Proposition: Under conditions of social complexity (more elements, more interconnections, more differentiated functions), what is negative in effect can also be positive.
Social dread
Every day, nuclear plant disasters, airplane crashes, water-supply collapse—and more—are avoided that would have happened had not operators and managers in these large systems prevented their occurrence.
Why? Societal dread is so intense that these events must be precluded from happening on an active, continuous basis. (It might be better to say that we don’t altogether know the degree of “societal dread” unless we observe how knowledgeable professionals operate and manage hazardous critical infrastructures.)
There is such fear of what would happen if large interconnected electricity, telecommunications, water, transportation, financial services and like did fail that it is better to manage them than not have them. Here, ironically, distrust is as core as trust. One reason infrastructure operators manage reliably is that they actively distrust the future will be stable or predictable in the absence of the system’s vigilant real-time management.
We of course must wonder at the perversity of this. But that is the function of this dread and distrust. Namely: to push all of us in probing further what it means to privilege social and individual reliability and safety over other values. We are meant to ask: What would it look like in world where such reliability and safety are not so privileged?
For the answer to that question is obvious: Most of the planet already lives in that world of unreliability and little safety. We’re meant to ask, precisely because that answer is that clear.
Blind Spots
Another way to describe hazardous sociotechnical systems is that they have significant blind spots when it comes to their management, some visible others not.
For example, my state’s department of motor vehicles handbook states:
Blind Spots
Every vehicle has blind spots. These are areas around the vehicle that a driver cannot see when looking straight ahead or using the mirrors. For most vehicles, the blinds spots are at the sides, slightly behind the driver. To check your blind spots, look over your right and left shoulders out of your side windows. Only turn your head when you look. Do not turn your whole body or steering wheel.
https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/handbook/california-driver-handbook/
“Driving a vehicle” is, in other words, managing the way drivers do in much part because of the vehicular blind spots posed for those drivers.
The broader point is that blind spots in sociotechnical systems represent a mix of both weaknesses and strengths for their managers. You get all the advantages and the disadvantages of driving a car in comparison to otherwise driving a tractor-trailer or horse-and-buggy. Or the same point from the opposite direction, you get all the advantages and disadvantages of managing micro-grids in comparison to otherwise having to manage the current electric transmission and distribution grids.
Organizational Setbacks
Setbacks—unanticipated, unwanted, and often sudden interruptions and checks on moving forward—are fairly common and typically treated as negative in complex systems and organizations.
Less discussed are the conditions under which such setbacks are positive. Arguably best known is when a complex organization transitions from one stage of a life cycle to another by overcoming obstacles characteristic of the stage in which the organization finds itself. An example is CAISO (the California Independent System Operator of the state’s main electric transmission) moving from its startup phase in the late 1990s to its full ongoing operations at present in 2024.
Other positive setbacks serve as a test bed for developing better practices, whatever the stage the organization finds itself. Some setbacks are better thought of as design probes for whether that organization is on the “right track,” or if not, what track it could/should be on. In yet other circumstances, setbacks serve to point managers in the direction of things about which they had been unaware but which matter.
For example, among all its negative features, did the 2008 financial crisis also serve as a timely interruption to remind us how central regulators are to the continuity of complex financial and credit systems? Did the crisis end up as a much-needed probe of how well the financial and credit institutions are keeping their sectors on track and under mandate? Was the 2008 crisis a test bed for more anticipatory strategies in credit lending and investing? Did the crisis in effect serve as an obstacle, whose surmounting has been necessary to promote the operational redesign of the financial and credit sectors in more reliable ways?
Note the obviously mixed answers to these questions mean the setbacks cannot be considered a priori negative.
Upshot: Complex is as positive as it gets. in large sociotechnical systems.
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 