Unravelling the Complexities of PolicyFrom Models to Actionable Decision-Making -- A Keynote for Polder and IAS, University of Amsterdam

 Many thanks to Mike Lees, Vítor Vasconcelos, the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), and the POLDER Center for the invitation to speak at today’s 'Unravelling Complexity session at the IAS Festival -- as part of the IAS's week of celebrations for its 10th anniversary.

The POLDER event explored how insights from the complexity sciences can be better translated into policy, governance, modelling, and decision-support systems, particularly under conditions of uncertainty, competing values, and institutional complexity. Discussions throughout the session focused on methodological innovation, participatory modelling, governance learning, the value of the social sciences and humanities and the future role of the complexity sciences in helping societies navigate increasingly complex societal challenges. 

 

MY KEYNOTE:

Three provocations: 

• ‘The challenge is no longer simply producing more sophisticated models or more data. The challenge is learning how to unravel systems of reasoning, governance, participation, and decision-making in ways that open new possibilities for collective learning and action.’  
• ‘Complex societal challenges unfold differently across places because systems become configured differently over time, requiring more place-based, participatory, and adaptive forms of governance, modelling, and decision support.’
• ‘If we are serious about addressing the complex challenges societies face, we need to fundamentally rethink how we educate future generations — training people to think across disciplines, reason in systems terms, engage uncertainty, understand computational methods, and work within more methodologically pluralistic forms of inquiry and decision-making.’

Abstract of Keynote: 

My keynote focused on why we need the complexity sciences, drawing less on abstract theory and more on years of mistakes, failures, institutional frustrations, partial successes, and small hard-won insights gained through working across real-world policy, governance, and decision-support systems. 

A major focus of the talk was the growing mismatch between the complexity of contemporary societal challenges and the increasingly narrow forms of reasoning often used to address them. 

The presentation argued for more place-based, participatory, configurational, and adaptive approaches to governance and decision-making; stronger engagement with issues of power, inequality, and institutional asymmetry; and greater methodological pluralism across qualitative, computational, participatory, statistical, and systems-based approaches.

Another major theme was the importance of moving beyond the idea that models alone can solve complex societal problems. Models and methods are only one part of broader governance and decision-making systems. The future challenge is developing more socially usable forms of complexity-informed reasoning that can better connect researchers, policymakers, practitioners, and communities, while also rethinking how we educate future generations to work within increasingly complex and unfinished worlds. 

One example would be models that unravel the complexity of a problem, such as healthy eating or workforce resilience or just transitions -- rather than try to find solutions -- in order to help people understand why the system is so difficult to change, giving new insights then into what sorts of change is possible and the models that would help to drive that change. 

 

LINKS
 

CLICK HERE for a PDF of my presentation 
 

Here is a link to the paperback version of The Atlas of Social Complexity Discount Code TASC15, and it offers a 15% discount.

 

Here is a link to the map of the complexity sciences  

 
Here is a link to COMPLEX-IT, the online R-Studio platform allowing non-experts in computational modelling access to these tools, all through a social complexity framework.