Blog
Is this a pleb I see before me? Reality and perception in the markets
By Paul Ormerod Andrew Mitchell, the Government Chief Whip, remains in some difficulty after his exchange with the police at the gates of Downing Street. At the heart of the incident, there is an objective reality. Either he used the word pleb, or he didn’t. Either the police were officious jobsworths, or they were the epitome of politeness. But perception matters much more than reality. It is perhaps unfortunate for Mitchell that he went to Rugby, the home of Tom Brown’s Schooldays and the arrogant bully Flashman. This wholly...
read moreEconomic Man’s Guilty Pleasures
By Peter Hulm Peter Hulm is a former Guardian correspondent now living in Switzerland. An advisor to the European Graduate School on innovative journalism, he specializes in the postmodern aspects of media and advises international development organizations. Zurich must be one of the few major cities where you can get a tram at 8.15 in the morning and see nothing (well almost nothing) but guilty faces for going to work so late. Switzerland’s business and intellectual capital, Zurich is the obvious place for a high-powered symposium on the...
read moreThe Olympics, traffic in Central London and a bar in Santa Fe
By Paul Ormerod We all know now about the empty roads and deserted shops, all quite contrary to the official announcements before the Games began. No doubt Transport for London used their massively complicated, expensive models of the transport network to deduce that the system would be under massive strain. But a deceptively simple game devised in the 1990s about a bar in Santa Fe sheds light on what has happened. Santa Fe is teeming with high powered researchers, who proliferate in the state of New Mexico. Of a Thursday evening, many of...
read moreOlympic Complexity
By Chris Davies The spectacular spectacular with which Danny Boyle opened the Olympics had many things to recommend it. But alongside the dazzle, wit and downright eccentricity of the whole thing, there were two aspects of the opening ceremony that led me to reflect on the complexity of social systems. The first was Boyle’s history lesson. By selecting the Industrial and Information Revolutions as punctuation for his story, Boyle picked not only two great moments of British creativity (the former more than the latter, of course), but...
read moreBoard Women
By Greg Fisher Two weeks ago I attended an All Party Parliamentary Group in Westminster which focused on rebalancing boards of directors to ensure they included more women. A compelling argument for doing this was presented by Nadhim Zahawi MP, who noted that returns on investments in companies with gender-diverse boards stood at around 11%, which compares with 6% for non-diverse boards. My contribution to the group was to suggest that the debate ought to shift away from a man-woman framing to one focused on masculine and feminine...
read moreChaos Versus Complexity
By Greg Fisher Recently I got in to a very interesting discussion, which led me to articulate to my interlocutor (and myself!) the difference between Chaos Theory and Complexity Theory. I thought I’d write this down in the form of a blog article. I should stress that you should only read further if such technical differences blow your skirt up. If you have a life, you should probably read something else. Chaos Theory is the study of fascinating yet deterministic systems, whereas complex systems are not deterministic. At first blush,...
read moreThe complex effects of technological dislocation
By Chris Davies The widespread coming-to-prominence of the New Institutional Economics (NIE) school, which was given a little push recently by the sad news of Elinor Ostrom’s death, has brought to the fore the importance of economic structures. This is surely a good thing: by acknowledging the importance of institutions, formal and informal, the NIE school has helped to root economics in the real world rather better than the old neoclassical models. But having been doing some digging of late in the fertile soils of both NIE and technology...
read moreTest, Learn, Adapt… and repeat: Learning and adaptation in public policy
By Mark McKergow The Cabinet Office Behavioural Insights team has just issued ‘Test, Learn and Adapt: Developing Public Policy with Randomised Controlled Trials’ (download from their website here). This document is notable for several reasons. One of the authors is Ben Goldacre, author of Bad Science and a thorn in the side of pseudoscientists and charlatans around the world, who has long advocated actual testing as opposed to ideological debate as a way of finding what works. Secondly, the report mentions complex systems, which is...
read moreA New Style of Community Leadership for Complex Networks
By Lorraine Ford Picking up on Greg Fisher’s blog post regarding the distinction between power & formal authority, I did some related work recently at Henley Business School with Mike Green on local strategic partnerships – a concrete example of networks operating in the public sector. We looked at how local political leaders use their power in the flatter, less hierarchical structures which such partnerships constitute. Leadership styles for complex environments What we were trying to find out was whether, for the purposes of...
read more“Positive Linking” – A Review by Rhett Gayle
Today our colleague Paul Ormerod is launching his new book, “Positive Linking – Why Networks Can Revolutionise the World” (click here for more). When I was young, I often wanted to do things that my mother would rather I did not do. When told “no” I would offer what seemed to me should be a winning argument, the argument that “everyone is doing it, Mom.” The ready reply, taught to all parents of a certain generation, was “If everyone jumped off the bridge, would you jump too?” The underlying message was...
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