Directors' Blog

25 October 2024

This is the final post in our series on complexity. We’ve explored some of the ways that studying complex systems gives us a more nuanced way of understanding the world, how this is relevant to all our lives, and the unique contributions we can make to this new way of understanding the world from Aotearoa New Zealand.

Change happens all the time. Humans grow and age, days shift from light to dark, and people move between cities and jobs.

Some changes are expected and natural – like human growth and ageing. Some are cyclical – like the seasons. And some are the outcome of complex circumstances – like a global financial crisis. Some changes can be anticipated, but others are unpredictable. And some changes are desirable, while others might need to be prevented or reverted.

Sometimes we want to create the conditions for change through human intervention. We can do this as individuals, communities or through other organised efforts of society such as our governance and policy systems.

Our big global problems can seem overwhelming, but by recognising how systems are related, we can create meaningful solutions.

Human intervention within complex systems

Understanding complex systems helps us to figure out how to make the changes we want, and prevent the ones we don’t. Recognising that systems have behaviour – like emergence and feedback – can show us how and where to intervene to create change.

Approaching something like health as a complex system allows us to identify interventions that are more likely to succeed. Doctors often tell people to eat better to improve their health. But choosing what to eat is not the same for everyone. The type of food available to people, their budgets, the amount of time they have, and how much they know about nutrition all affect the food they eat. Because of this, trying to treat health issues like heart disease or diabetes by focusing on individual behaviour will have limited success.

Instead, a complex systems approach to health shows that solutions also include better job opportunities, increasing incomes, creating fairer rules on the type and location of stores where people buy food, and strengthening how much say the community has in local and national government decisions. These interventions create the conditions that make it easier for people to choose healthy food that nourishes them.

Scales matter for making change

Different scales and the relationships between them are important when acting within complex systems. In health, evidence and treatment options will be different when focussing solely on individuals, rather than considering communities. Medications and behaviour changes help to treat and control disease in individuals, but treating the clustering of diseases in local communities requires changes in social and physical environments to prevent individuals from becoming sick in the first place.

Seeing problems from a whole system perspective provides information about what solutions might need to look like. We saw this during Cyclone Gabrielle. In Tairāwhiti and Hawkes Bay, the loss of telecommunications, power outages, and damage and destruction to roading and bridges caused many difficulties for evacuations, and made health services inaccessible. The elderly and people living with disabilities were particularly affected as they could not easily move around, which meant they had difficulties evacuating and getting the help they needed. Without telecommunications, doctors and pharmacies struggled to access patient medical records, and people could not pay for essentials such as medicine, food or petrol with their Eftpos cards.

The consequences of this cyclone crossed different communities, organisations and areas. But not all communities were affected in the same ways, and the evacuation, health and social support needs varied within and across the regions. Multiple and connected social actions were needed to address the impacts as they evolved, and to support those communities and groups most affected in the days, weeks and months following the cyclone.

Learning from the past and adapting to a changing future

Complex systems are open and interact with their environments, which means they have the capacity to adapt and learn.

With repeated extreme weather events in Tairāwhiti over the past 18 months, many parts of the community have been learning and adapting. Lessons have been captured and are helping us become better prepared for future events.

Land use is now a key priority for communities, and there is much stronger advocacy for policy changes – particularly recognising the responsibilities of forestry companies. Others have been adapting in smaller ways by planting up land alongside waterways, or on their own properties. Many whānau, neighbourhoods and communities now have clear plans in place for future extreme weather events.

In the months since Cyclone Gabrielle, a learning system developed through local community groups and organisations working with researchers to help capture the lessons and make changes. The benefits of these lessons will be felt right across the country. As we face more frequent extreme weather events due to climate change, the lessons learned in Tairāwhiti show that we need to be ready with improved infrastructure, and better planning for community resilience.

Understanding complexity supports better interventions

Social, economic and health systems are built by humans, and we can change them.

Instead of only focusing on change to isolated parts of the system, complex systems approaches focus on whole system change. They help us to identify levers like cultural norms or money flows that cross scales, or increasing the ability to adapt through better data and information linked to flexible resource use. We can also design and construct new systems so that they better meet the needs of our rapidly changing world.

