Description
Complex systems are high-order, multiple-loop, nonlinear, feedback structures. All social systems belong to this class (management structure of a corporation, urban area, national government, international trade processes, etc). Complex systems have many unexpected and little understood characteristics, making them very different from the simple systems of which people have an intuitive understanding. Such systems bring together many interacting factors which have been traditionally compartmentalized into isolated intellectual fields (the psychological, the economic, the technical, the cultural, the political, etc.), whose interactions may be of greater importance than the internal content of any one alone.Characteristics include:
1. High order: a system of greater than fourth or fifth order begins to enter the range of complex systems. An adequate representation of a social system, even for limited purposes, can be tenth or hundredth order.
2. Multiple loop: possessing upward of three or four interacting (positive or negative) feedback loops of shifting predominance.
3. Nonlinearity: allowing one feedback loop to dominate the system at one time and then causing a shift in this dominance to another part of the system which may produce such different behaviour that the two may seem unrelated.
4. Counter-intuitive: in that the intuitive solutions of the average person to the problems of complex social systems will most probably be incorrect most of the time.
5. Insensitivity to changes in many system parameters.
6. Recalcitrant resistance to policy changes.
7. High sensitivity to a few parameters and a sensitivity to some changes in structure.
8. Frequent conditions of delicate and uncertain balance between the forces of growth and decline.
9. Tendency to drift to a low level of performance.