Newsletter #398 — November 5, 2025

Heidi Burgess and Guy Burgess

Understanding the Difference Between Complex and Complicated Systems

The first step toward solving the many problems associated with our hyper-polarized, us-vs-them politics is to understand and be able to distinguish between two very different types of problems and problem-solving efforts—for the moment, we'll call them "type 1" and "type 2." Humans have historically been very good at solving type 1 problems while, unfortunately, they tend to have much more trouble with type 2 problems. As we explained in our newsletter on sharp and fuzzy feedback,problem-solving is relatively easy in type 1 cases. There you can try possible fixes and find out quite quickly whether those fixes work. If they don't work, the feedback is immediate and sharp, and you can try something else. If you get it right, you can move on. Most of humanity's great inventions were developed in this way. We saw a problem; someone developed an engineering or technological fix to the problem. If it worked, great! They sold it and made millions of dollars; if it didn't work, they went back to the drawing board and tried again. Humans are accomplished tool builders and this kind of problem-solving is something that we are very good at.

Unfortunately, the many problems associated with hyper-polarized, us-vs-them conflict are not type 1 problems; they are type 2 problems, which are much harder to deal with. And when we try to fix these problems, we find it hard to determine whether our fixes actually work. The feedback is fuzzy, slow, and ambiguous.

"Type 1" and "type 2" problems are what systems theorists call "complicated" and "complex" systems (or "complex adaptive" systems). While most of us use these terms interchangeably, they actually describe two very different kinds of systems. Understanding the difference and, especially, learning how to successfully work with complex systems, is essential for anyone wanting to help fix the societal-level problems that are the focus of this newsletter. (This short video further explains the distinction while this article explains what we mean by complex adaptive systems and this page offers links to even more resources on the topic.)

Complicated systems are mechanical systems. They are determinate. They are made up of (sometimes many) different parts, each of which is connected to other parts in a way that permits the overall system to function in a predetermined, predictable way. There can be lots and lots of parts, as there are in cars or airplanes, or computers, none of which we come close to understanding how they work. But fortunately, the engineers who designed them and built them do understand how they work, and they have trained technicians to diagnose and fix any problems that arise.

Complex adaptive systems are organic systems (e.g. individual organisms, ecosystems, and societies). They also have lots of parts, but these parts (or actors in a social system) are not connected in any reliably determinate way. Each of the actors in a complex adaptive system is connected to the others around it. But how they respond to a specific situation is not predetermined. The actors decide for themselves how to respond, based on their perceptions of the situation and their decision rules, which may or may not be rational. (In other words, they adapt — hence the name "complex adaptive systems.") These actors are focused on their own well-being (and maybe the well-being of their family, descendants, and "tribe"). Usually, they are much less concerned about the well-being of the system as a whole (apart from wanting to maintain a livable niche for themselves).

While complicated systems work the same way every time (at least until they break), complex systems are adaptive — they adapt to changing conditions. That doesn't mean that they always adapt successfully. They may respond to external threats in ways that fail to counter that threat. That is, of course, not an adaptive behavior, and it may result in the individual getting "deselected." However, it is also likely to strengthen the community, as it leaves only those individuals who responded to the threat in adequately protective ways. In our context, societies that figure out how to constructively respond to the threats associated with escalation and polarization are going to be much more likely to flourish than those that do not.

Unlike complicated systems, complex adaptive systems are not designed; they evolve. And there is no blueprint, or plan about how they work and what will happen in a particular situation (though observers can make educated guesses, based on past behavior of the system).

When we teach about the difference between complicated and complex systems, we ask students to visualize a pool table. We explain that solving a complicated system problem is a lot like trying to line upthe perfect pool shot. If you get it right, all the balls go exactly where you want them to go. By contrast, complex systems are more like pool tables with hundreds of millions of balls and millions of players. Each player is trying to solve their problem by making the perfect shot. If players are careful, they stand a fair chance of getting the balls in their immediate vicinity to behave as they wish. However, since all of these problem-solving efforts interact (often in contradictory ways) with each other, any single person's ability to significantly influence the behavior of the system beyond their immediate vicinity is limited, to non-existent.

