivity between the agricultural landscape and the surrounding forests in the Brazilian and Ugandan agroforestry systems that integrate crops, trees, and animal husbandry.

Using compost for maintaining the fertility, organic content, and water-holding capacity of soils is also an example of the third resilience principle – managing slow variables and feedbacks. In Ethiopia, the Tigray region’s innovative use of compost has earned world recognition for transforming an area suffering from impoverished soils, erosion, and droughts into increased harvests and incomes while improving groundwater levels, soil fertility, and biodiversity.

Gonçalves also found that farmers had a good understanding of the fourth principle: the landscape as a complex adaptive system. “To adopt agroecological practices simply requires a certain degree of complexity thinking,” he says. “While industrial agriculture is based on a linear approach and a cause and effect relationship, organic and other forms of agroecological agriculture requires a holistic view of agricultural production.”

A plant disease or pest outbreak in industrial agriculture, for example, might be seen as a direct consequence of a virus or insect, and would be controlled by using pesticides. Smallholder agroecological farmers, however, perceive diseases and pests as consequences of management, with many possible causes such as soil fertility, water availability, plant variety, and seasonal shifts.

Learning, participation, and decentralised governance – the fifth, sixth, and seventh resilience principles – were often strongly linked to each other in the farming systems Gonçalves visited. For example, the Ecovida Agroecology Network in Brazil brings together more than 5,000 farmer families in the three southernmost states of the country – Paraná, Santa Catarina and Rio Grande do Sul – in a network that promotes agroecology and sustainable, resilient use of natural resources. The farmers organise peer-to-peer learning and encourage broad participation that includes poor landless smallholders, larger farmers, and food-processing facilities.

The Ecovida network’s structure and distribution is also a classic example of polycentric governance. The network is divided into several self-governing organisations that interact, manage, and enforce rules within certification and sustainable agriculture. All individual members have a vote and all decisions in their respective organisations are taken collectively.

Similar networks connecting learning, participation, and polycentric governance were present in many other places visited by Gonçalves: PELUM is a network of civil society organisations working with grassroots communities in Kenya and nine other African countries; MASIPAG is a farmer-led network of people’s organisations in the Philippines; NOGAMU is an umbrella organisation of producers, processors, and exporters of the organic sector in Uganda; and there were several networks and organisations that promote sustainable farming in Ethiopia and in Sweden.

Agroecological approaches often go hand in hand with resilience thinking. André Gonçalves’ research has looked at how the seven resilience principles manifest in practice in agroecological farming. Illustration: E. Wikander/Azote

A shift in the world’s food system

Gonçalves concludes that “actively applying resilience thinking is an important basis for the agroecological farming in the case studies, making smallholder farmers less dependent on loans, fossil fuels and chemicals”.

He believes that agroecological and resilience-building approaches to agriculture are feasible alternatives to chemical-intensive monocultures, and that these methods will be crucial for reaching sustainable development goals. Several other researchers have reached similar conclusions.

Line Gordon, deputy director of the SRC, led a study published in the Environmental Research Letters journal in 2017¹² that looked at how food production has influenced human health and nature from the 1960s until today. The researchers propose eight ways to rewire the world’s food system and rethink how we produce our food, concluding that “we need to rewire different parts of food systems, to enhance information flows between consumers and producers from local to global scales, influence food-system decision makers, and re-connect people to the biosphere through the culture of food”.

Their suggestions include many agroecological aspects and call for better recognition and understanding of the many ecosystem services and social benefits that food-producing systems deliver beyond food itself, such as pollination, water filtration, and recreation.

More recently, the director-general of the Food and Agriculture Organization, José Graziano da Silva, also called for healthier and more sustainable food systems, mentioning agroecology as a way forward. During his opening remarks at the 2nd International Agroecology Symposium in Rome in April 2018 he said: “We need to promote a transformative change in the way that we produce and consume food. We need to put forward sustainable food systems that offer healthy and nutritious food, and also preserve the environment. Agroecology can offer several contributions to this process.”

