Every Young Person Should Learn Complexity Sciences - A Conversation with Dr Roland Kupers

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

This is a deep insight of complexity. You have to look at what is it that generates the emergent property and tackle that. And so if you think of it as an emergent property of the underlying institutional design, then that's what you need to tackle. Simply tackling the emergent property is never going to work.

Hi everyone, and welcome back to this week's episode. My name is Tim Logan, and the podcast is produced by Good Impact Labs.

As we seek to understand and help others understand the world, we begin to see reductionism everywhere. That is, the breaking down of complex phenomena into as many parts as possible to make them understandable. And to some extent, the whole enterprise of modern formal schooling is based on the premise of reductionism, as we break life down into subjects, concepts, facts, etc., to be digestible by our young people. It has also enabled unbelievable scientific and technological progress. Who could possibly argue with this? And yet, reductionism has become like the hammer that sees everything as a nail. One of the problems is that it renders everything into a mechanistic functioning of parts and nothing more. Our ability to perceive, understand, and value complex and systemic patterns and relationships is perhaps therefore something that we really need to take seriously and engage with in our education systems. This week is a fantastic privilege to be able to chat to Dr. Roland Coopers about this. Roland is an advisor on complexity, resilience, and energy transition, and professor of practice at Arizona State University, as well as an associate fellow of the Institute of Advanced Studies at the University of Amsterdam. He's also the author of many widely influential books, including Complexity and the Art of Public Policy in 2014. The reason I was so keen to talk to Roland was that in 2017, in partnership with the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, United World Colleges and the IB, he co-authored a complexity module for the International Baccalaureate Diploma as part of his efforts to bring the complexity sciences into education. You'll find more links to Roland's work in the show notes.

Amazing. All right, thanks Roland. Lovely to see you again. I'm super excited to have this conversation, perhaps if we can, from a couple of different angles, leveraging, dare I say, your wisdom around complexity sciences and the amazing work you've been doing for many years in the climate space, resilience, energy, theoretical physics even. I don't know, we might touch on that, but, uh, it was a long time ago, but yes. But, um, one is from my primary interest around working with young people and thinking about supporting them to, you know, navigate the strange world that we all live in and perhaps understanding of the sciences of complexity might be a useful thing for them. So that's one angle to it. And then the other one is the broader systems change question and the systemic change, which I think certainly you work in and written a lot about. So yeah, I'd love to, if we can touch on that as well, but if it's all right with you, we'll start with the question of the young people and just let's start bluntly. Should we teach young people the science of complexity?

Yes, I think it's imperative. Um, I mean, first of all, I think we should teach kids the best that we have, right? There's no reason, I mean, kids are in many ways have infinite capacity to learn. And there's no reason we should limit ourselves to, you know, 30, 40, 50-year-old insights. And so in any case, I think we should learn them the cutting edge of things in general, but for complexity in particular, I think there's a really important reason why we should teach kids about this. Which is we've made a choice, and I've actually just finished a book about that, but we've made a choice in the 18th century that proper thinking, you know, the kind of thinking that when it's emancipated from the church, right? That was the idea of the Enlightenment in the 18th century, is a fairly basic reductionist linear style of thinking. Because that's what was around in the 18th century. So it was absolutely reasonable. But it's formed the frame of both public narratives that we see often in politics and the way we talk about the world, management, etc., but also of science. And that's been very successful. I mean, you know, there's nothing wrong with reductionism. It's been wildly successful, but it was a great limitation of the kind of systems and the kind of phenomenon you can understand.. And what happened in the late 20th century is people said, actually, you know, it's about time we developed the tools to tackle this bigger set of problems, which are these complex systems, which are— of which the linear systems are a subset, right? So this isn't that it's wrong, this is just a bigger framing. And so now we have these tools that are starting to help us understand this broader class of problems. And these kids during their lifetime, this is the exciting stuff, right? This is what they'll be able to develop new technologies, new concepts, etc. And so they have to be equipped with that thinking in order both to serve the world's problems, but also just to get a job. I mean, this is going to be the playing field of the future. AI is an example, right? Artificial intelligence has been a hype. But in reality, the fundamental methods are about 40 years old and they're about complex systems, right? It's about networks. It is a classic example of a complexity domain. And, you know, kids have to be educated to deal with that stuff. So both to deal with technology and cutting-edge stuff, but also basically to deal with the problems that we're faced with. So absolutely we should include it.

