Beating the Global Odds: Successful Decision-making in a Confused and Troubled World

Fighting Complexity with Complexity

Earlier in the book, I mentioned how the Santa Fe Institute is leading the way in helping us understand complexity so that we can regain at least some mastery over it. To give you an example, diseases can now spread from one part of the world to another in a matter of hours, as we saw in the deadly SARS outbreak that gripped Toronto (and the world) in 2003, thanks to a sick airline passenger who arrived there from China. While we are still far from able to instantaneously address new developments that crop up, thanks to the world’s hyper-connectedness, the same technologies and connections that transmit disturbances at high speed from one place to another are already being harnessed to monitor potential dangers in real time. In the next one to two decades, expect to see companies, governments, public health authorities, and other organizations turn complexity to their advantage, as big data (that is, data sets that exceed the capabilities of traditional analytics tools and technologies, currently greater than 1 terabyte) will be monitored, analyzed, and responded to in real time.

As Santa Fe Institute researchers recently explained in Davos, “Complexity theory is giving new insights into how to protect computer systems from malicious agents, using ideas from immunology, epidemiology, and ecology. In nature, there is an ever-raging arms race between attackers and defenders, with the constant evolution of weapons and defense. … [Fortunately] the ...