Graziano da Silva’s statement resonates with an article published in 2014 in Solutions magazine,¹³ where a group of leading resilience researchers argued that efforts to improve short-term efficiency and optimisation in food production may be setting us up for a bigger fall down the road. “An agriculture that causes long-term or widespread environmental crises is not resilient, no matter how economically successful or how much food is produced, making its profitability and productivity irrelevant,” they wrote.

The group of researchers, led by Elena Bennett from McGill University in Canada, concluded that agriculture needs to be both resilient and sustainable, and this requires radically new approaches to agricultural development. A narrow focus on increasing production efficiency may reduce resilience, for example by degrading soils and making crops more vulnerable to pest and disease outbreaks and climate shocks. The food production system instead needs approaches and methods that produce sufficient quality and quantities of food while supporting healthy ecosystems.

Agroforestry systems mix crops, trees and animals, and provide resilience by e.g. strengthening ecological connectivity with forest fragments, maintaining biodiversity and managing slow variables like soil fertility and water quality. Photo: K. Höök.

Thinking less about bigger crop yields and more about resilience and sustainability also requires new metrics for evaluating the food system. This is also emphasised by Gonçalves and recently echoed by environmental economist Pavan Sukhdev in Nature where he wrote: “I never fail to be astonished at the inadequacy of the metrics we use to evaluate [food] systems. The most common yardstick is ‘productivity per hectare’. This measure of the yield or value of a particular crop relative to the area of the land on which it was grown is too narrow. We need alternatives that account for the interacting complex of agricultural lands, pastures, inland fisheries, natural ecosystems, labour, infrastructure, technology, policies, markets and traditions that are involved in growing, processing, distributing and consuming food.”

So, even though an agroecological transformation towards more resilient agriculture might come at an initial cost, it will make it possible to maintain human well-being for the long-term. A growing number of resilience researchers and practitioners argue that it is the only way to provide a diet that is healthy for both people and the planet.

The many farmers Gonçalves visited around the world represent the opportunities of this shift from a narrow productivity focus to a food production system that is both more sustainable and resilient. To be effective, it is also important that such approaches that challenge our current farming system are included in the training of next generations of farmers around the world.

“We must invest much more in resilience through participation and education of youth, for example by integrating agroecological approaches in the curricula of schools, training centers, farmer field schools, school gardens, and also at university level,” Gonçalves concludes.

Lead photo: Vicent Ssonko grows organic pineapples together with bananas and a variety of other plants such as beans, maize, and groundnuts. The pineapples are sold on the international market, and bananas on the local market. Beans and groundnuts contain important nutrients for a balanced diet, they also fixate nitrogen and improve soil fertility. Photo courtesy of A. Gonçalvés

Credits

Editor: Marika Haeggman; Top editor: Ida Karlsson  Reviewer: Jamila Haider

The text of this article is in the Creative Commons, but the images are copyright as indicated in the captions.

The post Farming with nature appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Ed Mayo: I work in the co-operative sector. Co-ops are different and much of this, as I see it, comes down to the fact that co-ops tend to be characterised by complex purpose.

We are set up primarily to meet needs, not to generate profits. Our owners have overlapping interests, as they are both investors and participants in the enterprise (such as customers or workers). We are expected to live up to seven different (internationally agreed) principles and how we do that – our culture – is shaped by a range of ethical values.

Telegraph pole outside a co-operative nursery, Seoul

A tide of simplicity

In contrast, the wider business environment within which we operate is increasingly characterised by assumptions of simple purpose: return on capital for external investors.

In most markets, the shift to simple has shaped institutions and policies, such as accounting standards or taxation, that are designed to encourage performance against that purpose. As a result, as co-ops, we are often swimming against a tide of simplicity.

How do co-ops around the world track their performance or design their reporting systems? This is the topic next week in London (neatly falling in the UK Co-operatives Fortnight with its theme of the Co-operative Difference) for an international symposium on co-operative accounting and reporting, organised by the great co-op business school, Sobey (from St Mary’s Halifax, Canada).

Accounting, set up to make clear what is true and fair, is a case study of simplicity versus complexity in business. The move to harmonise international corporate accounting standards over the last decade looks to reduce the costs of complexities at a global level of different accounting traditions – a worthwhile goal (even if somehow in the process, the complexity of delivering global standards further reinforces the dominance of the big four accountancy firms).

