EXYSTENCE NoE
Seminar on 12 Nov 2004, Helsinki

Dr. Mika Aaltonen, Finland Futures Research Centre, Helsinki Node for Millennium Project of American Council UN University.

The Relationship between Complexity Research and Futures Studies

Today I'm going to talk about the embedded thinking behind complexity science methodology and then about the practice and applications of this work in the business world. At present I'm liaising with a lady from Washington called Irene Sanders who is the Executive Director of the Washington Centre for Complexity and last weeks e-mail from her expressed lots of thoughts towards future studies. One of the points that she stresses is that "The present is the future in its most creative state.
We have a new initiative in Copenhagen led by a futurologist called Rolf Jensen and the people on the management team in charge of this project. Our clients are the strategic thinkers in European multi-national companies and the mission is "To travel forward in time to meet and greet the future, seize the challenges it psoes, and act upon these challenges in the present"
How different is this kind of thinking from that which Irene Sanders expressed?
How do we make sense of future chances and possibilities and what are the means by which we reach the future? I think I understand from Eve's presentation that she was attempting to answer the second question. I am trying to answer the first one and perhaps the question of how we make people more intelligent. According to Karl Weick, sensemaking happens, when we pick up pieces of information from the world around us and we combine them with some of the processes of the existing knowledge that we have and from the combination emerges action. If we don't understand something, this is how we begin to make sense of it.
I think one thing that hasn't been mentioned today concerning emergence is a comment made by our colleague Paul Cilliers. He said that one way emergence happens is because people manage us or direct us or that we react to previous knowledge. So the kind of knowledge we put into peoples' brains will determine their actions and this is the bottom line of my presentation. In general, the ability to put power or knowledge into the system will somehow direct the system.
Three years ago a very interesting study was made in Finland, when the managing or strategy directors of the top five hundred companies were asked about the kind of tools they used in their strategy-making processes. When asked the question: 'Can you name the practical theory by which your company does its strategy', the answers exemplified Ludwig Wittgenstein's observation that the limits of the language conditioned the meanings of the words. To put this in the context of future studies the meanings of the methods you are using are the limits of your understanding of the situation. It's sad, but this is the reality not only in Finland but in many other countries.
But there are many methods. In the United Nations University Millennium Project the leader of the project, Jerome C. Glenn and his team collected what they considered were all the future studies methods used during the last fifty or sixty years. We believe that the information that we put into management will guide the company's future. It might be simply S.W.O.T. analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) or something more sophisticated from the future studies and complexity methods, but we have been asking how to best analyse the methods.
One way is to draw a graph. The horizontal axis is the means of controlling or directing the system that each method has as an embedded function. The vertical axis is about the nature of the possible understanding of the system. In the bottom half approaching from the left we have engineering approaches and from the right we're talking about system thinking. There are things which are common to both and things which are not common. What is common is the thought that when we are doing our work, whether managers, consultants or experts; we always stand outside the system and in doing so we think that we can understand the whole system, how it works, and therefore that we can influence its future. The methods that we use amongst the engineering approaches assume that the system will not change in using such methods. So if you use some method the system remains the same but you gain information and perhaps you can make better decisions. What's different in the method of system thinking is that you're talking about multiple futures. We are allowing ambiguity in our thinking but we still think we can understand the whole system.
If we go to the upper half of the picture we begin to talk about emergent properties. We talk about a different kind of future which emerges because of the interaction of the agents and nobody can control the whole system, not the managing director or the best of consultants. We can influence the system but we cannot lead it in the way we try to lead it in the bottom half. We have two kinds of complexity: mathematical complexity in which we have a rule based model of the world and the sort of complexity that springs from future research methodology. I think for many people it's important whether or not it's considered a science, but that's not necessary for me. Many of the methods involve removing ambiguity and are embedded in the old practice but we have some where we talk about scenarios and simulations and games etc. More complex systems are the speciality of people like John Casti and John Holland and we can talk about evolutionary or generative algorithms.

Question 1: We have tried some of the participatory methods (in complex organisations),but somehow I feel that we have not yet succeeded, so can you tell us what might be the conditions under which social complexity methods and tools succeed?

Mika: I have just come back from France where they are practising this kind of thinking in twenty two areas, all as big as Finland, and they are implementing multiple actor strategy. They are trying to construct a strategy with all the relevant actors. As Eve explained at the beginning; the world is not only evolving, but co-evolving, which means that no one can survive alone, at least not for long. The other actors necessarily influence our success and this is why they are doing such analysis in France. Analysis of business information has to be knowledge of the big picture. If you think about the strategy process in your organisation, you have probably taken an inter-management team off somewhere to formulate a strategy and that's what we're going to think about here. People who can lead these thinking processes can influence the whole world though the knowledge delivered here will influence some of you, but not others.
Now I'm going to make you think by working together and this is a practical demonstration. I'm going to give one paper to every table which is the presentation of the article by Eve on the London School of Economics Complexity Group's methodology. You may ask why I'm only giving one paper per table. It's because you'll have move together and maybe even touch each other in working together. If I gave everyone their own paper that wouldn't happen. You would stay in your own chair and dream and then discuss. This process will affect your thinking because I am in some ways controlling the next twenty minutes of your life. When we make ICT tools they influence the way we live our lives at home or at a place of work and impose certain constraints. In Finland today, we communicate a great deal via e-mail and it's a very limited way to communicate so we're trying to enlarge that capacity so that we communicate with more senses. Every time you step into your room or your place of work you do so with five senses but you're often only asked to use one or two at a time. I think this demonstration will show you how you learn faster when you are asked to use all your senses.

(The demonstration could not be recorded in sufficient detail using sound alone and is not reported here.)