We live within complex systems which interact with each other through feedback and emerge from local conditions. And there are ways to design our systems that recognise this – something long understood by many Indigenous cultures with knowledge systems and practices embedded in the relationships between humans and the environment.

There is an increase in social movements that advocate for human-influenced systems to be regenerative. These include: economies that take account of our finite resources; food systems that respond to local needs and their environmental impact; and governance systems that give power and agency to communities to improve local conditions and adapt to changing environments.

In the face of problems like climate change or inequality, it can be challenging to know how best to intervene or contribute towards change. Complex systems approaches can help identify strategies to effect large scale change, whilst acknowledging the power of small local acts that can reach across the boundaries of scales to influence the bigger picture.

This focus on relationships has potential to increase the speed and effectiveness of our responses to large-scale emergencies. A focus on complexity can help us to shift away from isolated, hierarchical action and mindsets.

If we make systems visible and understand how they are connected, we can change them.

A collaboration between Te Pūnaha Matatini Principal Investigators Anna Matheson, Holly Thorpe and Markus Luczak-Roesch, and illustrator Hanna Breurkes. Edited by Jonathan Burgess.

Read more about the foundations of complex systems

• Complex is different from complicated, and why that matters
• Emergence: How interactions create complexity from simplicity
• Feedback: Processes that change the thing that caused them
• Scaling: Relationships across size, space and time
• Spreading: How something travels across a network

2 October 2024

This is the fifth of a series of posts on complexity. We’ll be exploring some of the ways that studying complex systems gives us a more nuanced way of understanding the world, how this is relevant to all our lives, and the unique contributions we can make to this new way of understanding the world from Aotearoa New Zealand.

On a Thursday afternoon in June, a power pylon toppled over in a small rural area in Aotearoa New Zealand, cutting power to most of the Northland region.

This happened after contractors removed too many nuts from the bolts securing the pylon during cleaning. The seemingly mundane act of removing these nuts led to catastrophic effects: the three unsecured legs of the pylon lifted, the tower toppled off its base, and the resulting electricity outage affected 100,000 properties.

Electricity is distributed through a network, and this particular pylon was crucial to the network. The removal of the pylon had a massive impact on the transmission of power between communities.

Things spread through networks

Networks are made up of nodes and links. Electricity networks are easy to imagine, with power stations and substations the nodes, and power lines the links that connect them.

Not all networks are as visible as power grids. For example, we can think of people as nodes in social networks, and their interactions as links between them. Information, ideas and disease travel through these networks as power may flow through an electrical grid.

When we talk about “spread”, we’re looking at how something travels from one node to another across a network. Sometimes we want things to spread through networks with as little difficulty as possible, such as electricity or food. In other cases, we want to prevent things spreading through the network, like disease or extremist ideologies.

In the 21st century, understanding how things spread on networks is vital for the world to thrive. The Covid-19 pandemic made this very clear. Knowing that the virus spread through close contact with infected individuals, governments were able to make policies and give advice on the most effective way to sever networks to prevent spread. Just like that downed power pylon in Northland, removing links prevented spread on the network.

The networks that spread information fundamentally shape our experience of the world

Information is another thing that spreads on networks. This happens over many scales – from talking to your neighbour over the fence, to reading online news from the other side of the world.

Even in our digitally-connected world, information is still closely related to geography. We still prefer to interact with people who share our worldview, which in turn influences where we choose to live and work, and the kind of information that we access – nodes can often choose which links are created which, in turn, influences the nature of future links.

Companies that depend on producing and implementing new knowledge depend on these networks. It’s no accident that Silicon Valley developed around Stanford University and continues to be a hub for the high tech sector. These environments make it easy for information to spread between like-minded people and are often constructed intentionally – as in the case of science parks. In short, the dissemination of information within networks can profoundly affect the design and growth of physical spaces.

Important nodes in information networks that spread information between communities are often referred to as `brokers’ or `structural holes’. These brokers are an important part of how societies reach consensus. One example of brokerage in the context of information spreading is how iwi and other communities are represented in governmental bodies through elected representatives. These people act as bridges between communities and the broader political system, facilitating the flow of information between them. They relay the community’s concerns to the government and bring back key updates, ensuring both sides stay informed and engaged.