But the drive for accounting simplicity can cross over into an attempt to reduce diversity. From time to time, international accounting policy makers want to move member capital from an asset, co-invested in a joint endeavour, to a liability, assuming that it is a promise of money owed by the business to those who participate in it. Why? For simplicity only, as if all companies could be treated as if they were owned by investors, rather than other stakeholders. But for financial co-operatives, among others, a move like this could mean instant closure.

For and against

Simplicity in business, in terms of return on capital, has significant strengths of course, including these five:

1. Decision-making. It is easier within the business to judge trade-offs and investment opportunities.
2. Capability. There are plenty of tools to draw on, plenty of expertise to bring in.
3. Communication. Not surprisingly, simplicity is easier to communicate. Expectations are clearer, the chance for conflict reduced.
4. Comparison. With net profit, return on capital and share prices, it easier to see and to compare how a business is performing.
5. Accountability. Simpler purpose makes simpler accountability, because it is clearer what to account for – less room for people who use complexity as a source of obfuscation.

Staircase at the National Co-op Centre, Warsaw

But simplicity becomes an obstacle, when the context changes and these same strengths turn to weakness:

X Decision-making. Chasing financial results, like share price, makes companies act for the short-term rather than on long-term drivers of success.

X Capability. More subtle aspects of the business, such as culture, are less valued.

X Communication. The purpose of making someone else money is not motivating for the workforce or for customers.

X Comparison. Simple metrics can be misleading, encouraging conformity rather than diversity and learning.

X Accountability. Wider social responsibility or stakeholder concerns are sidelined, generating the potential for risk and backlash

The case for complexity is that businesses operate in complex and fast-moving environments. To succeed, they need sufficient complexity in their own feedback and learning systems to adapt and improve.

One example is innovation. The two most common sources for business innovation are workers and customers. Where you are owned by your workforce, or by your customers, as in the co-operative model, you stand a better chance of capturing those ideas and adapting in line what they offer.

A second example is loyalty. Where people identify personally and collectively with the purpose of a business, going beyond simply making money, they are likely to be more engaged and more loyal to the business, as workers, suppliers or as customers.

The third example is the challenge of sustainable development, increasingly the focus of policy concern and action. Business is challenged to act on a complex array of risks and opportunities that are hard to reduce to simple metrics.

Taking these, the case for complexity in business can perhaps be expressed in these five characteristics:

1. Realism. The context within which companies operate is complex, so matching this can lead to more realistic decisions.
2. Responsiveness. Embracing complexity encourages a culture of openness and enquiry, helpful for listening and learning.
3. Safety. Companies that look at their interactions with the world through a lens of complexity are less likely to be blindsided when risks arise.
4. Strategy. In complex models, no one aspect is weighed alone without addressing the totality, supporting companies in moving forward in an integrated way.
5. Sustainability. The challenges of sustainability are complex and companies that succeed will be those able to sense and adapt to hard-to-predict changes.

There are other, more philosophical grounds too to affirm complex purpose – as a counter to the ‘financialisation’ of life, as an expression of freedom and as a component of cultural diversity.

The search for middle ground

As I see it, the response of business policy in many jurisdictions is to mitigate the weaknesses of simplicity, by interventions that encourage and require compensating actions to restore some complexity.

In a European context, stakeholder engagement and to a degree, stakeholder accountability, is a longstanding tradition. Having workers on the boards of German companies (co-determination), a tradition with roots post-war in the co-operative model, has been good for the German economy.

The Nordic countries have led the way on gender diversity, again with the argument that company boards need mixed perspectives rather than narrow unity – just one more example of the ‘law of requisite variety’: that you have to be able to reflect the complexity of your context in order to succeed in that context over time.

In the UK, the draft new governance code from the Financial Reporting Council is an overt attempt to move listed companies towards a greater degree of complexity – encouraging a focus on long-term purpose, engagement with the workforce, values and culture.