This distinction matters because political decision and policy makers (as well as peacebuilders) often act as if they are directing a much simpler, complicated system. They first try to analyze how the system works (which they assume they can do accurately). Then they try to devise a "solution" to whatever they define as "broken," in much the same way that a mechanic diagnoses and fixes a car.

The problem is that people, and the social systems in which they live, are complex, not complicated, systems. All the actors have minds of their own. They make their own decisions about how to respond to the constantly changing situations in which they find themselves. But as they are deciding how best to respond, they are likely to be bombarded with advice — some from people with altruistic motives; much from people with self-serving motives. Given that virtually everyone is subjected to the same kinds of pressures (though with different messages), it is impossible to accurately predict how any particular actor will behave, and how their action will influence the overall system.

We can still make educated guesses about the behavior of such systems, however. We each have the ability to analyze the situations in which we find ourselves, weigh the advice that we are given, and make decisions that seem to us to protect our interests and advance our values. While our ability to influence the overall system is limited, our ability to influence the smaller circle of people with whom we interact more directly is considerable.

If enough of us, in our daily interactions, act in ways that "nudge" our immediate environment in the direction of a fairer, more peaceful, and more prosperous society, then, collectively, we can help to push society away from the dystopias of hate, authoritarianism, chaos, and violence. Put simply, none of us has the magic solution or the power to fix our dysfunctional politics. But we do have the power, if we work with other like-minded people, to help nudge the system in the right direction. Our future depends upon combining these nudges in ways that collectively really do make a difference. (In the next post in this series we will outline a massively parallel strategy for cultivating and increasing the effectiveness of these "nudges.")

Another way of looking at the difference between troubleshooting efforts designed for complicated systems and those designed for complex systems is by comparing the way in which the engineering and medical professions approach their work. Engineers try to repair a system so that it works according to design specifications (while also trying to improve the design so that it will work even better in the future).

Doctors realize that they can't make you perfectly healthy, and they do not fully understand how the human body and disease systems work. Based on their less than perfect knowledge, the best they can do is try to diagnose your ills and then prescribe treatments for particular diseases and injuries using the best strategies and tools that they have. Sometimes this works (for instance, penicillin almost always cures strep throat — which is also easily diagnosed). But at other times, it does not work. Some diseases (such as Lyme disease) are hard to correctly diagnose, are often misdiagnosed, and once at an advanced stage, are very hard to successfully treat. In other cases, like "hay fever," doctors can provide only partial symptomatic relief or, for problems like blindness, we can simply help people live with an incurable disease. Still other diseases, such as many cancers, cannot be cured, even when they are quickly and correctly diagnosed. We need to think about fixing societal problems in much the same way. Some problems we can fix, some we need to learn to live with, and some we have to keep working on (because we currently have no solutions).

So bottom line, complex adaptive systems are much harder to "fix" when they are seen to be broken. But we do have ways of approaching them that can often be helpful. However, societal problems have another significant challenge: scale.

The Challenge of Scale

As U.S. national politics has gotten worse and worse, more and more of our colleagues have decided (quite possibly correctly) that the best hope for "fixing" our civic culture, right now at least, is to work at the local level. (This is an approach that is consistent with the "nudge" strategy for dealing with complexity outlined above.) The theory is that people care most about the issues that they can see, and they trust the people in their own communities more than they trust people from afar. People also seem to be more willing to work with others to solve local problems than they are willing to get involved (constructively at least) at the national level. These factors are what underlies the rapid expansion of local civic engagement projects such as Better Together America, Braver Angel's Citizen-Led Solutions, Urban Rural Action, and Convergence (among others).

However, the strategies used by such organizations and initiatives are usually what we call "table-oriented." They can be dialogues or deliberative processes. In most dialogues, people sit around a table and, through structured questions and answers, work to get to know "the other" better so that they can learn "where they are coming from" and improve their relationships with people who are different from themselves. Sometimes, they take that one step further, try to find areas of agreement about one or more issues of concern, and work collaboratively to find a solution that satisfies the interests and needs of many, if not all, of the participants.