Yeah. And so maybe could I just ask, just going back a couple of steps about the linear reductionist frame, because it has been wildly successful, but also generated all sorts of, of harm and damage simultaneously. So I wonder, I mean, maybe is it that the linear reductionist frame was victim of its own success in a way that it, the sense was that you could apply that to every single type of situation. And I guess the other part of that question is how do we grapple with the harm that it's also caused to violently sometimes apply a linear frame to a complex situation.

Yeah, so absolutely, it's created an enormous amount of damage. So, so it's important to establish the opposition, right? It's the opposite of— it's complexity and reductionism is the polarity, you know, rather than complex and simple, etc. So it may be useful for listeners that those are the— and, you know, they're two big words, but deal with it, right? And so partly— so the, the thing with reductionism is that you assume that the interactions between systems and outside the thing you're considering are a secondary effect. And if you neglect that, it's okay. That's essentially what you do is what physicists call the second-order effect. It's not dominant, so it's okay to focus on that. And so, for example, if you look at our relationship with nature, we've really created enormous amount of damage in natural systems between biodiversity and climate, which are the two big ones. But actually, you know, in the 18th century, disregarding our relationship, the interconnections with nature was not totally unreasonable because there weren't that many people. Nature was a lot bigger and we could free ride on it to a certain extent. Although, you know, I have to say, even the 18th century, people like von Humboldt clearly warned about climate change and biodiversity. I mean, this is not new, right?

Yeah. Yeah.

This is in the 18th century. You said beware what you're doing here.

Right.

So it's not that the wise thinkers, even in the 18th century, perfectly knew, had a sense of the price we were going to pay for this choice. But it wasn't unreasonable because in particular, the relationship with nature truly was relatively secondary. It's just when we were so successful in consumerism and industrial development, etc., that the damage is now enormous. If we stick to this example of the interconnection with nature, there are others, right? Social interactions. And we can go into many of them, but that one's actually really easy to understand.

Yeah.

And so we're now at a place where we absolutely have to understand the interconnection of our societal actions with nature and form sophisticated theories and a way of thinking about them. And, you know, one of the worst examples of reductionism, this concept in economics that talks about externalities, right?

Because yeah.

Externalities assume that it's outside, but through a complexity lens, you know, there is no outside, right? There's no such thing.

Yeah, absolutely.

And so there are many of these words that have made it into our, almost into our natural language, into our policy language that are deeply reductionist. And one of the first things I think we should teach kids is to recognize those and to say, well, you know, many concepts that we use aren't neutral, they're actually an expression of a particular set of assumptions. And then the secondary step is, you know, what do you do about it? But just recognizing that that's the case. It's not, you know, an externality is not an objective thing. It's an expression of a set of assumptions.

Yeah.

That should raise a flag.

Right. Exactly.

Just like the word average is, I mean, you know, anybody who's steeped in complexity, as somebody, as soon as somebody talks about an average, you think, ah, you're hiding something. The underlying diversity, right?

Right, right.

Average, you've, you underlying diversity, which is the essence of the, of self-organization, right?

Yeah. If I can also, that for me, I mean, I'm an anthropologist by, uh, background, and I would say the cultural assumptions are also incredibly strong in the story that you've just told, because that this is the we that we're invoking there is a very particular we, we're based on a whole set of Western European cultural assumptions about our relationship with nature, et cetera. And then when everything else was being discovered through that colonial period, almost bracketed with the nature or the, you know, the everything that is not civilized in inverted commas as part of this frame. And so that's, I just guess I wanted to flag that's also a big part of this. I mean, I don't know how that relates to complexity sciences and the cultural assumptions built into the complexity sciences. I know there's a lot of people making kind of indigenous in inverted commas kind of connections with some of the complexity science, but I just, I guess for me there's an interesting cultural story being told as well.