To that extent, companies are being encouraged to be more co-operative, more complex. And these are areas in which co-ops have tended to lead – on values for example. As I point out in my book, Values: how to bring values to life in your business, values evolved as a collaborative decision-making tool in the context of complex options. Values are a short-cut way of making decisions – as one co-op procurement lead says to me, “values are our handrails.”

So, should co-ops also move the same way, adding to complexity, further complexity?

My view by and large is no. There are of course some of those opportunities, evident in the rise of more participatory tools for decision-making, and the hopeful interest in multi-stakeholder models of governance.

I would argue that if co-ops need to change, it is usually towards more simple complexity.

An example is the UK’s consumer retail co-ops. For larger and more longstanding co-ops, there can always be a degree of drift in the sheer accumulation of expectations. To succeed, a co-op needs to be clear on how it makes a difference to its members.

Lincolnshire Co-operative has been going through exactly this process, with some support from us at Co-operatives UK. Successful, with over 250,000 members, and 150 years under its belt, the Chief Executive, Ursula Lidbetter has supported a process where the Board and members develop a clear forward purpose for the society: a few words, simple to say but still rich and complex in content and intent for what makes it so different as a business.

With a clear focus on what matters, what value is for members, it is then easier to choose the metrics that can paint a picture, alongside other forms of feedback, of performance. Merthyr Valley Homes tracks a range of indicators, including spending in the local economy and weekly levels of litter. The results are open to the members: residents and staff. For one social club in Yorkshire, the lead indicator is barrels of beer sold weekly. Members tell them what else they should be doing – the benefit of a participatory co-op, but key indicators help to balance that complexity of expectation with a more simple story of performance over time.

That is something which we are helping with, through the development of guidelines for the co-operative sector in narrative reporting.

More simplicity or more complexity?

The balance between simple and complex is one many others have considered. The words of Oliver Wendell Holmes, a late nineteenth century US Supreme Court Justice, are worth the repetition: “for the simplicity that lies this side of complexity, I would not give a fig, but for the simplicity that lies on the other side of complexity, I would give my life.”

The great mathematicians and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, said in a lecture a century ago: “we are apt to fall into the error of thinking that the facts are simple because simplicity is the goal of our quest. The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, ‘Seek simplicity and distrust it.”

I appreciate the modern Law of Conservation of Complexity, also called Tesler’s Law, after Larry Tesler, the computer scientist who is credited with inventing cut/copy and paste. This states: Every application must have an inherent amount of irreducible complexity… The only question is who will have to deal with it.

The implication is that designers can help ensure that the simple is not over-simplistic and the complex is not over-complicated. Computers, since Tesler’s days at Xerox have become more complex in terms of technology but more simple in terms of ease of use. In turn, complex software, such as the open source Unix operating programme suite, might be designed on the basis of simple subsets, collaboratively assembled, that do a single task well.

In business, it seems that simplicity alone is of value, complexity a necessary constraint. In terms of business philosophy, simplicity sells.

Ceiling at a coop and trade union education centre, Helsingor

I argue the opposite. There is a value to complexity, and a growing value at that. And yet, the need for simplicity remains a necessary constraint.

Like a flock of birds, wheeling in the sky, complex systems can emerge from simple rules, while retaining a function, of collective intelligence, what Geoff Mulgan calls ‘the bigger mind’ – or to the observer, beauty – which can’t simply be reduced down to those rules.

For my colleagues in the co-operative sector, the moral is that we should embrace complexity – and promote our understanding on how best to organise around it.

——————-

Footnote

This is all an example perhaps of a wider challenge that goes to the heart of a generation of debates on economics. A substantive body of work looks to redefine wealth and progress beyond the simple aggregate of money flows in the economy (or Gross Domestic Product), to integrate the context of unpaid labour, well-being, economic externalities and sustainability thresholds.

What we have learned is that while a new map (such as the triple bottom line) can sometimes become part of the landscape itself, a static description is not enough. There needs to a dynamic perspective that integrates things – a theory of change.

You can, for example, have as many different forms of ‘capital’ as you like in your (satellite) national accounts, but if they don’t make it easier to build an account of what is happening across the complexity of those domains, they don’t necessarily help. Of course, the simple option, which is to use money as a common denominator simplifies may help even less if it assumes that we can buy our way out of one or another dimension of collapse in environmental functions that are critical to habitable life.

