"Business leans on science the way Ginger Rogers leaned on Fred Astaire - for legitimacy and cachet. Science lent 20th-century business the aura of quantitative certainty, starting with Frederick Winslow Taylor's scientific management and Ford's assembly line. As science moves away from Newtonian notions of cause and effect to study complex systems like global climate and the human genome, which have too many variables to accurately predict, business follows. If there were a Hollywood Stock Exchange for business buzzwords, "complexity" would be trading high."

CIO.Com Chaos Control

"WHENEVER WE FORGE new strategies, devise new policies or create new services, we are dabbling in the world of complex adaptive systems. Authors Robert Axelrod and Michael C. Cohen define a complex adaptive system as one in which a single action?such as putting up a website?can lead to unforeseen, even unpredictable consequences. Their new book, Harnessing Complexity: Organizational Implications of a Scientific Frontier (The Free Press, 1999), aims to help readers understand how to design organizations and strategies in a complex environment. Borrowing ideas from scientific and biological research in which three factors?variation, interaction and selection?shape complex environments, the authors have devised a framework as a way of guiding readers to pose new questions and ponder new possibilities when confronted with complexity."

"In the following excerpt, the authors use the development of Linux as an example of variation. The question they ponder: When can an organization or population do better with more variety as opposed to uniformity? The answer revolves around the principle of exploration versus exploitation, a trade-off situation between creating strategies that are untested but may be superior to what exists versus copying proven strategies."

redux [11.05.00]
New England Complex Systems Institute Complexity rising: From human beings to human civilization, a complexity profile

"Since time immemorial humans have complained that life is becoming more complex, but it is only now that we have a hope to analyze formally and verify this lament. This article analyzes the human social environment using the "complexity profile," a mathematical tool for characterizing the collective behavior of a system. The analysis is used to justify the qualitative observation that complexity of existence has increased and is increasing. The increase in complexity is directly related to sweeping changes in the structure and dynamics of human civilizationthe increasing interdependence of the global economic and social system and the instabilities of dictatorships, communism and corporate hierarchies. Our complex social environment is consistent with identifying global human civilization as an organism capable of complex behavior that protects its components (us) and which should be capable of responding effectively to complex environmental demands."

The National Academies Can Knowledge of Human Behavior Be a Competitive Advantage?

"Industry in the past two decades has gotten better at applying research results in natural sciences and engineering. The gains to society (in better and cheaper products and services and more competitive companies) have been immense.

The social and behavioral sciences may offer benefits at least as great, in product and process design, marketing, forecasting, and planning. But business has found it harder to integrate the results and methods of these fields systematically in day-to-day operations. As a result, many of our technical systems and business practices fail to take advantage of knowledge of individual and social behavior and capacities. But business is increasingly demanding a more sophisticated approach to questions of demographics, human performance and learning, and the interactions of humans and machines, which can be addressed only through these disciplines.

The rewards of better utilizing such knowledge would be great and pervasive."