Making Things Work: Solving Complex Problems in a Complex World

Today, as individuals and as a society, we are faced with highly complex challenges. When we don’t solve them correctly they rapidly become crises.

This book explains how we can use complex systems research to solve complex problems * healthcare * education * military conflict * ethnic violence and terrorism * international development.

Highly complex problems cannot be solved by any one individual. Traditional organisations, traditional forms of control and planning are not effective. Making Things Work draws on insights from complex systems research about emergence, complexity, patterns, networks and evolution. It explains how effective organisations form through cooperation and competition, and how to make non-hierarchical distributed organisational structures effective at their tasks.