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals gives one interpretative framework and offers an important reference point. It is good to see it used by so many co-ops and Fairtrade organisations worldwide in their planning. And yet, as a complex array, it does not resolve the challenge of displacing the dominant simplicity of economic growth.

The struggle for what Paul Ekins and Manfred Max-Neef many years ago called ‘Real-Life Economics’, reflecting the complexity of human nature and natural systems, continues…

Republished from Ed Mayo’s Blog

Photo by bdesham

The post Does everything have to be simple? The case for complexity in business appeared first on P2P Foundation.

This article looks at three crucial insights for the future of economics:

• Complex adaptive systems
• How technologies of cooperation enable commons-based peer-to-peer networks
• Why we need complex adaptive systems to understand new economies

Complex Adaptive Systems

The Edge of Chaos

Complex adaptive systems has enjoyed considerable attention in recent decades. Chaos theory reveals that out of turbulence and nonlinear dynamics, complex systems emerge: order from chaos.

We learned that complex systems are poised on the “edge of chaos” and generate “order for free” (Stuart Kauffman). They are composed of many parts connected into a flexible network. As matter and energy flow through, they spontaneously self-organize into increasingly complex structures. These systems, continuously in flux, operate “far from equilibrium” (Ilya Prigogine). Beyond critical thresholds, differences in degree become differences in kind. “More is different.” (Phil Anderson)

Complexity science reveals the difference between prediction and attraction. We can know that a marble in a bowl will reach the bottom even though we cannot predict its exact path because of sensitivity to initial conditions. Deterministic chaos means path dependence, where future states are highly influenced by small changes in previous states. A typical economic example is the lock-in of the now-standard “QWERTY” keyboard.

Networks

We see network effects: adding another node to a network increases the value of all other nodes exponentially, because many new connections are possible, economically “increasing returns to scale” (Brian Arthur). Reed’s Law goes even farther, because new groups can be formed, exhibiting a much greater geometric growth. We know about “small-world,” or “scale-free,” networks, so called because there is no statistic at any scale that is representative of the network as a whole, e.g. no bell-curve average, but instead a “long tail,” mathematically a logarithmic “power law.” Some networks are robust to random failures but vulnerable to selective damage, i.e. network attacks that target nodes with a higher centrality. Furthermore, “centrality” means different things inside different network topologies. Network structure affects the frequency and magnitude of cascades. Like avalanches in sand piles, power laws create “self-organized criticality” (Per Bak).

Information Landscapes

Complex systems constitute “fitness landscapes,” exhibit cycles of growth and decline, are punctuated by explosions of diversity and periods of stasis, and show waves of ebb and flow, seen in traffic patterns. On fitness landscapes, algorithms that pursue merely maximization, without the ability to observe remote information from the landscape, freeze in local optima. Without system diversity, there is no improvement. Swarms escape because they not only read information from the landscape but also write to it, creating shared information environments.

Landscapes and occupants impart selection pressures on each other. Good employees and good jobs both outperform bad ones. Agents and strategies evolve. Adaptation can become maladaptation when selection pressures change.

Dynamics and Time

When we study the spread of disease through a forest we see a slow progression of infected trees.However, when we study the spread of fire, we see the same pattern enacted much faster.

Complex systems and their dynamics are not new. What is new is that human systems have accelerated to the point where political, economic, and social changes now occur rapidly enough to appear within the threshold of human perception. We change from slow social movement to an era of “smart mobs.” Consequently, while it may be true that we did not need the tools of complex systems in the past, because economic change was slow and did not require a dynamical viewpoint, the current speed of economic change demands this new lens.

The Emergence of Commons-Based Peer-to-Peer Networks

A crucial global economic phenomenon is the rise of commons-based peer-to-peer networks. “Technologies of cooperation” (Howard Rheingold) enable people to self-organize in productive ways. Open-source software was one first clue to powerful new ways of organizing labor and capital. “Commons-based peer-production” is radically cost-effective (Yochai Benkler). By “governing the commons” (Elinor Ostrom), shared resources managed by communities with polycentric horizontal rules, without reliance on either the state or the market, escape the “tragedy of the commons.” Our thinking about production, property, and even the state, must evolve to reflect the growing participatory economy of global stewardship and collectively-driven “platform cooperatives” (Michel Bauwens). New commons include food, energy, “making,” health, education, news, and even currency.