Absolutely. And you know, I actually, I've come to become an enormous admirer of anthropology. I think it's probably the social science of the 21st century. But so there's a beautiful book by Graeber, who is also an anthropologist, called The Dawn of Everything, which actually also goes beyond this because even the dichotomy of Western and indigenous It's a reductionist idea, right? Is that somehow there are two things. Of course there aren't. And what Graeber describes in The Dawn of Everything is, with his co-author, another David, both deserve credit, it's, I think, this gorgeous complexity story about exactly what you describe. And it just says, you know, there aren't Western and anthropological or Chinese and American models of organising society. There's actually infinite ways of organizing culture that are stable and successful for centuries. And that is a wonderful and very optimistic complexity story, is that we have so much choice about how we can structure our societies. There are many, many, many, many models that are possible and stable. Some are not, right? Some are clearly stupid. And so it doesn't mean that everything's okay. But we've— and I don't want to pick on you, but this you know, even this framing of Western and Indigenous is a reductionist framing. And Graeber is this wonderful example where you see that is this endless scale. And that for me is the fundamentally optimistic promise of complexity science is it— and I think that's why I see kids getting really excited about this because it gives this enormous potential of you know, what's possible. And, you know, it really opens up imagination into different ways of structuring society or relationship with nature, new technologies that will come about, right? I saw recently a rather weird interview between Peter Thiel and David Graeber, which—

oh wow, that's a combination.

Okay, combination. But they never managed to quite touch each other. But one of the things that Graeber also said is that that, you know, in the first half of the 20th century, we had transformative technologies. And in the past 50 years, we've been kind of tweaking stuff, right? There's not been enormous— and he blames it partly on this reductionist framing, is that we really narrowed. And so I'm repeating myself, but it's another reason for teaching complexity to kids, because it gives them this enormous potential Yeah. Both in creating different kinds of societies, art, the way they structure their families or their relationships.

Yeah, no, and it's fascinating and serendipitous, let's say, that yesterday Dave Snowden was online, as he does, taking people to task about exactly this, this dichotomy between the Western, in inverted commas, and the indigenous, as though they're two distinct separate things. But the thing I find fascinating about that is is exactly what you're saying, that it's the reductionism is so sticky that it captures everything. Even, even the framings about non-reductionist or non-linear thing, you know, it's everywhere and it's, it feels to be so deeply conditioned within many of the institutional structures that we have been conditioned by, right? Education being one of the large ones that I think that's another reason why I think this it's an incredibly tricky task of bringing in complexity into an educational frame, because it's in a way that the dominant model of education is reductionist itself, but why it's also so important.

Well, I always think of it, you know, Stanley Kubrick's fantastic film, Dr. Strangelove, where you have this scientist, when he gets excited about something, all of a sudden, you know, his right hand goes up in a stiffened salute. And, you know, that's what I think is a great image of reductionism, right? It's this thing that, you know, when we get excited, we become reductionists. But no surprise, right? Is, you know, one of the extraordinary things is we go through, you know, how long have you been to school? 18 years, 16 years, large number. And we've never had a class— the, the word reductionist is generally— I went to French schools where in philosophy actually they did talk about reductionism, but it's, you know, it's not explicit.

That's true.

Yeah.

And, you know, that is bizarre. And, you know, when I teach, you know, a master's course on complexity, for example, I I always start to make this point to people is, you know, there is no way that in a 40 or an 80-hour program I'm going to be able to offset, undo, yeah, years of education. So we should have no illusion how deeply this has been rubbed into ourselves. And so one of the big challenges of introducing complexity into school education— so one of the things I did some years ago was to write a complexity curriculum for the International Baccalaureate program. And we had a lot of debate about, you know, that in reality you want to rewrite everything, but the real world is that you can't, right? It'll never work because there are committees that approve curricula and etc. So we started with an add-on program and an extra optional module, which everybody understands is ultimately the wrong thing to do. But you have to start somewhere because this is also a systems change question is how do I change the educational system? And we know that to change systems, you have to create catalysts, right? There's no top-down model of change that works in reality for anything. So you have to create catalysts so that you get bottom-up demand and all of that. And so it's not easy. And the same is true at universities. I had a conversation with, here in Amsterdam, I was for a while associated for a few years with the Complexity Institute in the University of Amsterdam. And at dinner, I was sitting next to the I guess you'd call it in England the vice chancellor, but the boss.

Yeah.

The better word, the boss of the University of Amsterdam. And I asked her, so, you know, how do you think about this Complexity Institute? And this was exactly her answer. She said, listen, it's very clear that we have to infuse complexity science into every faculty, but I, as the boss of the university, cannot do that because academics are independent for many good reasons, et cetera. So what we do is we create a complexity institute. We give it a beautiful building in the center of Amsterdam so that it has convening power. And, you know, we encourage programs from the university. And so we hope that biosmosis makes its way into the system. But it's a very— it was heartening to hear that this was a purposeful strategy. And she realized that this was going to take decades. But that's the only thing one can do.

