Pursue a Complexity-Oriented Approach

4. The Massively Parallel Strategy for Dealing with Scale and Complexity

This introductory article was written by ChatGPT at the direction of Heidi Burgess, who reviewed, edited, and approved the final content.
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June 14, 2026

Peacebuilding, civic renewal, and democracy strengthening all involve efforts to influence complex social systems. These systems include millions of people, thousands of organizations, many levels of government, competing media ecosystems, economic incentives, legal rules, cultural identities, historical memories, and fast-changing technologies. The Santa Fe Institute describes complex systems as including such things as cities, economies, civilizations, the nervous system, the Internet, and ecosystems. In such systems, outcomes emerge from the interaction of many parts; they cannot be controlled by a single leader, organization, policy, or campaign.

This is why it is not enough to reject simplistic "us-versus-them" thinking. We also need strategies that match the scale and complexity of the problems we are trying to address. Polarization, democratic decline, political violence, public distrust, misinformation, and social fragmentation are not single-cause problems. They arise from many interacting dynamics: economic insecurity, identity threat, institutional failure, media incentives, historical grievances, bad-faith actors, weak civic skills, and many others. The OECD's work on systemic thinking for policy making emphasizes that complex policy problems require attention to cross-sector linkages, non-linear behavior, and consequences that are not visible from within any single institutional or disciplinary silo.

A complexity-oriented approach recognizes that no one can fix the whole system alone. Instead, many people and organizations need to work on different parts of the problem at the same time. Teachers can help students learn civic skills. Journalists can improve information quality. Lawyers can defend the rule of law. Religious leaders can discourage dehumanization. Local officials can improve public participation. Researchers can identify what is working. Business leaders can reduce incentives for exploitation and polarization. Community organizations can build relationships across divides. Each effort may seem small when viewed by itself, but together they can influence the larger system. Guy and Heidi Burgess have identified over fifty different "roles" that all need to be carried out if what they call "massively parallel peacebuilding" is to succeed. No one person or organization can play more than one or, at most, a few of these roles. But many people and organizations working largely independently can make a big difference.

This is the logic behind a massively parallel strategy. It resembles Adam Smith's idea of the "invisible hand" in economic life, where many separate actors, each pursuing their own piece of a larger task, can together produce patterns of order and productivity that no central planner designed in detail. In peacebuilding and democracy work, however, the goal is not to assume that everything will work out automatically. The goal is to help many constructive actors see how their separate efforts can become mutually reinforcing. This is similar to the logic of collective impact, which emphasizes a common agenda, shared measurement, mutually reinforcing activities, continuous communication, and support structures that help separate organizations contribute to a larger goal.

Complexity-oriented work also requires humility. Interventions can have unintended consequences. A reform that helps one group may frighten another. A message that persuades one audience may alienate a different audience. A policy that solves an immediate problem may create long-term dependency or backlash. Donella Meadows' classic essay on leverage points reminds us that small shifts in the right place can sometimes produce large system-wide effects. But finding those leverage points requires careful observation, experimentation, feedback, and revision. Constructive actors need to learn as they go, rather than assume that their first theory of change is correct.

To pursue a complexity-oriented approach is to accept that modern conflicts cannot be transformed through one big solution imposed from above. They require many partial solutions, operating at many scales, pursued by many different people with different skills. Some efforts will focus on preventing violence; others on strengthening institutions, improving communication, building trust, reducing inequality, protecting rights, teaching civic habits, or exposing bad-faith manipulation. None of the actors has the "whole answer," and arguing that one approach is better than or more important than another doesn't make sense. Many different approaches are needed, simultaneously. The challenge is to help these efforts add up. A massively parallel strategy does not promise quick or simple answers. It offers something more realistic: a way for large numbers of people to work constructively on the parts of the peacebuilding puzzle that they are best positioned to address.

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This page was created by ChatGPT in response to this prompt. It was then reviewed, edited, supplemented and approved by Heidi Burgess. More information about how and why we are using AI in this way, and about the growing number of ways in which Beyond Intractability is using ChatGPT, Claude and other AI systems to generate content and build out the BI system, is available on our BI/AI Overview Page.