The rise of 3D printing and the Internet of Things combined with participatory practices yields new forms of value production, paralleling new forms of value accounting and exchange. We witness a “Cambrian explosion” of new currency species, like BitCoin, and innovative trust technologies to support them: the blockchain and distributed ledgers. Just as 20th century electrical infrastructure remained fragmented until standards enabled a connected network (Thomas Hughes), new infrastructure matures when separate solutions merge and the parts reinforce the stability of the whole.

The Future Fate of Economics

Economics as a discipline can only remain relevant as long as it can provide deep engagement with contemporary reality. Overly-simplified models and problematic axioms cannot guide us forward. The world is an interwoven, heterogeneous, adaptive “panarchy.”

Harnessing complexity requires understanding the frequency, intensity, and “sync” of global connectivity. Analyzing many futures demands better tools. To analyze “big data,” first we need data. Complexity science utilizes multi-agent simulations to investigate many outcomes, sweep parameters, and identify thresholds, attractors, and system dynamics. Complexity methods provide unique metrics and representations, animated visuals rather than static graphs.

This is not just big data; it’s dynamic data. With distributed systems, it becomes peer-to-peer data: shared infrastructure. Just as ants leave trails for others, shared infrastructure bolsters interoperability through a knowledge commons. Restricting connectivity and innovation, e.g. with intellectual property rights, carries extreme costs now. Fitness impedes uncooperative agents and strategies. Fortunately new commons have novel “copyleft” licenses already, promoting fairness and equity.

Complexity science shows us not only what to do, but also how to do it:  build shared infrastructure, improve information flow, enable rapid innovation, encourage participation, support diversity and citizen empowerment.

This article was originally published in cooperation with the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) at The Future of Economics: From Complexity to Commons and on OECD Medium at The Future of Economics: From Complexity to Commons

To engage with the original please go to The Future of Economics: From Complexity to Commons by Paul B. Hartzog

The post The Future of Economics: From Complexity to Commons appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Complex Systems and the Energy Commons

In this article, we look at the future of the Energy Commons, and how using a complex adaptive systems lens can lead to effective solutions. As an example, I’m going to demonstrate how this method can lead us to a solution I call “swarm micro-solar.”

Complex adaptive systems as a lens tells us that the dynamic energy solution of the future should:

• be made up of many small components
• be fluid and flexible, utilizing component diversity
• be aware of and respond to its environment, by being mobile

From a complex systems perspective, we can predict the properties of a future solution even though we do not yet know the details. We can know that a marble in a bowl will settle at the bottom even when we cannot predict the specific path it will take. We can know that a percentage of a population will become adults even when we cannot know which ones will survive.

Similarly, we can understand that “small pieces loosely joined” should be more efficient even though we do not yet know precisely how. The reason this works is because all complex systems exhibit instances of deeper patterns found in the universe.

Disaggregate the Solar Panel

Our first understanding above was:

1. be made up of many small components

So, take, for instance, the solar panel. A single solar panel converts solar energy into usable electricity but suffers from the loss of some of that energy as heat. Solar panels don’t work when they exceed their tolerance thresholds for heat buildup.

Heat radiation occurs on the edges of the solar panel, so more edge length means more radiation and a cooler system. It just so happens that an array of smaller panels:

• covers nearly the same area, and so generates about the same amount of energy, and
• has significantly more edge length and so radiates heat more effectively and can run for longer.

In addition, these smaller pieces can be individually enabled not only to produce energy but also to store it, using individual mechanisms (such as batteries). Energy could be “uploaded” into larger storage networks when the individual units are in range of an upstream connection to the Energy Commons. Since the swarm components are connected horizontally, only one component would have to be in range in order for the entire system to communicate upstream.

