Science, Strategy and War The Strategic Theory of ... - Boekje Pienter

either. The edge of chaos is where life has enough stability to sustain itself and enoughcreativity to deserve the name of life, it is where new ideas and innovative genotypes areforever nibbling away at the edges of the status quo 43 .Complexity theory has become the ultimate interdisciplinary science. Subjects suchas psychology, evolutionary biology, ecology, linguistics, and archeology all bear on complexadaptive systems 44 . It has become the ‘overarching framework for theorists and researchersin economics, biology, physics, and other fields using mathematics and computer simulation,emphasizing holistic synthesis instead of atomistic analysis and focusing on dynamic processinstead of static content, in their efforts to deal with ‘messy’ nonlinear processes –discontinuities’, as Sandole asserts 45 .Complex Adaptive Systems, or Complex Systems for short, are quite different frommost systems that have been studies scientifically. A remarkable finding of chaos andcomplexity theory is that different non linear systems have inherently identical structures.Whether it refers to biological evolution, the behavior of organisms in ecological systems, theoperation of the mammalian immune system, learning and thinking in animals, the behaviorof investors in financial markets, the systems feature common processes 46 . It teachesmodesty too for it points to fundamental limits in our ability to understand, control, andmanage the world, and the need for us to accept unpredictability and change 47 .Several other brief observations can be made about the make up and about thebehavior of complex systems. John Holland, one of the early influential authors on complexsystems who features prominently in Mitchell Waldrop’s popular account of the emergenceof complexity theory, lists the following similarities among brains, ecologies, developingembryos, ant colonies, political parties, scientific communities, etc. 48 :They are systems that are networks of “agents” acting in parallel. In a brain the agentsare nerve cells, in ecologies the agents are species, in an economy the agents are firmsand individuals or even nations;Each agent finds itself in an environment produced by its interactions with the otheragents in the system;It is constantly acting and reacting to what the other agents are doing;And because of that essentially nothing is fixed in its environment;The control of complex systems is highly dispersed. There is not, for example, a masterneuron in the brain.Organization within these systems is created by both competition and cooperation withother systems.A complex adaptive system has many levels of organization, with agents a any one levelserving as the “building blocks” for agents at a higher level. Cells will form a tissue, acollection of tissues will form an organ, organisms will form an ecosystem;Complex adaptive systems typically also have many niches, each one of which can beexploited by an agent adapted to fill that niche;There are intercommunicating layers within the hierarchy. Agents exchange informationin given levels of the hierarchy, and different levels pass information betweenthemselves as well.43 Waldrop, pp.11-13.44 Gell-Mann, p.117. Note the similarity with Boyd's view on the fields one needs to take intoconsideration when dealing with strategy.45 Dennis Sandole, Capturing the Complexity of Conflict (Pinter Books, London, 1999), p.194.46 Gell-Mann, p.17, Waldrop citing Holland, p.145.47 Richard Pascale, ‘Surfing the Edge of Chaos’, Sloan Management Review, spring 1999, p.8548 Mitchell Waldrop, pp.145-147.134