Complex Systems
Most social change is systems change. School system reform is—literally—about reforming a system of schools. Confronting climate change is about addressing how economic systems impact ecological systems. The very concept of structural racism rises from a recognition that injustice is built into systems.
“I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity of the other side of complexity.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes
A whole greater than the sum of its parts
In this chapter, we’ll address how changemakers can think about systems. That may sound abstract, so let’s take a moment for to ground ourselves in a concrete example. Let’s talk about ants.
Ants are small, but their scale is extraordinary. There are tens of trillions of ants in the world. Individual leaf cutter ant colonies can reach 8 million individuals.1 In those colonies, we see the emergence of extraordinarily sophisticated behavior: agriculture, democracy, rebellion, and diplomacy.2 Somehow, millions of ants act as one. The colony is the individual: a whole greater than the sum of its ants.
Scientists have begun to tease out the way that individual ants add up to something so much more. For example, when a foraging ant discovers food, it ...
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