What Are Complex Adaptive Systems?

For the context of projects I will focus on a special type of systems: Complex Adaptive Systems, or CAS for short. I will first throw you off guard with a formal definition, after which I will explain a little more. The following definition is from John H. Holland:

Photography by Phauly.

“A Complex Adaptive System (CAS) is a dynamic network of many agents (which may represent cells, species, individuals, firms, nations) acting in parallel, constantly acting and reacting to what the other agents are doing. The control of a CAS tends to be highly dispersed and decentralized. If there is to be any coherent behavior in the system, it has to arise from competition and cooperation among the agents themselves. The overall behavior of the system is the result of a huge number of decisions made every moment by many individual agents.” (source: Waldrop, 1992)

Before you go all bouncy, let me tell you a story about the Game of Life. In 1990, while at university, a popular programming exercises was to create a small program based upon John Conways (a mathematician from the 60s) computer simulation “Life”. The idea is that you have a 2-dimensional grid with cells. These cells can be alive or dead (on or off, colored or blank). When the simulation is running the state of a cell is determined by three simple rules:

• If the cell has no living neighbors or just one, it will be dead (caused by loneliness);
• If four or more of the cells next to it are alive, it will be dead (overcrowding);
• If a dead cell has exactly three living neighbors it will come alive (Bitstorm).

The effect of these simple rules can be quite surprising. The starting grid can be very chaotic, but after a while you can see patterns emerge, and even stable situations can be reached where nothing will change any more, or the same patterns are just repeated over and over.





This simple program shows how from a simple set of rules that only take into account the cell itself and its direct neighbors can create some complex patterns in an entire system (the grid as a whole).

And this is exactly what is known as complex adaptive systems (CAS). Systems like this are the economy, the weather and human interaction, and the game of Life is a very simple one. In a CAS a very large group of small components or agents are interacting with each other. These local interactions are following some general rules. The collective of all these interactions, the sum if you want, determines the behavior of the whole system.

After previous postings on this blog (and wait until you reach my next posts about about The SIMS) you don’t have to wonder what this all has to do with project management. The people involved in the project and its surroundings are considered the “agents”. It is the human interaction between all those stakeholders that determines the overall behavior of the project. Nothing new here. But, applying CAS literally means that rules aren’t applied to the project as a whole, but the focus should be the individual interactions between people. That is way this entire exercises is so important.


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