The pragmatism of just starting with something imperfect, but absolutely the deep work that needs to be done is, yeah, I mean, you can't start with that, right? But this is, I, I hope, I feel like maybe this is part of the process and even us having this conversation and sharing it with the listeners. I think, I really hope this is part of the process. So I'd love to, I mean, obviously I wanted to ask you about the IB partnership with the Ellen MacArthur Foundation as well. What did you learn by doing that? I mean, what, what was the response of some of the young people to that curriculum as part of the diploma? Or, you know, yeah, what did you learn in that process?

So it was, it was an, you know, somewhat of an adaptation of a master's program I teach to adults, and not much of an adaptation, and it's much easier for the kids than for the adults. So that was the first part.

Interesting.

Don't dumb it down, right? Is give them the benefit of the most sophisticated stuff that we know. The second thing is, you know, kids loved it. And I mean, one of the culminating moments was, you know, after teaching— this was 7 2-hour modules on complexity— and you had this young girl from China at the end who put up her hand and she asked, you know, quite excited, do you think love is an emergent property of a system? And I thought, this is marvelous. And I told her, listen, I have absolutely no idea, but this is exactly the right question. So hold the question and find the answer during your life, right? I don't know, but you need to find out. But this is exactly the questions you should be able to—

Amazing.

The, the other thing that was exciting is that the teachers all sat in on the class, which was transformational for the kids because they said, wait a minute, teachers need to learn something too? And that in itself, yeah, really the moment of, and you know, the teachers ask questions, right? The kids. And at the end of it, every teacher, you know, from drama to mathematics and economics, et cetera, said, I understand how I can integrate this into my existing curriculum.

Amazing.

Interesting. I mean, just even the teachers identifying their own lack of literacy around these things shows a history to the young people in the room that this has never been taught. This has never been a part of the educational process and it should be, like it deeply should be. And you know, you may be heartened to know that the, the IB is now bringing in this Systems Transformation Pathway as part of the IB Diploma, which certainly weaves in quite a lot of these ideas and hopefully will do even more so. But I hear you very strongly that how by osmosis or by whatever process we can begin to kind of question the assumptions that underlie all of the traditional disciplines that we've built curriculum around, at least to acknowledge the reductionism that is implicit in the design of those curricula. You know, it could have been different had it been taken with an earlier complexity lens frame. That curriculum could have been very different.

Yeah, there's a real dilemma at the heart of it because I, I actually understand the conservatism of designing school programs, right? Because the last thing you want to have is fads as part of education. And, you know, a primary example of that actually was that at some point, I hope it's gone away, the IB and other school systems flirted with the idea of making circular economy part of their teaching. And, you know, to me, that's a classic example of a fad. You know, circular economy is something that was developed by McKinsey, actually, for a very specific purpose. And it has a function, particularly in the private sector. I think in the public sector, it's a gross oversimplification of what should be a complexity framing. But it's the last kind of thing you want to teach kids about, right?

Right.

It's for the relatively simple linear world of the private sector, which is reductionist for all sorts of good reasons.

Yeah.

And so this is the dilemma that we have is that we protect the curriculum of schools for really good reasons because you don't want the fad of the day to make it into curriculum., but it also makes it hard to get fundamental changes in.

Right. Exactly. Yeah. In our previous conversation, I really appreciated your healthy skepticism of consultancy frameworks, right? You know, as you're saying there, and I think that that's a really interesting question, I think, for education because there is a tendency to pick up frameworks, you know, because people, you know, really well-meaning, committed, curious educators are thinking, how could this be different? How do I make sense of this? How do I help my young people make sense? And quite often they will reach for a framework which has been provided by some sort of author, consultant, company, organization, whatever, as a tool to help young people make sense. So there's an interesting, you know, a very well-meaning process in that.

Adults need that, but I think kids don't, right? Reach for the cutting edge of science. And that's, you know, in a sense, knowledge is an emergent property, right? So it's also important that we don't have a model that we have to give kids a, you know, fully chewed meal.

Exactly. Spoon-fed. Yeah.

Give them the ingredients and let them cook their own meal. I mean, it's a weird image, but what I mean is that we don't have to give them ultra-processed food. That's not what education is about. It's giving people the ingredients so that they can structure their own learning. And what consultants' frameworks are is ultra-processed food. For also, again, for legitimate reasons. If you're in the consulting business and, and you have to— I worked in the private sector for a long time— if you have to slash your way through, you know, all the, the power dynamics and all the pressures there, then, you know, ultra-processed food is actually a reasonable thing.