Decenter the Solar Array

Our second understanding above was:

2. be fluid and flexible, utilizing component diversity

So the next step would be to detach the entire solar array from it’s “center” and instead connect the parts directly to each other. There are two ways to operationalize this:

• connect them together physically into a “mesh” or “net”
• connect them together virtually into an information network

Physically connecting them could be advantageous if you needed them to exist as a single unit for some reason. More useful however would be to connect them digitally into a “swarm.” A swarm of panels could communicate information about the sunlight they are converting, local conditions, etc. Moreover, you could even have the units send energy to one another to balance the energy storage. In other words, a unit that has more storage available could store energy for one that has less storage available.

The effect of horizontal connectivity is to make the entire system function like a brain. The swarm could essentially “rewire” itself by monitoring inequalities in the system and balancing its members’ behavior accordingly.

Detach the Swarm

Our third understanding was:

3. be aware of and respond to its environment, by being mobile

Solar panels need sunlight. The earth rotates. The complex adaptive systems lens suggests that the system should be able to perceive its environment and adjust its collective behavior accordingly. For example, slime molds exist as individual cells, but when changes in resource conditions demand, those cells come together to form a multi-cellular organism, which is mobile, and can move elsewhere to a better resource environment.

So, too, can our solar array. If it is a flying drone array, then it could be positioned in the sky as an actual swarm.

• It could move away from clouds or other obstacles, and even orbit the planet in order to avoid ever being on the dark side. A swarm of swarms, all autonomous but capable of cooperation and communication, could effectively perceive their environment and adjust accordingly to target better environments.
• Also, the diversity of the units would enable them to behave differently as individuals. Each unit could angle itself into the sun, or adjust to wind conditions, etc. Because every component adjusts its own behavior in response to every other component, individual behaviors would create systemic effects. Just as a swarm can fly around obstacles without a leader, so, too, could a micro-solar swarm dynamically adjust to changes in its environment.

D-words and Micro-Solar Swarms

This article has demonstrated how using complex adaptive systems as a lens can lead to an innovative solution in the Energy Commons. We focused on a language of:

1. Disaggregate
2. Decenter
3. Detach

There are many other facets to a fully-developed and organically evolving Energy Commons. There are other solutions, and there are also other commons (food, things, etc.).

We gain a significant advantage when we realize that solutions across these commons exhibit the patterns seen in complex adaptive systems, and when we focus on a “pattern language” for those future solutions.

I hope this article contributes to that effort in some small way.

Read More:
If you would like to learn more about robot swarms, take a look at:
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/06/the-bees-of-the-future-that-can-pollinate-and-save-disaster-victims

To engage with the original please go to Solving the Energy Commons with Micro-Solar Swarms by Paul B. Hartzog

The post Solving the Energy Commons with Micro-Solar Swarms appeared first on P2P Foundation.

This article seeks to respond to an important issue that arises a lot in the conversations and spaces in which I participate. Moreover, I think it is timely and important in relation to the divisiveness made apparent by the recent election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States.

There is a general usage in our language (which doesn’t necessarily indicate a cognitive consensus) that cooperation and competition are opposites or mutually exclusive. More importantly, there is a conviction that competition and cooperation are somehow ontologically “real,” which is to say that they exist, i.e. that they are a property of the system being observed, rather than a property of the observer.

An alternative viewpoint, however, and one that I find crucial, is that the presence of cooperation or competition is in the eye of the beholder.

We will look at three examples:

1. Predator/Prey interactions
2. Sports
3. The Nation-State system

Predator/Prey

An example from complex systems is illustrative. Take an ecology of predators and prey with complex systems dynamics between, say, wolves, sheep, and grass. There are several competitions happening here.

• sheep compete for grass
• wolves compete to eat sheep
• sheep compete to not be eaten by wolves
• grass competes to not be eaten by sheep

However, out of this complex system we get Lotka-Volterra cycles of the rise and fall of populations. An increase in grass can feed an increase in sheep which, in turn, can feed an increase in wolves. An increase in wolves results in less sheep, which takes pressure off of the grass, but subsequently puts more pressure on the wolf population as food becomes scarce. Populations rise and fall over time, a dance across time. These dynamics have been extended to any system containing resources and consumers of those resources, such as economics. The parts of a systems are always cooperating to maintain the system as a whole in the midst of larger systems and dynamics.

