This is a fascinating thinkpiece from four leading thinkers at the Boston Consulting Group, Martin Reeves, Ron Nicol, Thijs Venema and Georg Wittenburg. As well as discussing the power of evolutionary approaches in business, it showcases BCG’s work with agent-based modelling to strengthen strategic thinking (about which more on this blog soon). Much of relevance […]
In this guest cross-post, Geoffrey West, former President of the Santa Fe Institute, argues that just as the industrial age produced the laws of thermodynamics, we need universal laws of complexity to solve intractable problems of the post-industrial era, and that ‘big data’ needs such ‘big theory’. For more on this topic, see David Hales’ guest […]
A wonderfully written piece in today’s FT Magazine by Stephen Foley, on the changing role of physicists in financial markets. A short extract below, and the full article is here (sign up may be required but is free for a certain number of articles). ‘…complex systems are not systematically predictable. They’re only predictable in some regimes…’ The […]
I have written about the kind of problem malaria is, and the challenges this poses to silver bullet solutions elsewhere on this blog, a theme I explore in more depth in my soon-to-be published book. In the wake of this weeks announcement of a new vaccine, I thought it useful to highlight some of the challenges that still […]
This is a cross-post from the HBR written by Richard Straub, and is one of a series of perspectives that will be published leading up to the fifth annual Global Drucker Forum in November 2013 on the theme of Managing Complexity. Nobody would deny that the world has become more complex during the past decades. […]
As concern grows about H7N9 in China, this post explores the importance of managing such pandemic risks through collaboration, innovation and systemic thinking In the month of World Health Day (April 8th), the latest outbreak of bird flu in Asia provided a sobering sense of the challenges the international community still faces. To date, H7N9 […]
Aid on the Edge of Chaos 