Complexity Demystified - A Guide for Practitioners

Authors: Patrick Beautement and Christine Broenner.
Published by Triarchy Press. ISBN: 978-1-908009-24-1  

Here's a short summary of the content:

'We need to do something differently but are not sure what to do or how to do it'. This is a statement that is often heard from practitioners working with dynamic real-world issues on the front-line of human endeavour. They say: 'Scientists explain complexity but don't tell you what to do in practical terms'. This book has been written to offer solutions for these practitioners - to provide an approach for 'putting complexity to work'.

So what are the issues? Practice is, de facto, determined by changing contexts, and what to do differently in a specific instance cannot be rigorously bounded or decided in advance. What needs doing will depend on the circumstances. But when, for the most part, auditors, donors or managers demand tangible, target-driven results within a fixed time frame how can practitioners convince them that working with the open principles of complexity will lead to more successful and sustainable solutions?

Real practice is about appreciating the nature of the dynamic flow in the context; and how the underlying complexity generates the features and phenomena that practitioners work with. These are part of the approach. Understanding how to engage with the realities to influence and shape them is another part. Identifying mis-matches, tensions and trade-offs is a third. Having the complexity-worthy capabilities to do all that is also necessary. And being able to do it all iteratively together, with those best placed to bring about change, gives the overall holistic approach.

This book is not 'yet another' complexity book. Its Approach takes insights from complexity science and explains how to apply them in practice. Having demystified academic theory, it offers an in-depth, systematic, framework which practitioners can use to focus on the dynamic phenomena already active in their working context, to be able to shape and influence these phenomena 'on the fly'.

There are six case studies in the book for which the Approach reveals a better understanding of the stresses and strains that were felt throughout the contexts and how these might have been different had an appreciation of the underlying complexity been part of standard practice.

Drawn from their own experiences and those of other practitioners, and to bridge the gap between theory, experience and practice, the authors have produced a clear and erudite 'bible' for realising the inherent benefits of 'putting complexity to work'.

Recommendation:
"This book is a very valuable and timely contribution to that body of scholarship and practice, bridging as it sets out to do and does, academic abstraction of concepts and methods and the stark reality of social, economic and physical situations. It should be on the bookshelf of anyone seriously engaged with any complex issue."
Professor Brian Collins, CB, FREng
Chief Scientific Adviser. Department for Transport (DfT) and Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS)

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Email address for correspondence: research@abacipartners.co.uk

[Updated 22 July 2011]