This is fine to a point. Such processes will likely help civic culture and civic problem-solving at the local level. And it may even provide models for higher levels of social organization.

But it is important to understand the challenges posed by the scale of the society-wide hyper-polarization problem. In our teaching, we explain the scale problem by first trying to give students a gut-level understanding of the significance of orders of magnitude (factors of ten). We start by explaining that a person walks at about (1.7 miles or 2.7 km per hour) which is four orders of magnitude slower than the International Space Station, which circles the earth at (17,000 miles or 27,000 km per hour).

We go on to explain that the difference between what we call a "standard mediation triad," two parties and a mediator, is roughly seven orders of magnitude smaller than a moderately-sized international conflict. (For instance, the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians involves roughly 15,000,000 people--not counting the outsiders involved, such as the Iranians and their proxies such as Hezbollah). The population of the United States is 340,000,000. That is eight orders of magnitude larger than the standard mediation triad. Is it any wonder that the conflict resolution strategies that work for two people and a mediator, or twenty people and a facilitator, do not easily work for the hyper-polarized political conflict in Israel or the United States? Just by size alone, the difference is immense! Combined with complexity, these problems require a qualitatively, not just quantitatively, different approach.

Small-scale efforts that create islands of peace amid a vast acrimonious sea of conflict are of value as "pilot projects" or "role models" that might catch on and be replicated widely. And they are of value, of course, to those who live on the small islands of peace. But they, alone, are not enough to solve societal-level problems. Somehow, we have to figure out how these small-scale efforts can be "scaled up" in ways that enable them to deliver what Robert Ricigliano calls "peace writ large."

Large-Scale, Complex Problems Need Large-Scale,Complex Procedures for Addressing Them

For roughly a decade now, we have been talking about something we call "massively parallel peacebuilding," which we later extended to "massively parallel problem-solving" and "massively parallel democracy building." This isn't our idea for something new that needs to be done. Rather, it is simply the name we gave to the large number of independent efforts that have spontaneously emerged as individuals recognize the danger posed by hyper-polarized conflict and start undertaking projects designed to limit that danger. This reflects the great strength of complex adaptivesocietal systems, and it is the principal reason why they have survived and flourished despite all the seemingly insurmountable problems that they have faced.

All of this is driven by the fact that all problems create opportunities for people who can figure out how to help solve them. (This is the social equivalent of Adam Smith's "invisible hand"). Without any kind of overall organization or leadership, people are seeing things that need to be done, and are making an effort to do those things. They are motivated by the desire to earn money, improve their own lives, and contribute to their communities.

When all this effort is put together, it creates a massively parallel system that has the potential to transform our destructive politics and build a stronger civic culture and democracy. It also might not work — nothing is assured in complex adaptive systems (especially given the fact that the same complex adaptive approach is also driving hyper-partisanship.) That said, we still think that a massively parallel approach is the most promising strategy for defeating hyper-polarization and making our societies and governments work again. Indeed, we have yet to find another approach that stands nearly as good a chance of working.

We will not go into further detail here, as we have another post coming soon on massively parallel problem-solving. The key idea we want to leave readers with here is that we need an approach that effectively deals with the scale and complexity of modern societies. Complicated, table-oriented efforts, on their own, simply won't be enough.

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About the MBI Newsletters

Two or three times a week, Guy and Heidi Burgess, the BI Directors, share some of our thoughts on political hyper-polarization and related topics. We also share essays from our colleagues and other contributors, and every week or so, we devote one newsletter to annotated links to outside readings that we found particularly useful relating to U.S. hyper-polarization, threats to peace (and actual violence) in other countries, and related topics of interest. Each Newsletter is posted on BI, and sent out by email through Substack to subscribers. You can sign up to receive your copy here and find the latest newsletter here or on our BI Newsletter page, which also provides access to all the past newsletters, going back to 2017.

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