Rarely asked questions

Complex is what cannot be summed up in a key word, which cannot be reduced to a law and cannot be condensed into a simple idea. (Morin, 1990)
In short, let’s call it life. Each of our lives, the planet’s life!

• Making a wind turbine is complicated. Commissioning its use in a community is complex.
• Planning a school timetable is complicated. Managing a class is complex.
• Extracting tumours is complicated. Prevention of cancer is complex.
• Success in exams is complicated. Success in a job is complex.
• Getting a driving license is complicated. Daily driving is complex.

None of it is simple but getting through “complicated” matters is doable with analytical thinking skills and required know how. All factors involved and their causal relationships are more or less known. Once the art is mastered, you can be fairly sure of the results of your efforts and reproduce them when needed.

This isn’t quite the case with complex matters. We can never know everything we want to know. They involve too many interdependent factors, which interact in unexpected ways making it hard to predict an outcome with certainty. The cause and effect relationships are not obvious and it’s often beyond our cognitive limits to make sense of all that happens. Unpleasant or pleasant surprises, contradictions, failures despite efforts or fresh problems arising from well thought out solutions are the norm. The practice in general is to find out the most we can; sense the needful and act accordingly. Most times, this process relies on past experience but does not promise success. Take the example of family solutions that work with one child but not with the other. There are too many continuously and unpredictably interacting components in the picture to guarantee coherence in results, which is why the thinking here cannot be the same as with complicated tasks.

Learn more with Dave Snowden’s CYNEFIN framework

Complex thinking is a process of engaging and dialoguing with life in all its complexities:

• Understanding each problem as arising out of an “interconnected whole”
• Identifying the factors and dynamics that contribute to its complexity
• Discerning the web of interdependencies between factors
• In any drawback, not blaming people but focusing on interactive processes and circular causal loops that cause the problem.
• Knowing that an accumulation of small actions lead to delayed and far-stretched impacts.
• Being aware that one’s own perspective is just one of the many others in the context
• Growing in self-awareness, empathizing with all forms of life and seeking quality relationships
• Developing flexible, creative and divergent thinking abilities to deal with uncertainties, constantly changing phenomena, unintended consequences, contradictions or paradoxes.

Would these skills help have a “better control” over life? Not really and that’s not the ambition. Reality is a flow that cannot be controlled or conquered. One can acquire a lens to “read” its complexity but the real spirit of complex thinking lies in a constant dialogue with it for the sake of desired futures. If complexity is not the key to the world but rather a challenge to face, says Morin, complex thinking is not what avoids or removes the challenge, but what helps to tackle it and sometimes even overcome it.

And this challenge could be raising a child, managing a classroom, working, mitigating or adapting to climate change!

Analytical thinking calls for breaking down complex problems into manageable components, analysing the cause and effect relationships to find suitable solutions, which may then be fit for the separated component of the problem but unfit for the overall complex problem it was related to and in which it continues to reside.

Critical thinking could be described as reflective and independent thinking based on objective evidence. Critical thinkers question arguments and ideas, seek to understand clear, rational and logical connections between thoughts, analyse or evaluate information, identify inconsistencies in reasoning, challenge their own beliefs and assumptions. In other words their aim is to make an overall judgement that is as bias-free as possible.

Lateral thinking also called creative thinking, means ‘thinking out of the box’ or looking at things in a new way. Creative thinkers go beyond the simple analysis of a problem to search for what might be missing, to review the problem from different angles, assessing more than just one potential solution, remaining open-minded and staying away from stereotypical thought patterns.

These thinking strategies are all useful and do help with complexity to a certain extent and you will see that lateral thinking is an integral part of complex thinking.

• But what about the countless events with no visible and objective reason behind them? Like a disturbed class of students?
• What about contradictions or paradoxes discovered despite logical and rational decision-making? Like industrial agriculture’s role in damaging the life it was initially supposed to sustain?
• What about personal mind-sets and social relationships that not only interfere but heavily impact a context? Like a local politician’s greed or the power dynamics in any set-up?
• What about subsisting uncertainties? Like those related to the causes for the dwindling bee population? Or the insecurities of getting a good job or job satisfaction despite quality schooling or university studies?
• What about unintended consequences of actions? Such as a new health problem emerging out of medication intended to resolve another health issue. Interactions in complex situations happen without anyone meaning them to.

Engaging with complex thinking is not about denying the relevance of analytical or critical thinking in complex situations but about realising that they are not sufficient to deal with real life complexities.