Not for education, right?

You know, when we teach literature or arts to kids, that's what we do, right? We learn them to draw. We don't give them a sort of canned theory of, of art or something.

Paint by numbers. Yeah.

It doesn't make any sense, right?

No, absolutely right. But it's another interesting example of the capture of the reductionism in a way of like, it's almost a lack of trust often, I think is, you know, as you seem to be saying, I think, I don't wanna put words in your mouth, but you seem to be saying that we don't quite trust the young people enough to make their own sense with the complexity sciences. And I would say there's probably also to your earlier point, a lack of confidence and competence amongst the educators to actually be able to, to go in with the cutting-edge science.

Yeah, which is tough on teachers, right? I mean, there's the whole issue of teacher training that's part of this. But so trust possibly is one thing, but it, it may actually be an expression of reductionism itself, is that if you're a true reductionist, then that frame, whatever consultant's tool, can be a full expression of the underlying complexity because it's reduced to frame. And so that in its— the fact that you believe that that holds all of the information itself is a reductionist conviction. So it bites itself in the tail. Whereas if you have a true sense of complexity, you know that no, you know, framing or summary will ever express the full underlying complexity. It's just impossible. It never does. And therefore you don't even pretend to. And so it's all part of, you know, Dr. Strangelove's hand in a sense.

Amazing. And I mean, so maybe we could just to pivot slightly, one of the, the other aspects of, for me personally, that I work in with a lot is, is trying to also engage young people in doing something in society, make, you know, taking their learning into real world problems and, you know, meaningful issues that they can see they want to do something about, taking action, these kinds of things. And one of the things that you said there in the OECD was that if you're a young person trying to do something in society, the first question you'll get asked is, are you doing this for profit or for good? Which is of course a crazy choice. But the key point there you were making was that the forced choice may be the reasons for the emergence of the social norms that we have. And that just, that struck me as such a powerful statement because we, I see that all the time. You know, we are working with young people and they, they're thinking about how, what action do they want to take in the world or, you know, what, what issues and problems do they care about? And then there's this always this meeting with reality of, well, but you've gotta go and get a job. So are you gonna, you know, are you doing this for some kind of entrepreneurial, you know, mission and project, or is this just something you're doing for empathy and compassion and for social good? So maybe, yeah, could you just briefly speak to that? What's going on there around this idea of social norms? Yeah.

And so this is an old story, right? Is the design of this dual institution actually goes back to here in Amsterdam where I am at the moment in 1602, essentially the the first entity was developed, which is actually our current model of the private corporation, which was to serve a particular purpose. You had people who were buying spice— you're just in the center of Amsterdam— were buying spices from the East on ships, and each ship was extraordinarily valuable. And so if you owned one ship, you had an enormous risk because they tend to sink a lot. And so they said, we need to pool our risks. And own multiple ships together. So let's create an entity that allows us to pool risk so that, you know, we are not so exposed to our own little boat sinking. And that was a reasonable thing, right? But it was a bunch of rich people trying to manage risk. And then separately, you know, they also, with the money they made, they had enormous charitable works also in Amsterdam. So, and so they had entities, legal entities to do that. And that was a particular purpose from a particular time. But those institutions have stayed with us. And, you know, anybody who starts a societal activity will realize that this is an absurd trade-off. Generally, people, even in very large multinational companies, you know, want to do something in the world. And yeah, they have to make money to make it work. But it's now— it's become this dichotomy. And because you have institutions whose stated purpose is that they have to make money for shareholders, etc., it's really about, about monetary value creation, is that if there isn't enough demand for their product, they have to create demand. So if you're a pharmaceutical company and people aren't buying enough of your pills, you have to create demand for those pills. And if you're making t-shirts and people already have 10 t-shirts, you have to make sure they buy 20. And so with that, then, you know, the same is true for alcohol and other drugs. So that what happens there is that the consumerism that we have can be characterized as an emergent property of the institutional design that we made in 1602 in Amsterdam. And so that consumerism, there is no, I mean, anthropologists will, there's quite a lot of literature. We're not innate consumerists, right? It's not, there's nothing in human nature that makes us want to accumulate stuff. There's enough evidence from, you know, hunter-gatherer societies, etc. Greenland is an interesting example these days since it's topical, but that this is not an innate human nature, but it's the emergent property of a set of, you know, quite random institutional designs. And so in one of my books on complexity and policy, what I argue is that in order to tackle consumerism, we should tackle that architectural choice and do some institutional innovation. Now, that started a little bit in the US with something called for-benefit corporations, but there needs to be a lot more experimentation about what are the set of institutions that we could create. And this is legal and tax framework. It's not easy, right? It's, you know, could we create not 2 or 3 more, but could we create like 15 different kinds of— we have called Cooperatives, which is one particular example, but can we have more of these institutions so that young people would have a choice? You know, for my type of activity, I actually want institution number 6, you know, not a private company, not a charity, not a cooperative, but this other thing. And then over the decades, this will evolve, right? As you know, it will self-organize and some will be unsuccessful because nobody adopts them. And so we should kill them off.