The structure of networks affects how things spread

The structure of the network, including how densely connected it is and whether it contains distinct groups or isolated nodes, plays a crucial role in how quickly and widely information spreads. Communities within the network may facilitate rapid sharing within their group but slow the flow to others. Additionally, the strength and frequency of connections between nodes can impact the speed of diffusion – strong, frequent interactions often lead to faster spread, while weak or sporadic ties may slow it down.

Different things can simultaneously spread across a network. This was highlighted during Covid-19 as the spread of disease and information between people interacted in complex ways – such as misinformation influencing behaviour – with tangible effects on the health of people across the world.

Food and values spread like electricity

Thinking in networks shows how different phenomena, both tangible and abstract, spread in remarkably similar ways. The simple example of electricity supply failing due to a fallen pylon can give us insight into seemingly unrelated things, like the distribution of food – or values and beliefs.

The food that we depend on for survival is distributed through a network. This was made starkly clear by the disruption of Covid-19, which restricted the flow of food between food producers and household consumers. Food producers, retailers and restaurants – or, nodes in the network – were affected by unwell workers working at reduced capacity, or closed as non-essential businesses, and the links between these nodes were disrupted.

However, while the usual regular food supply chains were constrained, local communities self-organised to decentralise the network. Alternative food networks were established to get food to people who needed it, through informal and voluntary efforts by communities. That is, new links sprung up organically and at a more local scale to compensate for disruption at the national scale. Communities saw the value in these emergent experiments, which has meant that some of these novel and innovative networks have persisted. This new coexistence of food distribution networks at distinct scales has improved the resilience of aspects of the spread of these vital, and delicious, components of our daily lives.

This example demonstrates how seemingly different things like food and values can spread through networks and interact with each other in unexpected ways. While food moves through a physical network, values hitch a ride and shape the way in which these networks form and persist—the values that led to informal food networks being set up have also helped sustain them, as their success reinforced the underlying beliefs that keep them going.

Qualitatively different but quantitatively similar

Electricity, ideas, values, food, disease – many different things spread across networks. Although they are different in character, these networks often have the same universal underlying architecture, and behave in quantitatively similar ways. This means that by studying networks, we can gain insight into the spread of seemingly very different phenomena.

If a power pylon can fall over and cut power to 100,000 properties, what does this mean for other things that spread across networks?

A collaboration between Te Pūnaha Matatini Principal Investigators Kyle Higham and Emma Sharp, and illustrator Hanna Breurkes. Edited by Jonathan Burgess.

Read more about the foundations of complex systems

• Complex is different from complicated, and why that matters
• Emergence: How interactions create complexity from simplicity
• Feedback: Processes that change the thing that caused them
• Scaling: Relationships across size, space and time

4 September 2024

This is the fourth of a series of posts on complexity. We’ll be exploring some of the ways that studying complex systems gives us a more nuanced way of understanding the world, how this is relevant to all our lives, and the unique contributions we can make to this new way of understanding the world from Aotearoa New Zealand.

The microbiome is the community of trillions of microorganisms living in, and on, the bodies of complex organisms – like people. In human beings this microbial community aids the digestion of food, supports the immune system, and protects us against pathogens – the infectious microbes that cause sickness and disease.

Do you think of yourself as a walking community of trillions of microorganisms? Probably not. Thinking of ourselves as individuals rather than a collection of microorganisms is an example of how we can classify the world into different scales.

Our knowledge systems tend to order everything into different scales to help us organise and understand our universe. These scales are typically used for convenience as well as having some meaning. It is useful to distinguish the individual from a population of people, just as it is helpful to differentiate days from years when we think of time scales.

The different levels at which a system can be observed or analysed

In complex systems, the concept of scale refers to the different levels at which a system can be observed or analysed. These levels can be thought of as micro, meso and macro. In the example of human beings, the microbiome is at the micro scale, the human individual at meso scale, and the natural and built environment that we inhabit at the macro scale.

These scales are groupings of size, but they are also sets of complex relationships which may be nested within each other. For example, interactions occur between the microbiome, the individual, and the environment. The composition of our microbiome is influenced by the food we eat, our habits and behaviours, which in turn are influenced by the natural and built environments we live in, in turn influencing those microbes themselves, which influences our health.

