Complexity

• 2026-08-19

  1.2.many

  This post is about a new simulation game I’ve written to go with my book Confluence. The game is about making sense of emergent patterns and intentional plans. Read more

• 2018-05-28

  Underbutterflies are free

  About a year ago I cleaned up my old “butterflies” blog post (one of the most popular) and submitted it to the Journal on Policy and Complex Systems. After acceptance, review, and revision, the journal volume is now out, and you can read and download the improved version of the paper (or read the stand-alone… Read more

• 2017-07-18

  Togetherness

  A while back I was on a discussion list and people were talking about biological symbiosis as a metaphor for people communicating and collaborating. As a former biologist, I felt a responsibility to respond, so I wrote a sort of quick guide to sociality in the non-human world. Several people later thanked me for the… Read more

• 2016-09-14

  Liminal Thinking

  So about a year and a half ago, Harold Jarche introduced me to Dave Gray, whom he met at a conference. Dave was writing a book about agility; Harold told him about my work; Dave wanted to talk. He was interviewing lots of people for his book. I said yes, and thus began a fascinating… Read more

• 2015-04-13

  The Holy Roman Empire was a complex adaptive system

  So a few weeks ago my son and I were watching the Crash Course World History series. In it John Green mentioned Voltaire’s famous statement that the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire. A few days later, I found that the phrase “Holy Roman Empire” was still bouncing around in… Read more

• 2013-01-31

  Tick tock tick tock tick

  This post is about a little thing I’ve been thinking about for a long time. It’s not a story thing, it’s more of a complexity thing, but I’m allowed to talk about that here because I said I would. Clocks to leaves I spend a lot of time looking out of windows. Most of the… Read more

• 2010-10-28

  Selection and development

  I was looking at the blog Aid on the Edge of Chaos and followed a link to Owen Barder’s wonderful presentation titled “What can development policy learn from evolution?” I enjoyed the clear, thought-provoking presentation so much I wrote a comment to the post. However, the comment turned out to be much too long for… Read more

• 2010-09-04

  Complexity/chaos stories: Butterflies, keystones and climbers

  This blog post has been revised and published as the paper “Are We Ready for Complexity?” in the Journal on Policy and Complex Systems, Spring 2018 issue. You can also read this PDF version of the published paper. (It fixes an editing error that bothered me.) If you want to read the original, unimproved version… Read more

• 2010-07-29

  Groupthink, groupfence, groupsense

  Here is a rambling series of mental peregrinations, a set of musings that you might find muse-worthy as well, about thinking and creating individually and in groups. I often find that things I think I’m unique in thinking about turn out to be on the minds of lots of other people too, so see if… Read more

• 2010-07-06

  Two times two is four

  Here is another comment response the system threw out for being too long, and that I thought was worth bringing up to a blog post. This is thanks to Stephen Shimshock, who commented on the Of hypotheses and tools, models and frameworks post. Stephen mentioned how my diagrams (in the Better confluence diagrams post) that… Read more

• 2010-07-05

  Of hypotheses and tools, models and frameworks

  My thanks to everyone who has commented on the Confluence and Better confluence diagrams posts. One particular comment on the Confluence post (by Paula Thornton, twelveth in the list, starting with “Seriously”) got me so motivated to write (thanks Paula!) that I ended up writing something too long for a comment; so I moved it… Read more