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Making Things Work: Solving Complex Problems in a Complex World
Today, as individuals and as a society, we are faced with highly complex challenges. When we don't solve them correctly they rapidly become crises. This book explains how we can use complex systems research to solve complex problems * healthcare * education * military conflict * ethnic violence and terrorism * international development. Highly complex problems cannot be solved by any one individual. Traditional organizations, traditional forms of control and planning are not effective. Making Things Work draws on insights from complex systems research about emergence, complexity, patterns, networks and evolution. It explains how effective organizations form through cooperation and competition, and how to make non-hierarchical distributed organizational structures effective at their tasks.
306 pages, Paperback
First published December 12, 2004
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
January 19, 2017
Devoid of any useful information.
February 27, 2016
"Complexity" has real potential to join the ranks of concepts like "disruption" or "black swan" as a buzzword that is thrown around and abused by countless management consultants, bloggers, Monday morning CEO's, or the like. Complexity has its roots in cutting edge physics (as does the author), and is itself still a developing science. Even in the scholarly hubs (such as Santa Fe Institute, or the author's own New England Complex Systems Institute for instance) you wouldn't expect to hear a fully consistent definition of complexity from any two researchers - the science itself is still evolving through the myriad of applications of which its tools of simulation have found use. In the case of Bar-Yam, those applications appear to be focused on social systems. Instead of evaluating turbulence in hydrolics, behavior of ant hives, or flocks of birds, the author instead applies the lens of complexity to human engaged fields like education, healthcare, or national security, looking for areas within that the traditional tools such as top down design, central planning, or high scale efforts have fallen short, and instead prescribing solutions that are more appropriate under conditions of complexity. As an example, the author cautions those engaged in field of systems engineering that their traditional approaches are not suited for designing systems of extreme complexity (as has been the case in large scale failures such as the attempted redesign of the US air traffic control system or IRS tax modernizations) and instead offers the alternative of an evolutionary approach to system development through experimentation, if necessary coupled with redundancy. One troubling recommendation was the author's advocacy for the building of boundaries between populations experiencing conflict, rather than engaging and building common ground. It is hard not to see the Isreal / Palestine status quo as the natural byproduct of this approach, is this really the best case outcome? A reader is even left to wonder whether Bar-Yam would go so far as to support a wall between the US and Mexico (such as is sometimes suggested by various rabble rousers in US politics), after all where does one stop building boundaries, at the national, state, city, or even neighborhood level?
July 27, 2023
Great read and intro to complex systems. It's also aged fairly well - not a given with nonfiction.
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February 14, 2013Simple read: best chapter is 7: Competition and Cooperation
December 10, 2017
A good introduction on complex systems, more like a Text Book read (which is not particularly helpful)
November 5, 2021
There was a website which included some pieces of this book. They intrigued me. Recently I read this book, and enjoyed it.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews