This work by Alan Richmond (‘Mandrian’) is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Adaptation
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- Elements of the system may learn or evolve leading to changes in system behavior and responses to interventions
- Individuals and groups engage in behaviours that enable them to predict, and potentially prepare for, future situations
- setting policy ‘targets’ may produce an unanticipated adaptation if actors in the system learn to “game” it by meeting targets while not fulfilling the original aim of the target(s)
Emergence and Self-organisation
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- Lower level properties and capabilities cannot predict higher level ones that emerge from interactions between elements of the system
- Social movements (environment, women’s, BLM), development of new social norms (recognition and acceptance of previously marginalised groups), innovative products (smart phones), and new markets emerge unpredictably from existing conditions
- Like adaptation, policies can both benefit and work to the detriment of emergent properties and self-organisational tendencies from market formation to a need for regulatory protection from emergent phenomena (negative social movements, pollution, habitat destruction, etc.)
Unexpected and Indirect Effects
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- Many interlinkages and interactions between elements of a system can lead to unexpected impacts or impacts in apparently remote (disconnected) elements from interventions
- Smoking cessation can lead to overeating, indirectly effecting obesity levels
- Floods resulting from increasingly extreme rainfall events and the tendency to build in floodplains have unexpectedly combined to increase the numbers of floods and properties impacted, indirectly leading to a decrease in the social/community resilience to flooding
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Feedback and feedback loops
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- Feedback occurs when the result or output of a process influences the input into the next iteration of the same process. This can happen either directly or indirectly, and can work to both increase and accelerate or to suppress the changes taking place.
- Groups may panic, or otherwise respond as a mob, based on the panic from one individual that spreads to other (positive feedback).
- Cigarette smoking increased when nicotine levels were reduced (negative feedback leading to stabilised nicotine consumption).
Levers and Hubs
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- System components may exercise more influence than expected over the system due to their connectivity within the system. The influence(s) may enhance or impede changes, and may increase the potential for system disruption
- Individuals or groups may champion or vehemently oppose a particular cause. Civil rights, women’s rights, and environmental concerns have all been impacted by levers and hubs in the interacting systems
- In response to needs authorities may enact statutes, regulations, laws, protocols, or apply other limitations or supports to markets, communities, and more general policy requirements promoting social and environmental outcomes.
Nonlinearity
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- Inputs to the system may have disproportional impacts on outcomes: large effects may result from small changes under some circumstances, but not in others. This may result in sudden changes at a larger scale, or even directional reversals
- The adoption of a new product often follows a pattern of initially low numbers, building a small market, then suddenly burgeoning into a major component of society (personal computers, mobile phones)
- For impacts to be felt, sometimes a threshold needs to be passed to produce impacts. The threshold may be time/duration, numbers (members of a group), or other input to the system
Domains of Stability
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- Complex adaptive systems may reach equilibrium in different states, and may change from one to another as circumstances evolve, often through external stimuli. Once an equilibrium state has been displaced, it may not be possible to return the system to it.
- On a global scale, this is the current state of climate change – an old equilibrium has been disturbed too much to remain viable, so environmental and social systems and subsystems are seeking new ones. More locally, redevelopment may lead to disruptions in communities by displacing one group in favour of another and negatively impacting original local businesses
- Public transport services may be minimal, attracting only those users who have no alternative, or they may be a priority, offering reliable service to many in place of private transport. To achieve high quality service and attract regular users, longer term support may be needed to ensure the positive feedbacks of use move the system beyond the stability of the existing private transport system
Tipping Points
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- Tipping points are the places where a system can be seen to flip from one domain of stability to another, such as when social change has been slow on a particular issue, but suddenly becomes more rapid, intense, or mainstream
- Gentrification of neighbourhoods, marginal social movements that become the norm, and certain environmental limits such as atmospheric carbon, all expose tipping points
- Adoption of solar panels and accessibility requirements in cities have shown a slow build up followed by sudden increases in popularity
Path Dependency
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- Complex adaptive systems are influenced by their history – the evolution of the present state – in addition to current conditions.
- An individual’s health is influenced by their heredity and the conditions they have been exposed to during their lifetime, as well as current environmental conditions. A community may wish to control sprawling development, but be challenged by the pattern of road-building historically and currently planned.
- The ultimate outcome of policy implementations depends in part on the order in which they are decided and the history of the organisation proposing and implementing them, as well as how other organisations respond to the policy.
Openness
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- Systems can be open or closed. Most systems of concern in policy are open. Open systems have numerous links outside of the system itself, so changes outside the system can still have significant impacts within. Links may be physical (material, energy), informational, social, and/or financial.
- The push for ethanol as fuel impacted agricultural crop choices, and the price and availability of some food stuffs (primarily corn).
- Covid vaccination levels were initially strong, but declined as influences from outside the health care system arose in opposition
Change over Time
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- Complex adaptive systems evolve because they are open, adapt to changes, and require new equilibria periodically, so are continually in flux
- Once acceptable social norms and customs can change radically (civil rights, women’s rights, environmental issues), but the change may be more or less sustainable (stable) depending on other system conditions. However, reversion to a previous state is likely to be inexact – that is, the reversion will be incomplete, incorporating some elements of the previous state, but with others that are unique to the new one
- Innovative products from personal computers to social networks can drive policy changes, new personal and social behaviours and business models. The rise of social media has increasingly urgent policy implications in addition to significant impacts on interpersonal relationships