From the feed: More complexity
I’m moving these posts to Monday morning and will try to provide a theme each week to connect the five links. Enjoy.
Dave Snowden’s 12 Shibboleth’s of Christmas
Back in 2015, Dave Snowden took on 12 aspects of organizational and corporate culture that were basically enemies of complexity thinking. The list is still very valuable these days. In each post Dave offers the problem and the way complexity theory helps you do better.
Evaluation and complexity – lesson from 5 big evaluations in the UK
I’ve recently found the blog of Marcus Jenal, who is yet another guy who is saying a bunch of stuff that I say too. Here’s a piece he wrote reviewing his work with complexity and evaluation, starting with the question: ““When is understanding complexity important for evaluation?”
Defining complexity as a messy human
Another blog new to me is Human Current. They have a podcast which serves as a place for them to talk about and learn more about these ideas. This post is an index to some of their episodes that have helped them understand and and explain complexity science and complexity thinking.
My friend Ria Baeck has been writing a book for years that combines her thinking about self, source, hosting and theory with harvests from the workshops and conversations she has hosted over the past decade. The book is being released like expressions of fine whisky, one barrel at a time at her blog. This chapter delves in complexity through Cynefin thusly:
I have already talked about ‘sourcing’, and ‘collective sourcing’ as collective embodied revelation. It takes some courage to learn to voice our subtle sensing, because we have to overcome our conditioned assumption that this is not ‘real’ or ‘true’ or ‘useful’ information. At the present juncture, though, I wish to give some attention to a next step that follows on from the subtle sensing: the precision of language and making (subtle) distinctions.
How chaos makes the multiverse unnecessary
Lastly, this wide ranging piece from the always interesting Nautilus takes my weekly reading on complexity back out to the cosmological level, through trying to understand why we see structure when we look at things in a fundamentally chaotic universe.
There is another, more interesting, explanation for the structure of the laws of nature. Rather than saying that the universe is very structured, say that the universe is mostly chaotic and for the most part lacks structure. The reason why we see the structure we do is that scientists act like a sieve and focus only on those phenomena that have structure and are predictable. They do not take into account all phenomena; rather, they select those phenomena they can deal with.