Yeah.

Others will evolve. But this, you know, the insight that consumerism, and consumerism is a problem because it's a problem for our relationship with the natural world. It's also a problem for our relationship with mental health. I mean, we know there's plenty of evidences. It makes people unhappy. It doesn't provide joy or anything. And so if you think of it as an emergent property of the underlying institutional design, then that's what you need to tackle. And simply tackling the emergent property is never going to work, right? This is a deep insight of complexity. You have to, to look at what is it that generates the emergent property and tackle that as opposed to tackle the emergent property.

Yeah, I mean, it's just so powerful, I think, because it Just this, so much of what you're saying there is the complexity science is coming through in the, in the language that you're using and the story that you're telling, which I, I love. And I, it's this, the braided, I mean, you talk about complexity as this kind of braided set of challenges. They're all nested in a particular time and they are emergent, as you say, an emergent property of particular decisions made at a particular time. I mean, all of the insurance industry, right? It, built up around that same time about— because again, protecting risk and gambling on which boats would come back and which ones wouldn't. And now we've got this set of insurance constraints around what's possible and what's not, set by these particular decisions in Lloyd's of London in, you know, whatever year. And I think that feels like right at the heart of what I mean, I feel very passionate about now is— and it, it speaks to— I don't know if you know Indy Johar talks about the boring revolution, and that's what this is, right? In a way is the boring revolution is what are the institutional choices and frames that would take complexity seriously, but that we could actually start to enable to come into being or institute, or, you know, whatever the verb is, cuz we don't necessarily design them in quite the same way that we maybe would've done previously. Given things like path dependencies. I mean, we, again, you really powerfully talk about path dependencies. We're carrying the history of all these choices on our backs, right? Yeah. So yeah, sorry, that, that's a lot, but it, it just feels, it gets right to the heart for me of what I'm trying to do, what we are trying to do in an educational space. I think, yeah, there are other choices. It could have been different. How could we enable the difference to emerge? Yeah.

I have a friend who, who coined this term of institutional entrepreneurship, which I think is lovely. Is that we have to, you know, say, all right, you know, let's try some new kinds of institutions. And actually, I have a concrete example, which is something that, you know, I've had the opportunity to set up, which is now I spend a lot of my time on, which is a new institution, which has been, you know, housed under the UN to deal with methane emissions. And so methane is about a third of global warming. So it's quite a chunk. And so I had for circuitous reasons, which I won't go into, I had the opportunity to actually be the designer of this thing. I designed it, I wrote it, I negotiated it, you know, with a team of people. And, you know, as the American saying says, you know, eat your own dog food. I thought, you know, this is going to be the institution. And so the idea was that, and this is the failure in much of climate policy, you have to think about two things is who is the individual agent who needs to have different behavior on a Monday morning than they did the Friday before? That's the one question. And it's not a minister, it's not a CEO, as you have to figure out. In this case, it's actually a person, for example, in a gas plant who can change a valve or close it. So it's an individual person. It's not a category, it's one individual. And the second thing is you have to figure out how they're connected. So what is the network, or can you create a different kind of network between these individual people so that that strengthens their behaviour and evolves their social norms, etc. And so that's at the heart of this methane institution that I helped set up. And it's radically different in kind of a soft way, right? You continuously have to defend this against, you know, the entire climate community, which, you know, both in the UN and in various governments et cetera, who are all about this top-down reductionist thinking. If only we got the stakeholders and the rules different, et cetera. And my sense is that's not evil, but it hasn't worked in 50 years. Exactly.

Right.

