Impact Trust β’ Working glossary
Complex adaptive system
A system whose behaviour emerges from interactions between its parts.
Details
Our Take
Foundational concept for polycrisis thinking. The label is academic but the idea is that you cannot understand a forest by studying individual trees. Foundational concept for polycrisis thinking. The implication: you cannot fix a complex adaptive system by fixing its components in isolation. Interventions have unintended consequences because the parts are not independent.
Examples of Use
Complexity science, ecology, organisational theory
Synonyms/Variants
Living systems, Emergent systems
Typical everyday wording
A system made of many interacting parts that canβt be taken apart and reassembled β its properties arise from interactions between the pieces, not from individual components. 1+1 is not 2
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