Those who have been working on local development for years know that there isn’t one big answer that brings about local development, but rather a series of small interventions among many different groups that shift a community to a more sustainable development path.   Complexity theory confirms this, but brings in new language and research methods that can tease out how we might identify and encourage these kinds of activities.  This blog is my way of sorting out after a 2-day workshop by Cognitive Edge how complexity theory might help those of us working in the area of local development.

The first thing to understand is that although we live in a complex world, we can find – and should try to find — issues and solutions that are ordered and therefore can be addressed head-on.  This ordered domain is broken up into the simple where the best practice is obvious and the complicated, where skilled individuals may identify a variety of good practices that address the problem in different contexts.  Order is important for scaling solutions.

When things are chaotic – by definition a temporary state – there is a need to act to stabilize based on intuition and then define the way forward.  Chaos represents opportunity for innovation because our usual boundaries do not apply.  One way to capitalize on chaos is to have one team working on new ideas while another team is responsible for creating stability.

The objective of sustainable human development will involve complexity because it involves human and natural ecosystems.   The main principle in a complex environment is that we cannot use the past to predict what will happen because our behavior shapes the environment.  (And our behavior even shapes our brains, but that’s getting into cognitive science.)  The extreme example of our behavior shaping the physical environment is climate change, but we can also see this when precedents of behavior become binding cultural norms.  In a complex environment we may have a big vision of where we want to go, but we can only get there by mapping the present and finding out what we want more of and what we want less of.

How to operate in a complex environment?   First, we have to acknowledge that expertise as we commonly think of it can actually hurt because this imposes a solution when solutions need to emerge.  So the experts we need are actually the people themselves that we want to help.  Not one or two, but many.  Why many?  We don’t know where are the solutions (in the language of complexity theory these are the attractors for evolution) so the broader coverage the more likely to find them.  We can’t rely on cause and effect, but we can frame relationships and strengthen the connections so certain behavior is more likely (in the language of complexity theory, this is dispositional).  Success isn’t pre-defined, but it’s where we find it.

Micro-narratives are a way to capture thematic stories from many people and then map how people make decisions related to a problematic issue and uncover these dispositions.  Computer modeling can be used to plot the narratives based on self-identified attributes of the stories.   People tell a story and then give it several meanings.  Most of the stories won’t be read because they will fit the pattern.  Stories that don’t fit the pattern represent change and actions in violation of existing boundaries for better or worse.  What the majority of stories is saying can be a powerful advocacy message to decision makers on what are the real problems.  What the outliers are saying can be early signals of problems or opportunities.

If we can create a safe-to-fail environment than new solutions may also emerge.  Being perfect by following theory is a fairly new concept.  For hundreds of years, craftsmen would learn by doing in an apprenticeship during which he would periodically fail and be corrected by the master craftsman.  Older siblings had many responsibilities for caring for younger siblings – an apprenticeship for parenthood.   Putting knowledge down on paper doesn’t make us absorb it faster.  We still learn from our experiences and when we fail we learn faster.  Perhaps failure provides motivation, focus, and an analysis of what does not work.  Joseph Pilates was motivated to design a whole system of strengthening the body because he was sickly as a child.

If we want a safe-to-fail environment, then the focus – and the reward factor – must be on the learning.  In the scientific method we document how our results change when we change the variables.  But complexity theory challenges us to open up more than by slightly changing some variables.  They talk of naïve experiments and experiments designed to fail – just for the sake of learning.

What if local leaders ran their local governments on this principle and allowed their staff to come up ideas for change and gave them responsibility to implement the idea?  What if they encouraged members of the community to figure out how best to solve their issues, with support from the local government?  Isn’t this the essence of democratic governance?  One can argue that this is not new from emphasizing voice and participation.

So what is new in complexity theory that can help us plan interventions to promote sustainable local development?  First, the use of micro-narratives with open-ended questions allows voice of a very broad section of the population (including people who might not vote or might vote but not speak up at a local council meeting) on their concerns, not a closed list of issues that leaders think are the priority.  Repeated over time, this becomes a human sensor network that will increase the resilience of a society and its leadership because they will be able to identify problems early on.  Second, the safe-to-fail environment means that anyone can innovate.

Twenty years ago at the original Rio Summit one of the main outcomes was bringing civil society into the development equation.  Twenty years on we confirm the need of grassroots work and now have a paradigm that explains why these contributions are even more critical today.