By Greg Fisher I was recently asked to take part in a roundtable co-organised by Nik Gowing and CIMA (the Chartered Institute for Management Accountants). The roundtable was designed to feed in to the Churchill 2015 conference in November, and was on the subject of ‘thinking the unthinkable’ with regard to global leadership. The premise, […]

By Greg Fisher Recently I was involved in a small piece of work funded by an NGO called PEFC (via AKC Global), which is the world’s largest certifier of sustainable forests. One of the most interesting things I witnessed in this work was the contrast between two perspectives in this domain: one which held that […]

On 4 July Paul Ormerod launched his new book, “Positive Linking – Why Networks Can Revolutionise the World”. Modern economic theory was first set out on a formal basis in the late 19th century. There have certainly been developments since then, but at heart the basic view in economics of how the world operates remains […]

The new science of complex networks emphasises the importance of both the static and the dynamic in social systems. Such systems are in a perpetual state of change; however, patterns can and do emerge in such systems, which persist for a period of time. Since the Enlightenment, social scientists have focused on identifying persist patterns, […]

Explicitly or implicitly, we often invoke two different metaphors for social systems – natural selection and machines. The study of complex networks offers a conceptual framework that help us to go beyond metaphorical framings. It also offers a toolbox of new concepts, such as emergence and self-organisation, that help us make sense of the world […]