Understanding relationships between the system scales of the microbiome, the health of a person, and external environments is essential for knowing what to do to improve human health and prevent disease.

From the microscopic to the global, from the quantum to the cosmos

The planet that we live on is made up of interacting systems encompassing differing scales. These scales may be about size, place, organisation or time.

Spatial scales range from microscopic levels, like individual organisms or microhabitats, to broader landscapes and global ecosystems. Our universe ranges from the smallest known quantum scales to the entire cosmos.

Time scales encompass moments, seasons, years, and geological epochs, reflecting the dynamic nature of ecological processes over time from nerve impulses to annual seasonal changes in forests to the rise and fall of the large dinosaurs.

Organisational scales range from genes and individuals to populations, communities, and whole ecosystems.

Relationships between scales

Scales of any type do not have rigid boundaries. They are open systems that can be nested, interact with each other, and bonded by relationships that feed back and lead to emergent properties and adaptation.

A disruption at one scale can cause a cascade of interactions. For example, a pathogenic bacterial infection within a gut microbiome that causes disease is in reality a population of reproducing bacteria all interacting with other communities of viruses, bacteria and microorganisms – as well as the host’s own immune cells, and the non-living material inside the digestive system. The gut is an ecosystem within wider ecosystems.

Improving the health of human populations requires recognising relationships between scales. Even a very specific risk to health – like an infectious disease – has causes and impacts that will span multiple scales from the microscopic to the global. Think of the spreading and harm caused by SARS-CoV-2, the viral cause of Covid-19. The resultant pandemic showed that ignoring the ecosystem of relationships around individuals or communities not only reinforces existing patterns of harm, but reproduces harms over time.

Social scales also matter here. At the macro scale, the effectiveness of national health policies depend heavily on how they are implemented at the meso scale of local communities. Local health services that lack sufficient resources or fail to adapt to their local conditions can undermine national policy intentions. We saw this relationship in action through the Covid-19 pandemic where feedback from local Māori, Pacific and other community-led organisations – through advocacy and protest – influenced the national policy approach. This led to a faster reallocation of resources and development of more responsive and locally adapted communication strategies and health service delivery.

To understand our world, we need to look across scales

Understanding scales as systems of complex relationships helps to identify causes of phenomena such as, infectious disease spread, animal behaviour, human health or environmental degradation – but it also provides information about how we can intervene more effectively to create system change through human action that focuses on the relationships that link scales together.

To prepare for, respond to and learn from things like financial crises, natural disasters, systemic challenges to population health, or changes in the research system, we must look across the scales that influence individuals, communities, and all of humanity. This includes the connections between history, the present and the centennial and millennial time spans of collective memory.

To understand our world, we need to look across scales.

A collaboration between Te Pūnaha Matatini Principal Investigators Anna Matheson and Dave Hayman, and illustrator Hanna Breurkes. Edited by Jonathan Burgess.

Read more about the foundations of complex systems

• Complex is different from complicated, and why that matters
• Emergence: How interactions create complexity from simplicity
• Feedback: Processes that change the thing that caused them
• Spreading: How something travels across a network

15 August 2024

This is the third of a series of posts on complexity. We’ll be exploring some of the ways that studying complex systems gives us a more nuanced way of understanding the world, how this is relevant to all our lives, and the unique contributions we can make to this new way of understanding the world from Aotearoa New Zealand.

We’ve all been there. Someone steps up to a microphone to speak, and there’s a little high-pitched ringing around the edges of their voice through the speakers. In a flash, this has become a loud squeal. Jolted in their seats, the audience clasp their hands to their ears until the person with the best reflexes manages to leap across to turn down the volume.

This is feedback. A microphone placed too close to a speaker picks up the sound from the speaker and amplifies it, then sends it back out of the same speaker. The microphone now picks up the louder sound, and amplifies it further. This reinforcing feedback happens rapidly, and before long we’re being assaulted by a high-pitched squeal.

We can also imagine a thermostat in a room. We set a preferred temperature, and allow the heating to run until this temperature is reached. At that point, the thermostat switches off the heating, and the room slowly cools. This is balancing feedback. Once the room has cooled below the set temperature, the heating is switched back on.

Feedback is all around us

Feedbacks are processes that change the thing that caused them.

