Organized complexity

1. Any organized collection of entities interconnected by a complex network of relationships. The organization of a system is simple if the system is a serial or an additive complex of components, each of which is understood. As soon as strict sequential sequences or linear additivity is transcended, an organized system becomes rapidly more complex, usually too complex for detailed analysis into superposable parts or effects. At the other extreme from organized simplicity is chaotic complexity where the number of entities involved is so vast that the interactions can be described in terms of continuously distributed quantities or gradients, and do not need to be specifically identified with regard to the individual entities. Such systems can be described by the methods of statistical mechanics which merge with those of classical mechanics when the collections of entities are treated as continuous. In modern physics and biology, and the behavioural and social sciences, problems of organized complexity are commonplace and demand new conceptual tools such as a general theory of organization.

2. Complex systems are high-order, multiple-loop, nonlinear, feedback structures. They have many unexpected and little understood characteristics, making them very different from the simple systems of which people have an intuitive understanding, including:

(a) 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.

(b) Multiple loop: possessing upward of three or four interaction (positive or negative) feedback loops of shifting predominance.

(c) 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.