Systems Thinking

We have stressed in several places that both democracies and societal level intractable conflicts are "complex adaptive systems."  That means that they include many autonomous actors, acting according to their own decision rules (based on their interests, needs, values, beliefs, etc.) toward disparate goals.  It is impossible to change such systems, in ways we might want to change them, by using simple or even complicated approaches. (Complicated systems are ones which have many parts, but, like machines, they are all connected and interact in predictable ways. Therefore when something breaks, if you understand how the machine is supposed to work, you can go in and fix it. (Or you can throw it away and get a new one if the fix is too difficult or too expensive.) 

Complex systems cannot be fixed like that.  There is no one place that you can "tinker," no one change that you can make, that will change the way the system operates enough to have a predictable outcome.  So "systems thinking" involves understanding the nature of complexity, understanding the nature of the particular system as much as possible (and understanding that it is impossible to fully understand what is going on) and adopting a complexity-oriented response to bring about the desired change. 

As we argued in the theory of change section, and will do so again at length in the "roles" section of this guide, bringing about change in complex systems almost always requires doing multiple things at once, at different "vulnerable" or "ripe" parts of the system.  Systems mapping is a tool that is sometimes used to determine what those "vulnerable" or "ripe" places in the system are and what interventions (i.e. theories of change) are most likely to bring about the desired outcomes.

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

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