4. Decision Making in Complex and Ambiguous Environments

“Today the network of relationships linking the human race to itself and to the rest of the biosphere is so complex that all aspects affect all others to an extraordinary degree. Someone should be studying the whole system, however crudely that has to be done, because no gluing together of partial studies of a complex nonlinear system can give a good idea of the behavior of the whole.”

—Murray Gell-Mann, Nobel Prize, Physics, 1969

Numerous CEO surveys (for example, from IBM and the Conference Board) cite complexity and analytics as their number-one and number-two challenges. Both complexity and analytics have difficult technical dimensions. Modeling a complex system, such as the climate, ...

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