Complexity theory and the Steering Group Meeting in Amsterdam

A Mandelbrot set

The Broker online magazine recently had a couple of articles on complexity theory, one by Alan Fowler and the second by Willemijn Verkoren summing up a panel discussion of Fowler’s paper. Verkoren mirrors the panel’s ambivalence about the theories and demonstrates some scepticism, asking how we could possibly take up Mandelbrot sets in daily practice, for example. Are these concepts just confusing?

Mandelbrot sets demonstrate fractals, mathematical equations which give rise to self-same regular/irregular patterns which replicate similar shapes at whatever scale of detail you look at them. Many people used to have them as screensavers. The screensaver develops a pattern, homes in on one part of it and magnifies the view so that you can see the pattern developing all over again no matter how fine the degree of detail. There are lots of examples in nature, such as ice crystals or ferns, or even coastlines, for example.

A number of sociologists have made analogous observations about social phenomena, Pierre Bourdieu for example. So in order for a global social pattern to arise, there must be a requirement for those processes to be replicated in micro-interactions between people. We embody social phenomena and contribute to them at the same time: ‘the body is in the social world and the social world is in the body’ in Bourdieu’s formulation. The local interactions and the global social patterns are being formed by, and are forming each other contemporaneously. This is a paradoxical process.

To give an example of a social fractal, how micro-interactions may help form the IKME programme, I recently attended the meeting of the IKME Steering Group in Amsterdam as programme evaluator and witnessed a number of important things happening. They are important because the way that people interact with each other in managing and running the programme, using the fractal analogy above, will have a big impact on the work that people do in the programme, the way that they understand the work and the way they engage with each other.

First of all I noticed the negotiation of a process of mutual accountability, by which I mean programme managers and steering group members gave an account to each other of what they think they are responsible for and negotiated a way forward together. This process of negotiation, if replicated, becomes a working method, a way of struggling with multiple points of view and different power relationships. Negotiation becomes a disciplining dynamic for anyone becoming involved in the programme and leaves open the possibility of destabilising power relations.

Secondly, we spent some time talking about how one belongs to a Working Group, whether there should be ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ members, what participants’ rewards should be, depending on the status of their membership of the programme. This discussion of who belongs, who is an ‘insider’ and who an ‘outsider’ and how we negotiate the fair distribution of resources goes right to the heart of what the programme is about. One might make the case that when the members of the Steering Group are struggling with these issues it makes it much more likely that themes of inclusivity and fairness will be replicated right across the programme. New participants in the programme will be brought into a group where these themes are an important focus of organising.

Participants in the group were able to develop the quality of their relationships with each other, through socialising and chatting between the business parts of the meeting, at the same time as inviting each other to negotiate and give and account of what they thought they were responsible for in the working sessions. The quality of these interactions and the strength of the relationships formed, could, if one continued to draw on the fractal analogy, have big consequences for the quality of the programme work overall.

So I was struck by the importance of the reflexivity that the group was demonstrating, the paying attention to the patterning of relationships that the programme is bringing about and the questions of power, values and priorities that they provoke. There is a continuing need to discuss these patterns and questions and make sense of them together. If we are to make practical the concept of multiple knowledges we will be required to understand much better the social processes of power of which we are a product, and in which we are still engaged.

Perhaps the next stage is to be reflexive about our reflexivity, never imagining that we can stop thinking about how we think, a continuous Mandelbrot set.