The Startup Community Way

CHAPTER SEVENUNPREDICTABLE CREATIVITY

Startup Community Way Principle

Startup communities are complex adaptive systems that emerge from the interaction of the participants. Understanding and embracing complex systems and how they operate is essential to building a vibrant, long-term startup community. Principally among these is an understanding that value is created by the emergent processes that result from the repeated interactions of the many parts.

A startup community is a complex adaptive system of many interdependent actors (people and organizations) that are continuously acting and reacting with each other and with their environment (resources and conditions).¹ This perpetual loop of action and reaction means that a startup community is in a constant state of change, as the system and its constituent parts coevolve.

The interactions between the actors and factors define the startup community. But this interconnectedness introduces complexity because the actors have the freedom to pursue individual agendas, learn from the behaviors and ideas of others, and adapt their actions and thought patterns as a result. Since actors lack complete information and visibility into the whole startup community, imperfect decisions are pervasive. This gets multiplied as each ill-informed decision is passed along throughout the system, occurring continuously, while the actors and the system coevolve.

The lack of awareness about how complex systems function is a source of many errors ...