Chapter 6. Design for Collective Intelligence: The wonderful world of complex, adaptive systems

 

When working in social, economic, environmental systems, we often assume one action has one result that it will happen relatively soon.

But experience has shown us that we are managing tightly interconnected, delayed, complex systems where one action has multiple, often counterintuitive, results. Delays and perverse effects are common.

Our brains just don’t capture these system features well.”

 
 --SUSTAINABILITY INSTITUTE[1]

It’s not often you hear of a web site dropping a feature. In a world of rampant feature creep, we hear press releases and blog reports daily about our favorite services adding new, better features. It’s incredibly rare that a fully-released ...

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