And complexity tells us all change is bottom-up. So you have to understand who the agents are in your system, but critically how they're interconnected. Not how you can tell them what to do, because that's a reductionist thing, but how they're interconnected so that their emergent behavior is different. And this is the critical thing about complexity policy, is that you don't really care about individual behavior that much, but you care about the emergent property. And so I often, you know, when I teach, you know, people or companies, etc., you know, for example, you know, eating red meat is one of the major sources of of methane emissions. You know, it doesn't matter whether you buy an enormous steak and eat it, you know, just like it doesn't matter whether you take a flight to the Maldives for your holiday, which is a lot of, you know, that, you know, we try to make individual people guilty about their behavior. But what does matter is how your behavioral choices are interconnected with others, because that's what it is. And that's really tricky, right? Is you wonder if I go to the Maldives, if I don't tell anybody about it, it's probably okay, but as soon as you talk about it, then it's probably even more damaging.

Yeah.

It's realizing that it's not the thing per se, but it's the interconnection of the thing that's— and we're never quite sure, you know, how influential are we? You know, generally more than we think. And I think this is again a slightly different complexity framing, is that if you do something, for example, that's environmentally evil, As long as nobody knows about it, it's probably okay, right? Ironically.

Yeah, interesting.

The thing is, is if it, you know, if you start boasting about it or if it's, you know, then it's the damage comes through the spreading, not the individual thing. You're individually too small to create real damage to nature. You know, you start a nuclear war or something, right?

Yeah, right. But the flip side of that is also true because I've heard you talk, I mean, this idea of the contagion of social norms and the fact that if you buy photovoltaics and put them on your house, your neighbors, you start talking to neighbours, and then, you know, there is an influence that you have there.

And that's mathematically actually well understood. So particularly in the US, because there are a lot of individual houses in this suburban thing, which itself is an emergent property of a law that was adopted in post-war, the GI Act, right, as an emergent property, suburbia in the US, which in itself is fascinating. But there you can see through satellite images, you can see the time spread of social panel adoption on houses. And mathematically, it has the same mathematics as a pandemic, right? It is completely contagious. The degree of contagion depends on the quality of the urban fabric. Cities with a poor urban fabric actually have slower contagion.

And I'm sorry, what do you mean by urban fabric?

So the degree of societal trust in a city, if I'm right, you know, some— Okay. More integrated and more, more, you know, better connected than others. And that sociological thing. But the mathematics are very clear. It is not an economic choice, right? People talk about, you know, the payback of your social panels, etc. Bullshit. It really is about, is there somebody you trust and you look up to in your, in your community? And then you will adopt social panels.

Yeah. That's fascinating. Can I come back to just something you said there that feels really crucial to me that I've been thinking a lot about, which is this radical soft approach? Because I think that's something I've been reflecting on a lot with, particularly when you look at the political situation now, what seems to be this macho control-based politics, which is effect change by just linear cause and effect. I'll tell you, I'll write this presidential decree or executive order and this will happen and that will change everything. And it feels to defend an approach, which is a radically soft approach, soft in inverted commas, which is an unfortunate adjective in a way, because it has a weak association, which is, I think is really unfortunate. I don't know. It feels to me like that's actually how change happens., but we like to pretend back to our reductionist idea. We like to pretend that we can, you know, make things happen through this, you know, efficient cause relationship, and that will solve the problem.

Yeah. I think that soft is the wrong characterization because, you know, complexity policy requires a very strong state, but a small one because it, the difference is that it doesn't tell individuals what to do, but it has to be able to structure ecosystems. And, you know, one of the, you know, rather violent things you may have to do, or, you know, in societies to break, purposefully break path dependencies. And that can be really ugly. I mean, there's nothing soft about that. But it's a very different kind of, you know, be really interesting if you went to Parliament and you said, listen, the reason I'm doing this is to break a path dependency, which is a very, a very sophisticated justification for a policy. You know, it could be incredibly disruptive. And so this is where these things get messy. Also, you know, the current, you know, right-wing surge is this bizarre alliance of really right-wing people with libertarians, right? Which is a very strange combination. And this is why, you know, the Peter Thiel and Graber conversation was interesting, because there's You know, there's a weird affinity, although not overlap, between, you know, complexity and libertarianism. I think libertarians actually miss some crucial bits of it, but there are some things that are— that you do need to break path dependencies violently. And one of the things that, that I think you can truly object to the classic liberal politics is that they refuse to do that.

That's true.

Yeah.

Gradualism. And so this again isn't as black and white, right? You see some of these extreme right-wing governments actually breaking some of the path dependencies that need to be broken. Now, they may do it for the wrong reasons, or there may be somebody inside the system who says, actually, this is my chance. I mean, who the hell knows, right?

