Making Things Work (Paperback)

Paperback. 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 in: * healthcare * education * military conflict * ethnic violence and terrorism * international development. Highly complex problems cannot be solved by any one individual. Traditional organizations, 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 organizations form through cooperation and competition, and how to make non-hierarchical distributed organizational structures effective at their tasks. The science of complexity has revolutionized our understanding of everything from the brain to the economy to the weather. This book shows how it can change the way we approach our most persistent social problems, introducing key concepts like emergence, self-organization, and networks, and using them to propose novel solutions to problems that affect us all. Shipping may be from our Sydney, NSW warehouse or from our UK or US warehouse, depending on stock availability.…