Tag Archives: eric berlow

Eric Berlow: How Complexity Leads to Simplicity

One of my favorite TED talks on complexity is the one of Eric Berlow who explains in three minutes ‘how complexity leads to simplicity’. Of course, he leaves out many steps, but I think he gets two important points over to the audience

1. We need new tools to explain interactions and make sense of emergence in complex systems, such as the causal loop diagrams.

2. The solution to complex problems can actually be surprisingly simple, but they must be based on an understanding of the behavior of complex systems and not on simple and obvious cause-effect relationships.

We don’t have these tools in a ready-made form available yet in our work in development. That’s certainly a field we need to work in and that’s were I want to put a lot of my intention and time in the future.

Here the link to Eric Berlow’s TED Talk.