Yes, they both belong to the same school of thought and have the same theoretical underpinnings. Although the terms “systems" and “systems thinking" were used before the 1940s, it was Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s General Systems theory that established systems thinking as a major movement. It was soon to be supported by cyberneticists working on patterns of communication, especially in closed loops and networks. Norbert Weiner formulated the concepts of feedback and self-regulation, which later led to the idea of self-organisation – all concepts crucial to systems thinking. Weiner related the new notions of message, control and feedback to patterns of organisation, which led to the general idea of “pattern" as a key characteristic of life. Claude Shannon’s Theory of Information, an important part of cybernetics, was the other major contribution to the movement.

Most “systems thinkers” were or are based in North America and a large part of its literature is in English. The term “complex thought" was brought to the forefront by the French thinker Edgar Morin  who’s Method in particular – a collection of 6 volumes published between 1977 and 2004, compiles his thoughts, research and theories on complexity. His work, more known in Europe, Latin America and French speaking Africa, is only beginning to be translated into English.

To answer this question, it is worthwhile considering why education systems have been designed, as they exist today. What inspired us to think that the best way to educate children is to separate them into age groups, create a body of abstract knowledge broken up into subjects, assign a higher value and emphasise some of them, create subject specialists, design timetables and enforce discipline for an efficient transmission of knowledge, emphasise reasoning and analytical skills, ignore emotions… What indeed influenced this design?

Education systems like most other human organisations were influenced by the mechanistic worldview of Descartes and Newton, which revolutionised the world in its days. It claimed the material universe to be a perfect machine, explainable in terms of mechanical laws – all aspects of complex structures could thus be understood by reducing them to their smaller constituent parts. Descartes extended this view to plants and animals. The human body was no different he said, if not being inhabited by a rational thinking soul. This worldview separated mind from matter, made reductionism and certainty of scientific knowledge the order of the day. The 18^th century thinkers applied this mechanistic approach to human society and organisation. In other words, human organisations they thought, can be designed in the image of perfect machines and made to run efficiently. This is why schools are organised as mentioned above – a machine designed for an efficient transmission of knowledge. You may see the same influence on universities, enterprises, industry… The “machine” metaphor drove our thinking and was crucial in the design of the structure and operating principles of all our systems.

But this understanding of the world is no longer valid today. Scientists agree that the world is indeed a constantly changing interconnected web of life. Our planet is a vast closed-loop system within which innumerable human and non-human sub-systems inevitably and intricately relate to and interact with each other, making uncertainty and emerging properties the order of the day. It is in this context that systems/complex thinkers call for schools to make a shift from the “machine" metaphor to a “systems or complexity” representation. In other words, analytical-rational thinking skills, so dear to the mechanistic worldview, do not help understand the real world – an inevitably complex and interconnected world. Educating for complexity and nurturing complex thinking skills prepares learners for the real world.

What is true of the planet is true of a classroom. A constantly changing learning environment! Learner profiles have changed. Cultural diversity, equity and identity issues matter more to learners today than they did some decades ago. No straightforward reasons (in other words, no certainties!) to explain conflicts, dropouts, mental and psychological stress, drug addiction or low motivational and engagement levels. Knowledge and curricula keep changing. So do markets, jobs and livelihoods. The digital device invasion allows for personalisation, interactive learning, social networking, direct and immediate access to knowledge or transmission of information and misinformation. Learning apps adapt to student performance in ways teachers cannot and hundreds of freely available videos and tools explain any subject that once used to be the sole prerogative of the teacher. This diversified resource base often leads to confusing and contradictory information on any object of knowledge which itself is complex because it keeps evolving and can be interpreted in a variety of ways. In short, complexity practices and complex thinking skills help teachers, educators and activists to navigate and dialogue with such complex learning environments.

Many articles contemplate the role of ‘design’ in ‘systems thinking’ as much as that of ‘systems thinking’ in influencing ‘design’.

‘Design thinking’ as its name suggests, aims to design solutions for complex problems. It works to meet the real needs of people for which inputs are sought from a core group; iterates upon ideas in a cyclical fashion; looks for new ideas based on undetected needs and patterns and concludes with a prototype for a solution to be tested.

‘Complex or systems thinking’ is wider in its scope and concerned with the big-picture thinking: mapping complex relationships; understanding underlying processes and dynamics; detecting unintended consequences and delayed impacts; seeking to change undesired dynamics or patterns that create problems; being aware of unavoidable contradictions and so on. While ‘design thinking’ is more about creating solutions for the future, ‘systems thinking’ is about seeking systemic change.

Probably the most important question! What indeed are the methods and tools that help transform learners into positive changemakers for themselves and for the planet? To discover the practices that hundreds of teachers around the world are engaging with, jump to “Educating for complexity”.