Jargogled Impressions.

On Dealing with Complexities

How do we deal with complexities in our world? Across the different complex adaptive systems that we live in, including professions, marriage, society, politics, and nature, how do the best among us make sense of the cacophony? How are these use cases for complexity modeled in our minds and what drives how these models fare in responding to complex stimuli that are triggered almost every second in the space we inhabit? The stimulus that invokes a sense of ennui and of paralysis, how are they formed and what factors aid or abet their formation? How do humans retain a sense of control over these triggers that rise calamitously and suddenly with no warnings?

What is control when it comes to leading a life of agency? Is control illusive and a figment of our imagination or is there veracity to the claims of personal growth and discipline that we see people exhibiting all too often around us? If wilderness is a happy trait for our forests and our trees, is there merit to stressing for control and for disciplined mono-culture in our lives? Are demonstrations of control and of power merely ephemeral and inconclusive or are these examples capable of modulating our behaviors? When living with equally complex adaptive systems like human beings, where do these interactions factor in to our decisions and to our emotions? How far and deep do these external factors go towards making us who we are and what we represent? Is there a basis for this micro-organism called man or the super-organism is what’s the objective truth after all?

A complex question is a fallacy that requires answer to a question that already pre-supposes an answer to a related but preceding question and in so doing, implicates the person before he or she has had the chance to answer it. The implicit argument baked into the complex question reminds me of the implicit argument we often carve into our own understanding of the world – through our conditioning and our journey – that’s confounds our ability to then make sense of this new world which is asking a new question of us. Complexity comes in because a) we do not realize that the question we are asking of ourselves is not one but a coming together of different questions. b) we default ourselves to the ways of thinking that comes naturally to us without regard to the complexity baked into the questions. and c) the permutations and combinations of potential future world that may arise out of this one question perplexes us and hinders our ability to objectively assess the situation at hand.

Situational awareness is the capability to assess, comprehend, and respond to the stimuli or event around us and do so in a way that objectively accelerates our ability to take decisions and act deliberately. When dealing with complexities in our daily lives, while the situations are far less dangerous than in combat situations where situational awareness first originated, the SA mental model and the OODA loop offers helpful guidance towards dealing with them. And yet, as Kahneman and Trevorsky have pointed out, it is our ability to perform these mental short-cuts using universal mental models that often leads us astray in our attempts to make sense of the world around us. Complexity then becomes more of a recursive loop around defining these situations and constantly questioning our our interpretations and the decisions to factor in our biases and our pre-set modalities.

In my mind, it is this absurdity and the apparent randomness built into the things that we experience, that defines absurdism. Complexity then is this duel between the universe (system) and human mind (agent provocateur) and the contradictory nature of the two when it comes to deriving value and meaning. Complexities exist across multiple domains including personal, professional, business, social, political, and natural worlds. But from an individual lens, complexity is basically about taking decisions to further our Sisyphean tendency to seek meaning and value in the things that we do.

Acceptance of the absurd is the acceptance of the complexity and of the apparent senselessness of the world around us while still attempting to create meaning in our own little lives. Knowing fully well that what we find complex and impossible to deal with in our day to day lives is just the card that has been dealt to us and to everyone else and that extracting meaning and value from them is possibly the only way out.  How do we extract meaning and value from a complex world with extremely inter-connected and interlocking situations and become a far more deliberate and conscious agent of action in our own lives?

Mental-models, as described earlier is one way we instill a sense of decorum and mapping to the things that we deal with. These maps are our pathway towards dissecting the complex adaptive system we inhabit. But map is not the territory as Kahneman has eloquently articulated it. Having the map cannot solve the chaos and non-linearity of our lives as they are but merely the representations of the system. Testing the map locally though, through constant feedback and iterations, can enable you to make sense of a small subset of the bigger system. This feedback – improvement loop is what evolution is and is what helps you to separate the forest from the trees. The iteration helps you develop your own system of checks and balances, buffers and redundancies, and fail-safe mechanisms to counteract the often-overpowering nature of complex systems. It’s a classic defense-only mode against the randomness of nature and of the world we have built around us. The defense posturing then makes the unknown unknowns turn a bit tamer even though the complete picture will continue to evade us.

Death is the ultimate system destroyer. The micro-systems you build to shield yourself from the complexities crumbles in the face of death and renders your every action meaningless. The morbidity inherent in this simple fact is a defense posturing. Being conscious of this is nihilism.