Sports

Another useful example is the dynamic between sports teams in competitive sports. Certainly we are all familiar with the arena in which one sports team competes against another in a match where there is only one winner and one loser. Beneath the surface however there are other complex dynamics occurring.

The resources for both teams are not infinite: financial resources, time, attention, etc. Many resources are in scarce supply. The ecology of sports teams and individual players seeks to maintain its popularity and importance inside larger systems. Sports desires our attention; it requires our resources, and it takes actions in order to achieve those goals, e.g. to keep sponsorships alive, and to keep salaries high. Even when competing, sports teams strive to bolster and sustain the network. Even a simple chess game between friends, while seeming competitive, may serve broader goals of companionship and time spent. When we zoom out from a limited viewpoint, we can see that competitions serve cooperative ends.

The Nation-State System

Another place where competition and cooperation occur simultaneously is in the nation-state system, i.e the realm of international politics. This does not refer to competition and cooperation between states, however. Instead we are talking about a level of understanding that shows that even when states are apparently competing (even when they are at war), their activity, seen through another lens, is fundamentally one of cooperation.

A quote from Hedley Bull is instructive:

“[States’] goal [is] the preservation of the system and society of states itself. Whatever the divisions among them, modern states have been united in the belief that they are the principal actors in world politics and the chief bearers of rights and duties within it. The society of states has sought to ensure that it will remain the prevailing form of universal political organisation, in fact and in right.”

— Hedley Bull, “The Anarchical Society,” 1977, p. 16

For some scholars, this is demonstrably evident with regard to the 1936 anarchist revolution in Spain. Foreign powers, both capitalists and communists, many of whom were already in direct conflict, cooperated to eliminate the success of Spanish anarchism because it was not merely a threat to individual states themselves but, more importantly, a threat to the entire nation-state system’s validity as the dominant means of managing peoples (internally) and international order (externally).

Competition IS Cooperation: Seeing Differently

The crucial consequence of the perspective that I have attempted to illustrate above is this.

Even when we are in conflict with an opponent, there is some cooperative dynamic that is occurring by our acting in relation to that opponent.

For example, in society and politics, when social groups oppose each other with hatred and violence, there are those who benefit. The media and the arms industry supply us with both the pens AND the swords for us to keep the merry-go-round revolving. In addition, the larger system that defines the terms of participation, benefits whenever players slip themselves into predefined slots that the system knows how to handle: predator; prey.

The solution then is neither to disavow competition in favor of cooperation, nor disavow cooperation in favor of competition, but, instead, to realize that:

Competition and Cooperation have no independent existence, i.e. they are not objective properties of the world. Competition and Cooperation are called-forth into being, into the world, only as a function of the way in which we choose to observe a domain.

Consequently, the challenge for us all is to be more cognizant, open and aware, of the contexts in which competition and cooperation are highlighted by our choices. The responsibility lies squarely in ourselves.

In other words:

Competition is Cooperation: See Differently

To engage with the original please go to Competition IS Cooperation: Seeing Differently by Paul B. Hartzog

The post Competition IS Cooperation: Seeing Differently appeared first on P2P Foundation.

From our friends at The Extraenviromentalist Podcast.

From the episode notes:

The catastrophe at Fukushima presents the opportunity to re-evaluate basic assumptions about energy and technology but the temptation to double down on business as usual becomes incredibly strong. Will our species obtain a paradigm shift in the face of an energy emergency? Could we create new models for business that regenerate ecological functions rather than destroy the planet?

In Extraenvironmentalist #66 we speak with Michael Stone and Ian MacKenzie about their new film Reactor which covers their recent trip to Japan. Is the social fallout from Fukushima a template for social change elsewhere? Then we speak with Willem Ferwerda of the Ecosystem Return Foundation about scaling up the ecosystem restoration techniques we discussed on XE #65 with John Liu. We talk about the potential for regenerating ecological functions through new models for business and investing. Can we develop a process for launching permaculture businesses around the world?

The post Podcast of the day: The Extraenviromentalist: Changing Reactions. appeared first on P2P Foundation.