Yeah.

I think it's really the wrong characterization because this breaking path dependency is a deep complexity thing and it would look ugly. It would look anything but soft.

That's really helpful. I think that's really interesting because I mean, bringing it back to it, you know, for the listeners from to an educational frame, there's been many conversations about policy change in education where we just keep adding things and people are really reluctant to stop doing things to say, actually this practice that we are doing, whatever it is, you know, age-based, whatever, doesn't matter what, choose the policy. We've decided just patently does not work anymore and we're gonna stop doing it. But we, we find that really difficult to do. We just keep adding as though the adding will enable, you know, a better situation ultimately in terms of outcomes. So it's, yeah, that's where it resonates for me. And I think, but I, I really find that helpful that, I mean, you did, you used the word soft, but I, I agree. It's, it, I've always struggled with to know how to hold that because it does feels responsive, let's say, not soft. And there's some of the kind of— I don't know what it is about— there's something relational and responsive about complexity, which I think is important, right?

Why do we need to reduce it to one word?

There's that reductionism again. Yeah.

Well, I mean, you know, there's a place for poetry and language, right?

Which—

so I'm, you know, that all of that also matters, right? Because Concepts help motivate people, et cetera. But, you know, it would be bottom-up, I think, is the thing that's more, but we also know that bottom-up organization requires a design of the ecosystem because in, in the example we talked about, about consumerism, it's a particular institutional design that led to a bottom-up evolution of consumerism. And so if you want a different thing, you're gonna have to change the institutions. And, you know, a lot of people aren't going to like that because there's people who like the current set of incentives.

Exactly. Can I ask you about, you've, you said bottom-up solutions and top-down mirrors, and I, I found that really interesting. So there is a role for the top-down, but it's not to generate the solutions. Could you just briefly say a little bit about what that means by the mirrors?

So the top-down action, so typically people think of top-down as telling every individual agent what to do.. And in a complexity frame, the top-down action consists in breaking path dependencies, setting boundary conditions for bottom-up emergence. And that's a really subtly but radically different way of thinking about top-down. You don't tell anybody what to do. And it's problematic in many ways, right? Because how do you exercise democratic control around that? People can You can say it's manipulative and all of these things are true, right? The other thing to realize is that, you know, this isn't like nobody's ever understood this, right? So, you know, we talked about the GI Bill, for example, which had as an emergent property suburbia, you know, that was actually people understood what they were doing because it was also about, you know, segregation in a new way.

Right.

So wise politicians have always known about complex systems, right? It's not that we're now saying something that people have never realized because also that's a reductionist story. But it's been dominated by these, you know, some complexity policies have been sold with a reductionist language. And it would be nice if we got rid of that, right? Is that we describe the things as they are and people understand them as they are. Listen, here's a reductionist policy. Here is a complexity policy. And This is why we're doing one. This is why we're doing the other. But then we need kids and voters to understand what that means. Therefore, we're back to education unless we educate them. And the point is not eradicating reductionism. That would be ridiculous, right? But it's just being purposeful about it is, you know, I think for this particular problem at this time, a reductionist solution is the best thing to do, which may be absolutely great. But for this particular problem at this particular time, we actually need a complexity solution. Solution. And it's that ability to be purposeful about it that I think we're after and not, you know, badmouthing reductionism in a sense, because reductionism is great for certain things.

Yeah, right. But I guess to quote a favorite anthropologist of mine, it's never just that and nothing more. Like even the reductionism is never just that and nothing more. There's still, you're not getting rid of the second order, nth order effects. That are happening as a result of that reductionist policy.

Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, one thing to get rid of, you know, I think we should get rid of economics in schools and teach anthropology.

There you go. I love it. A radical curriculum suggestion to end on. Amazing.

Thank you, Roland.

I mean, honestly, it's just so fascinating and I, I'm so committed and passionate about continuing to do that, enabling this this literacy to be developed through however we can with young people. And I think it's, yeah, it's vitally important. So no, I thank you for everything. And I'll share in the show notes, I'll share the original documents for the module in complexity for the diploma and yeah, any other resources as well that you might want to share. But thank you so much. This is amazing.

Thank you. It's a, you know, it's a wonderful opportunity to talk about this stuff and there aren't that many, right? So it's, it's really It's really important to be able to get this out to the world. Good.

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