During 2020, the SARS CoV-2 virus infected millions of people, many became ill, and
countless lives were lost. But what sort of situation is the Covid-19 pandemic, and
how should we respond - to it, and to other challenging situations? If the pandemic
is just a medical problem, involving a highly contagious and dangerous virus, then it
makes sense to put our efforts into finding medical solutions - treatments, cures,
vaccines. But might the pandemic be more than just a medical problem, and if so, then
how should we proceed? Consider its impacts on how we work, travel, spend money,
and communicate, the baffling toilet paper shortage in Australian supermarkets, or
the rising international political tensions. Nobody knows how the future will
unfold, or how to prepare for the unknown. The pandemic is a paradigmatic
contemporary "wicked problem" of global proportions that touches everyone's lives.
Like other 21st century challenges, this situation is neither simple nor
complicated, but complex, and it requires a very different mindset - a different
way of seeing, thinking, and doing. My name is Nicole Vincent, and I'd like to
welcome you to Thinking Complexly. Complex situations have features that make them
distinct. For one, their effects and causes are many and varied. COVID-19
is certainly a medical condition involving a virus, human hosts, treatments, and
hopefully a vaccine. But it also involves non-human hosts, our norms and values, as
well as political, economic, social, technological, legal, and environmental
factors. Moreover, some elements in these interactions are not even real - like our
predictions, fears, and narratives - but yet, these collectively imagined entities
influence our behaviour, which alters reality. Finally, elements in a complex
situation are not static - they change all the time due to their interactions. The
countless number and kinds of such elements comprise an environment in which
interactions between them take place, and through their causal interactions they
create a constantly changing environment, which in turn gives rise to novel
emergent properties. When we see such properties as problems, it is tempting to set
out in search of solutions. But just as our use of antibiotics to tackle bacterial
infections eventually created anti-biotic resistant bacterial strains, so too the
solutions to today's wicked problems will simply reconfigure the complex system,
and new (and potentially even more wicked) problems will emerge tomorrow. Drawing
on such examples, in this subject we will learn about how complexity emerges from
interactions between simple physical elements, why emergent properties of complex
systems defy best practice and traditional problem-solving techniques, and how the
most challenging features of complexity can be embraced to co-create interventions
that shift these systems into better states. Employing tools and concepts from
systems thinking, we will consider two questions - "What is your situation?" and
"What is our situation?." This will enable us to move beyond problem solving, by
imagining and beginning to co-create a future truly worth wanting.
