Ellen Macarthur Foundation. Rethink the future

Non-linear systems… and preconceptions.

• by Ken Webster
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• 24 May 2011
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Insights from living systems

Myths are powerful, neither true or entirely false, they point to sensitivities around how we think of ourselves. It’s quite easy to spot them. If it’s got leverage, then it is probably part of a marketing strategy somewhere already. There is a pervasive myth in our society that if something is done in nature’s way, (make that Nature’s way), then it’s going to be benign: natural is safe, it is the other side of the fence chewing grass while the sun shines on organic cotton sheets through the farmhouse window (1). After all living systems have survived, and evolved for over 4 billion years, so it works right?

Well, yes, but its no bucolic scene. In the Foundation we tend to think that the basics, the ‘rules of the game’ are useful and worth repeating around non toxic materials flows and cascading energy, but with well over 95% of all living species that have ever lived on the planet long gone and five major extinction ‘events’, not counting the sixth underway now, then we have to say that this equips us only in the way that a learner driver is equipped by knowing the controls of the car and which end is front. It helps but it is no reason to be smug. So Nature = balance?

Nature doesn’t even settle down to become ‘balanced’, no more than an economy does, as this would be describing it as if it were a simple system which had been disturbed and was now quieting down, a system with shock absorbers perhaps. It’s all very mechanical imagery, almost as if the ‘balance’ (even the word suggests a mechanical weighing device or counterweight) was the system at rest, or ‘normal’ where everything is just fine, despite a bit of Darwinian ‘kill or be killed’ one supposes. Hence the myth, if we stop disturbing Nature it will be OK. No, it won’t. The clue to the problem is in the generic name for systems which are full of feedback, and this means living systems particularly, they are called non-linear. These are energetic systems, there is no rest, there is no balance in the conventional sense only continual change. Stability is a temporary island of dynamic balance in the flow rather than the ‘normal’ state of affairs. Think of the world from space and those swirling weather fronts endlessly iterated.

Oddly this sort of system is the norm, and it should be no surprise to us.

‘It has been said that if the universe is an elephant, then linear theory can only be used to describe the last molecule in the tail of the elephant and chaos theory must be used to understand the rest. Or, in other words, almost all interesting real-world systems are described by non-linear systems.’

Non –linear means, among other things, that input and output in the system need not be proportional. It can be a boom and bust world because of runaway feedback over a number of iterations. A virus of a few microns can multiply to overwhelm the host in hours, a rumour in a remote newspaper in China can become the trigger for a huge fall in stock values by the time the story is repeated and elaborated upon. This is the territory of exponential curves and tipping points.

These are spiralling systems within limits – meteorological variations do not extend to beyond the atmosphere obviously- so there is no going back there is no pre-existing condition, and because living systems are able to generate novelty they are also adaptive and we would say ‘creative’, but at huge cost and over long periods of time. A ‘huge cost’ refers to all those try outs, all those changes which are not taken up, ones which thrive briefly but are not sustained, the ones which are destroyed or just fall apart. Most things fail most of the time, whether it is business, ideas, seedlings, or economies, but that’s just an observation. Iteration is harrowing and may seem wasteful. Success may seem like chance, but it is chance that fits the time and the place and changes ongoing.

Our much discussed mature forest ecosystems analogy might appear long lived but climate shifts can cause profound and rapid change here too. It has happened many times and is still happening. There is no comfort to be had from Nature, apart from the knowledge that a dynamic tension between multiple feedback flows, between reinforcing feedback and balancing feedback has given us some illusion of a more permanent natural order. It’s stable enough – we hope – to enable us to make plans but the logic of the argument says we must work with it as participants going forward, not as orphans of some lost age or jumped up masters of the universe.

And in passing (for now!) this is surely justification enough for the role of systems thinking in education about ‘building a positive and restorative future’: it’s simply closer to how the world really works and might help dispel persistent myths around the machine-like-world, about nature and the myth of the splendid isolation of the individual.

Don't miss…

A new series from Adam Curtis, one of the most important filmmakers of our time, and touching on some of these themes, debuted on the BBC on May 23rd – All watched over by machines of loving grace

Episode 2, “The use and abuse of vegetational concepts”, is especially worth watching in relation to this article.

Tangential reading

(1) – On that ‘note’ (make that Note), and on the subject of marketing and myths, this little excerpt from one of our articles: “Marketing is partly to blame for our distorted vision – as adverts only show lush green fields and glorious cows under the sun – but our growing disconnection with the realities of rural life also plays a big role.”

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