Complex Adaptive Systems: A Primer

Several years ago, a friend and mentor recommended The Origin of Wealth by Eric Beinhocker, a book that looks at the economy as a complex adaptive system in which physical and social technologies are constantly evolving. This view of economics, according to Beinhocker, calls into question every fundamental assumption of classical economics and has profound implications for the ways in which we engage instrumentally with the economic environment.

I was astonished by the work and the concepts it presented, and I've been wrestling with complex adaptive systems as a minor obsession ever since, with a particular focus on the implications for my own fields of military operations research and force structure analysis (a subject on which I'll have more to say another day).

In this intellectual wrestling match, I found myself in need of a working definition of these systems, and because of the applications I was pondering I needed that definition to work from the bottom up. In other words, I needed a list of the desiderata that characterize what a complex adaptive system is and does (to provide a heuristic for classifying such a system). In the end, I arrived at the following:

A complex adaptive system is any system comprised of diverse, interdependent, adaptive elements interacting nonlinearly and exhibiting systemic behaviors including emergence, coevolution, and path dependence across multiple scales.

As a standalone definition, this has served me fairly well in pulling together the various descriptive and behavioral elements of complex adaptive systems as they've been articulated by those far more expert than I (e.g., Brian Arthur, Yaneer Bar-Yam, Eric Beinhocker, John Holland, Melanie Mitchell, Scott Page, and too many more to name). What it doesn't do, however, is lay out in detail what each of these seven characteristics mean for how we understand and engage complex systems. More depth is really needed. Then enters opportunity ...

In writing a thesis (now a short book on the subject of complex systems as a lens for understanding (material) military force structure published by Air University Press and available for free download here), I've put together a short and (I hope) useful primer on complex adaptive systems. In the interest of adding a verse to the powerful complexity play, that primer is available as a standalone document here ... Complex Adaptive Systems: A Primer.