How Can We Respond to the Increasingly Complex World

First published on October 2, 2019

I'm reading a book at the moment. It was published about a few years ago and the subtitle is something like 'relationship guidance for a complex world'. I used to be sceptical of the phrase 'complex world'. This is because of the media's general bias for bad news stories. Any number of books published over the past decade have mentioned this; the one that brought it to my attention was The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley. What Ridley points out in that book is that a) bad news sells and b) we respond more to bad news. To explain the first, think about 'there was a hurricane in the Carribean and X people have died' to 'Y00,000 people were lifted out of extreme poverty today'. Both can be (and have been) true but only one makes for a newspaper headline. Or, at least, the number of people being lifted out of extreme poverty might be a headline once, but wouldn't be every day, when in fact it is happening as we speak, every day. And as an early human, the person who responds more to bad news than good survives on the plains, when the bad news might be 'there's a lion near the waterhole'. That is much more important to survival than 'There are slightly more berries this year than last year'. So I thought that - like concerns about overpopulation, which have been around for hundreds of years without us ever running out of space or food (to demonstrate how off-target concerns specifically about overpopulation are, you could give everyone on the planet today a house of average size and they would all fit inside the area of Texas) - fears of complexity were simply humans being humans and worrying about things.

Not any more; I've seen too many signs: the undeniable increasing pressures on modern people, which I see through my work as a coach; the inability of the structures we have to deal with complex challenges like climate and Brexit and social media; increased learning about complexity theory earlier in the year. These things and more have made me look at people's concerns about the complexity of the world anew.

One of the key distinctions is: complicated vs complex.

Something complicated is something which can be known, but almost no one knows. How a car engine works or getting a rocket to the moon are examples of very complicated things.

Complex is something different. Complex is something where cause and effect can only be known afterwards; before something has happened things are essentially unknowable. Examples of this might be 'how to solve world poverty', 'how should we deal with climate change' and 'how should I raise my child.'

Humans evolved for a complicated world and are now staring complexity in the face. This is why so many well meaning policies don't end well. Switch to diesel over petrol? Good for CO2 levels but bad for the tens of thousands of people who die from the pollution. Set targets for waiting times in A&E? Sounds good, right, except when people lose sight of the reasons for that target and take shortcuts to meet their targets.

Examples like these are everywhere.

Humans have a number of tendencies which serve them well in a complicated world, but run them up short in a complex world. Jennifer Garvey Berger writes brilliantly about this in her book, Unlocking Leadership Mindtraps (a short, practical guide which isn't just useful for leaders). Our tendency for control, for example, often leads to us trying to solve a complex problem (which we can't control) by focusing on a part of it we can (like the waiting times in A&E). We feel satisfied because we can control that, ignoring that it may not be helping us solve the overall goal: providing the best medical care we can.

So what do we do? Well, if we can't control what is going on, we can at least do our best to create the conditions for good things to happen. In the charged, complex modern world, one of the most important steps you can take towards that is to understand yourself. The complexity of the world will short-circuit your habits, whether they came from evolution - like the ones Garvey Berger writes about - or your childhood. Deepen your knowledge of yourself, increasing your fitness for complexity: be more able to respond skilfully so you can be more responsible.

It isn't easy, but in the face of complexity, that's one of the only things we can do.