a triarchy press publication
Complexity Demystified: A Guide for Practitioners
by Patrick Beautement and Christine Broenner
Publication Date: 13 June 2011
No of pages: 268
Book type: Paperback
Print ISBN: 9781908009241
List Price: £25
Offer Price: £18
Complexity Demystified focuses on how to apply complexity insights in practice and appreciates that human activity is a flow of changing experience, shaped by circumstances and events. The Guide indicates how to become adaptive, open and able to engage with evolving situations in order to influence and change things in the moment.
While quite a few terms from complexity science have entered our everyday language - emergence, co-evolution, self-organisation, interconnectedness, the edge of chaos, etc. - most of us have little idea of their value and practical relevance in our work and everyday lives.
'Scientists explain complexity but never tell you what to do in practical terms' and 'We need to do something differently but are not sure what to do or how to do it' are typical concerns of people working in areas as diverse as healthcare, economics, housing and community matters, event management, transport, the military, humanitarian aid, climate change ... the list is long.
In writing this book, the authors held extensive meetings and workshops in order to learn more about the difficulties people are experiencing. Again and again people said that the mechanistic approaches required by managers, donors or auditors (where 'what to do' is bounded or decided in advance and often within a fixed time frame), rarely led to sustainable solutions. A new approach was needed to be able to respond to, exploit and benefit from the changing dynamic and underlying complexity inherent in all human endeavour.
If you are at all familiar with complexity, you would probably like to find a practical approach that:
- helps you work effectively with the kind of fast-moving dynamic situations that 'engineered' approaches can't address
- provides a way to explain and report your approach to managers, colleagues, clients or donors.
The authors have developed such an Approach which provides clear and systematic Framework for working out how to explore the space of possibilities and how to apply a range of different techniques to bring about change in practice. In short, they bridge the gap between theory, experience and practice, demystify complexity and show how to put it to work - embracing the challenges and opportunities of constantly changing, real-world contexts.
"Practitioners who are engaged in dealing with complex issues across diverse domains and contexts will find this book illuminating, thought provoking and most of all useful - in guiding them to ways of moving forwards in their endeavours to understand and then exploit that understanding for greater purpose... It should be on the bookshelf of anyone seriously engaged with any complex issue."
Professor Brian Collins, Chief Scientific Advisor, Department for Transport(DfT) and Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS)
The Guide is in two parts:- (The full Table of Contents is available here)
Part One documents and evaluates the needs of practitioners, it then derives insights from complexity science and introduces the Approach and a systematic Framework for working out how to 'put complexity to work'.
In Part Two the practical application of the Approach is developed (sample diagrams here) and six case studies are provided. Each one shows the benefits of using various techniques and aspects of the Approach in order to understand and work with the underlying complexity of the contexts.
- the fuel crisis protests in the UK (2000);
- upgrading of slum housing in Cameroon;
- social housing in Ludlow in the UK;
- journalism in Lebanon;
- the Deep Water Horizon Oil Rig disaster; and
- the Lost Town art/architecture project promoted by the East of England Development Agency.
About the Authors
Patrick Beautement is co-founder and Research Director of The abaci Partnership. He has over 25 years experience of implementing innovative studies and high-profile evaluations for government, academia and commerce. He has a track record of partnering effectively with practitioners and communities in multidisciplinary contexts and of developing appropriate tools and techniques. Over a three-year period, he has been lead facilitator for a set of UK government sponsored workshops involving practitioners and successfully collated, analysed and presented the interdependent factors in a series of detailed reports. In another Study, he was the Principal Investigator for a multinational, coalition collaboration examining crisis management and disaster response that received awards for its clarity and relevance.
Christine Broenner has worked with practitioners in many domains, in private companies and in international research and education institutions. She has been involved in projects in Europe, as well as in technical assistance missions for development cooperation in Asia and Africa. Through these experiences, she has become particularly interested in overcoming the lack of interoperability between data, mindsets and organisations that she encounters in many of the day-to-day situations and in the wide variety of settings in which she works. Christine joined The abaci Partnership in 2008 as a Principal Consultant.
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