What is Complexity?

We often hear the word complexity, now more than ever because of the way in which our lives are bound up with systems of extremely high complexity--social, technological, ecological, and indeed all three, as an issue such as climate change reminds us. However, if asked people usually have a hard time explaining what "complexity" means--partly because complexity and simplicity are properties of systems, which they find they have to explain also.

Systems are sets of parts or things that work together. As for complexity, here is what I had to say about the matter in my article "Societal Complexity and Diminishing Returns in Security."

According to one definition, complexity refers to "asymmetric relationships that reflect organization and restraint" between the parts of a system. As such, the characteristic features of complex systems are their composition from a large number of components with a dense web of connections between them; a high degree of interdependence within them; an openness to outside environments, rather than their being self-contained; "synergy," meaning that the whole is more than the sum of its parts; and nonlinear functioning, so that changes in these systems have effects disproportionate to their size, either larger or smaller. Such nonlinearity and synergy come with an exponentially increased range of possible interactions, including unplanned interactions, making an incomplete understanding of at least some processes also an aspect of complex systems.

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