Complex systems on the other hand, are not predictable.  They are not clockwork, they are defined by their unpredictability. These are things like… a cell, or an organ – like the human brain – or a human body; or an ant colony, or a school of fish or a flock of birds or the population of a city, or even a city neighbourhood, or a political system, or an economy, or the planetary climate, or the ecosystems of land or sea… Complex systems on the other hand, are not predictable.  They are not clockwork, they are defined by their unpredictability. These are things like… a cell, or an organ – like the human brain – or a human body; or an ant colony, or a school of fish or a flock of birds or the population of a city, or even a city neighbourhood, or a political system, or an economy, or the planetary climate, or the ecosystems of land or sea… 

So basically – the things that people make are complicated because that way we can fix them. The things the rest of creation makes are complex, because that’s how things need to be to work in massively complex biospheres.  (And this is why, if you’re over the age of around 26, you’ll find that an increasing number of people in your immediate circle are not getting well when they go to a medical system that still insists that the human organism is a complicated system and if they just change the oil filter one more time, it’ll run like new again…. Energy medicines get that this model doesn’t work.)

Anyway, back to complex systems. These function by positive and negative feedback loops that are absolutely not linear and not predictable and can rapidly lead to exponential responses – so parturition – childbirth – is a positive feedback loop – uterine contractions start and move the foal or the pup or the child down towards the cervix and the pressure there releases more oxytocin that causes stronger contractions that drive it further down towards the cervix and it all keeps going until birth.  Or, to take one that’s less charming, if anthropogenic global heating warms up the arctic to the point where the frozen blocks of methane begin to sublimate and release gaseous methane, which boils off and rises up into the atmosphere as it did last summer. And methane is 86 times more potent than CO2 as a greenhouse gas, then we’re heading for a positive feedback loop that could go catastrophic quite quickly. And yes, it will eventually self limit, but that’s on geological time scales and we might not be around to appreciate it. 

The freezing of water into ice is an easy one to imagine: when the temperature drops and the average kinetic energy of the molecules falls, then they reach a point where the push-pull forces that have kept them moving in fluidity resolve into a new more solid balance and we get snowflakes, or the amazing glass-like structures of ice. Which is what’s known as a phase shift – from solid phase to liquid phase… but this increasingly is being used to describe all emergent systems – like the butterfly emerging from a chrysalis.

This, too, is one we can get our heads around – everyone knows what a caterpillar looks like: you can imagine the green slinky ones or the brown fuzzy ones with the black dots that used to be everywhere up on the island of Skye when I was a kid… and we know they munch leaves and grow big and fat, but only up to a point. Then they slow down and spin themselves a chrysalis and their entire being dissolves into a kind of DNA soup.

Which is a pretty radical phase shift. If that was all, it would be quite impressive – and if you arrived as an Alien out from beyond alpha centauri and didn’t know any planet earth carbon-based biology, I don’t think you’d predict a chrysalis from the caterpillar. But even less would you predict the imaginal cells that arise from the DNA soup, or the ways they are at first rejected as being alien, but they keep arising, and they clump together into little imaginal clumps and some of these are rejected by the DNA soup as well, and broken down, but some keep going and they clump together to make imaginal islands which clump together more and more until what you have is a butterfly or a moth, ready to emerge from the chrysalis. And I absolutely defy you to predict that if you didn’t know it was coming.

And this – the unpredictability – is one of the inherent properties of emergence from complex systems – that the end result is entirely unpredictable from the perspective of the original phase.

And then we’re all set for humanity to arise. Not quite. There’s a lot of interesting gaps in the between… but what I want us to take away from this is – again – that the end result is unpredictable. If you were viewing the prokaryotic soup, facing extinction from its own success in releasing oxygen, you wouldn’t predict the fusion that formed the nucleus and allowed those cells to metabolise the oxygen so it was no longer a problem. That’s the first important take-home point – the utter unpredictability.

But the second – and perhaps more interesting point – is that the problem before the phase shift is no longer a problem after it.

Which is also pretty key – There are clearly a lot of people concerned about the climate and ecological emergency, or the ghastly injustices and inbuilt pain, fear and horror of disaster capitalism, or any of the other issues that assail us… and a great many of these people are endeavouring to fix these systems from the inside. Which is laudable, and understandable.

So – while we think about this, I want to look briefly at one of the heroes of complexity thinking  – Donnella Meadows.  Dr Meadows wrote the seminal book, The Limits to Growth which is well worth a look if you have any interest at all in economics, But, here, I want to look at her list of twelve leverage points or Places to Intervene in a system.  These came from a paper published by the Sustainability Institute back in 1997, and, for me, they are absolutely crucial to what we’re doing.

Meadows was asked how best to intervene in a complex system to affect change. Given that we know the point of complex systems is that they’re non linear, and unpredictable, changing them is… non linear and unpredictable – and hard.  But we can at least nudge them. She came up with a list of twelve leverage points, which she ranked in order of efficacy from the least effective to the most:

12. Numbers: Constants and parameters such as subsidies, taxes, and standards
11. Buffers: The sizes of stabilizing stocks relative to their flows 10. Stock-and-Flow Structures: Physical systems and their nodes of intersection
9. Delays: The lengths of time relative to the rates of system changes
8. Balancing Feedback Loops: The strength of the feedbacks relative to the impacts they are trying to correct
7. Reinforcing Feedback Loops: The strength of the gain of driving loops
6. Information Flows: The structure of who does and does not have access to information
5. Rules: Incentives, punishments, constraints
4. Self-Organization: The power to add, change, or evolve system structure
3. Goals: The purpose or function of the system
2. Paradigms: The mindset out of which the system—its goals, structure, rules, delays, parameters—arises
1. Transcending Paradigms

But there’s one more lever above this, though – and I didn’t understand this one at all when I was first introduced to this when I was doing the Masters in sustainable economics at Schumacher. Because the very top of list, the most effective lever of change – is – transcending all paradigms.

It took me to this summer when I spent most of the day driving a dying owl from Brecon to Evesham, and the shamanic work that arose from it, to understand the core of this. It’s where we reached the understanding of the final step in the Accidental Gods four-step dance towards conscious evolution, which is Letting Go. Or Making the empty handed leap into the void. And even when I understood this, it took me a while to make the link to Dana Meadows’ levers of change – to understand what a visionary she was, and to mourn again that I never went to listen to her when she was alive.

But still, we can honour her now, for her understanding.