Let’s say that we have a system with two parts: A and B. A is connected to B by one process, and B is connected to A by another. If the state of A changes, it triggers a corresponding change of some amount in B, because they are connected. But now, B has been modified, and because it is also connected to A by a second process, the change in B also results in further change to A.

The processes connecting A to B, and B to A, are both feedbacks, and those feedbacks can be reinforcing or balancing. Audio feedback and thermostats are classic examples of these two types of feedback. A reinforcing feedback drives further change in the direction a process was already going. It is a self-sustaining, or amplifying, feedback, which can lead to exponential growth or decline. A balancing feedback, on the other hand, leads to a reversal in the direction of change. So something that was increasing starts to decrease, and vice versa, which can lead to stability or equilibrium.

The concept of feedback is key to understanding complex systems in reality, reaching well beyond the scales of the examples of audio feedback or temperature control. Systems of feedback determine patterns we can see in the world around us. These patterns can be observed over time within any complex system, whether that be from the perspective of the earth sciences, biology, how cities work, or human health.

When we observe these dynamic patterns, whether it is exponential growth (like a virus spreading) or collapse (like the Wall Street crash of 1929) or even if a system is in a state of seeming stability, it is useful to explore the feedback processes behind these patterns. It is through understanding feedback that deep insight into fundamental causes and how to make change can be found.

Reinforcing and balancing feedback on a global scale

In studying the climate we can see reinforcing and balancing feedbacks playing out on a global scale. We know the release of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels results in more longwave radiation being trapped in our atmosphere, which leads to warming. This warming melts sea ice and thaws permafrost. Which in turn lead to further warming, which leads to more melting, and so on. This is reinforcing feedback, just like the squeal of a microphone.

Like the way a thermostat works, rainfall is an illustration of balancing feedback. Evaporating moisture from the surface of the Earth leads to increasing water vapour in the air. This increasing humidity then makes it harder for further water to evaporate from the land or ocean. Eventually, as the air becomes saturated, it rains, humidity is reduced, evaporation resumes, and the whole cycle starts again.

Feedbacks between people and environments

There are destructive inevitabilities, such as the increase in extreme weather events, of planetary system feedbacks like warming caused by too much carbon dioxide. But there are also constructive feedbacks where relationships between people, our practices and culture, and the built and natural environments are leading to new and innovative solutions.

One helpful reinforcing loop in the area of energy, where increasing demand for solar and wind power is driving down the cost of these clean energy sources so that they become more affordable for households.

In transport, if we can understand feedback processes underpinning car dependence, we can shift from reliance on cars to more people walking, wheeling and biking. For example, we know that fewer people ride bikes when they associate them with negative experiences of car danger and injury. If traffic on busy streets is slowed and road space is allocated to bike lanes, more and more people become visible, and you will see more people riding different kinds of bikes. When people see others like themselves on bikes having fun while getting around, this is a reinforcing feedback as they feel inspired and encouraged to then give it a go.

The ways we adapt to a changing climate bring new feedback processes into play. When people’s homes and land are threatened by severe weather, flooding, sea level rise and coastal erosion, balancing feedback responses – such as the construction of sea walls – might successfully buffer a worsening crisis in the short-term. But adaptations may not be sufficient in the long term and may in fact cause greater harm through  attracting further housing development and therefore increasing the number of people exposed to climate dangers.

Understanding feedback is essential for finding solutions

Identifying and understanding processes of feedback is critical to understanding the complex causes behind the issues that we face. If we understand feedback, we can find more appropriate and sophisticated solutions, and become aware of dangers and unintended consequences. If researchers and policymakers incorporate feedback in their methods and practices, we can create more effective pathways of action that result in beneficial outcomes.

In the next post in this series on the foundations of complex systems, we’ll be taking a look at how we can understand phenomena across different scales in order to intervene more effectively.

A collaboration between Te Pūnaha Matatini Principal Investigators Alex Macmillan and Nick Golledge, and illustrator Hanna Breurkes. Edited by Jonathan Burgess.

Read more about the foundations of complex systems

• Complex is different from complicated, and why that matters
• Feedback: Processes that change the thing that caused them
• Scaling: Relationships across size, space and time
• Spreading: How something travels across a network