Making things work : solving complex problems in a complex world

Today, as individuals and as a society, we are faced with highly complex challenges. When we don't solve them correctly they rapidly become crises. This book explains how we can use complex systems research to solve complex problems in: \* healthcare \* education \* military conflict \* ethnic violence and terrorism \* international development. Highly complex problems cannot be solved by any one individual. Traditional organizations, traditional forms of control and planning are not effective. Making Things Work draws on insights from complex systems research about emergence, complexity, patterns, networks and evolution. It explains how effective organizations form through cooperation and competition, and how to make non-hierarchical distributed organizational structures effective at their tasks. The science of complexity has revolutionized our understanding of everything from the brain to the economy to the weather. This book shows how it can change the way we approach our most persistent social problems. It introduces key concepts like emergence, self-organization and networks, and uses them to propose novel solutions to problems that affect us all Scientists look at something and want to understand what it does, and how it does it.