Getting Out Of Control: Emergent Leadership in a Complex World

Getting Out of Control

Getting Out of Control

Emergent Leadership in a Complex World

Neil Chilson

New Degree Press

Copyright © 2021 Neil Chilson

All rights reserved.

Getting Out of Control

Emergent Leadership in a Complex World

ISBN

978-1-63676-843-4 Paperback

978-1-63730-199-9 Kindle Ebook

978-1-63730-287-3 Ebook

Contents

Introduction

The World Is Out of Control

Our Brains, Prosperity, and Emergent Order

What is Emergent Order?

How Emergent Order Emerged

Leadership Without Control

Your Role in Emergent Systems

Emergent Leadership in Public Policy

Case Studies

Your Actions Still Matter: They Can Change You

Your Actions Still Matter: They Can Change the World

You Need Your Communities and Your Communities Need You

Six Principles of the Emergent Mindset

Conclusion

Acknowledgements

Bibliography

To my daughter Alice. Stay in awe.

He was flesh: flesh, bone, muscle, fluid, orifices, hair, and skin. His body was controlled by laws he did not understand.

– James Baldwin, Another Country

It’s an election hall of idiots, for idiots, and by idiots, and it works marvelously.

– Kevin Kelly, Out of Control

Introduction

Are you in control of yourself? Reach your right arm out, point your finger, and touch your nose. If you can do that, you must be in control of yourself, right? But how did that movement happen? How did you move your arm? What signals did you send to which muscles commanding them to contract or relax?

Actually, how did your arm even form? You know it’s made from the raw materials you eat at meals, but how did that pizza from last week get turned into your bicep and bone and index finger? You didn’t control that process of turning food into your body. No one did. That spectacularly complex chemical and biological feat of turning pizza into muscle (or bone or fat) happened without anyone in charge. 

It happened because your body is a dynamic, complex adaptive system with emergent properties. Simply put, your body is more than the sum of its parts. Your body is your own very personal example of the mystery and the power of this book’s core theme: emergent order.

But it is only one example. We are surrounded by emergent order—order that occurs without design or control—on all scales. From ant colonies to our brains to our cities to our economies, emergent order is everywhere. Yet we rarely think about this order. Instead, many people casually think about our complex modern world as primarily the result of someone else’s design and control. 

And increasingly we worry that the world is growing too complex to be under anyone’s control. Certainly, the world is getting more connected and complicated. International trade, international communications, and international travel have all skyrocketed. Encountering ideas outside our own experience is as easy as picking up our smartphones. The volume of human knowledge means we rely on experts and specialists more than ever in human history.

Faced with this complexity, we’ve become obsessed with getting control of ourselves, our jobs, and our families. CEOs want to control their companies; politicians and policymakers want to control the economy. Recently, everyone is trying to figure out what to do to get the COVID-19 pandemic under control. 

We want control because as humans, we have a limited ability to comprehend complexity. We’re a species that developed in small tribes. For most of human history, the average human never encountered more than a hundred other humans. As a species of tribal animals, we are evolutionarily attuned to be comfortable in small groups. Scientists estimate human brains can only keep track of about 150 relationships and only five of them closely.¹ Historically, our small groups—largely family members—were led by a tribal leader who was like us, shared our perspective and experiences, and therefore could be expected to make decisions with our interests in mind. Therefore, many of us are comfortable leaving hard decisions to leaders. We’re built that way. And when chaos arises, we expect the people in charge to restore order. 

The instinct to impose order on chaos is human. Humans are goal-setting and tool-using animals. As individuals, we each plan our minutes, hours, days, and our lives. Faced with a deluge of information, we seek to explain, understand, predict, and control the environment around us, in part to improve our planning. 

Likewise, in science and politics we often look to experts to design solutions to complex problems. We expect there to be a right answer and for the smartest people to be able to find it. When we see a big problem, we want a big solution. We depend on the people in charge to solve problems that are beyond us, and we’re disappointed when they fail. 

In our own lives, we also face increased complexity. More choices, more options, more opportunities, more pitfalls. These options are wonderful because they improve our ability to build a life we want. But this doesn’t help us decide what that life should be. People are searching for a personal GPS to set the destination for their lives and guide them there. We look to rigorous systems of personal productivity, detailed sets of mantras and codicils, and belief systems in religion or politics. We’re attracted to complex systems that promise to make our lives simpler. 

Research indicates that people increasingly want tools that simplify and clarify their lives. The self-development industry is predicted to grow 5.6 percent between 2016 and 2020.² The market for self-development books and other media, along with self-development apps, personal coaching services, and motivational speakers continues to explode. The rapid growth of personal management and workplace organization applications demonstrates that people want services to manage complexity. Hundreds of productivity apps are available in the Google Play Store and Apple App Store, and articles like Forty best productivity apps are common online today.³ Many of us are looking for that perfect app to help us design a more productive, satisfying life—one that is in control. 

No one is more attracted to the promise of control than the smartest and most successful. When a politician or a regulator encounters public calls for action on a difficult problem, few can say, This isn’t the kind of problem we can fix. Instead, they boldly draft dense legislation and create complex rules. They assemble coalitions to negotiate language that few will read and fewer will understand (there are more than three hundred thousand federal crimes in the US and well over one million regulatory commands at the federal level).⁴ But it’s not just politicians who fall victim to the illusion of control. Successful businesspeople, leaders, and celebrities often see their success as evidence that they should control things, both in the areas where they have had success, but also in other unrelated fields. 

Can You Control the Complex?

The most ambitious and arrogant of these world builders—tyrants like Joseph Stalin or Adolf Hitler—tried to wipe out history and redesign society from the top down. They failed to wipe out history, but they did murderously wipe out the futures of millions of people. Other schemes to gain control are more modest but still deliver unintended consequences at best. Forced relocation of slums in Mumbai, restrictive zoning in US cities, occupational licensing unrelated to legitimate safety concerns, and risk-averse Food and Drug Administration reviews of vaccines are just some of many examples. Such schemes accrete like rusty sand in the joints of society. The effect can also be deadly, but it is slower and often lacks a baseline for comparison and is therefore harder to recognize. 

In our personal lives, the search for control can also be destructive. The continuous tension between the desire to control the world around us and our inability to do so is a great source of stress. Even those who seem to have the resources and power to dictate the world around them cannot control many of the most important things in life: relationships, love, and health. Entertainment news headlines offer many examples of entrepreneurs, organizers, and artists crushing the very thing they most value because they try to control it. 

All this destruction begins with misunderstanding how complex complex things are. The problem is not just a lack of knowledge. It is that in such complex systems, side effects can swamp intended effects, even for seemingly small changes. 

I have been fascinated with the strange characteristics of complex systems since my early teen years. I read two books in those years which shaped the course of my life. The first was James Gleick’s Chaos.⁵ This popular science book explored the then-nascent computer science research into the strange order that underlies seemingly chaotic natural and mathematical systems. From that book I learned about fractals, nonlinear systems, and other messy but still somehow ordered systems. The second book was Metamagical Themas by Douglas Hofstadter, which talked about memes, strange attractors, self-referential systems, and complexity theory (among many other things).⁶

I spent hours and hours with these books. I won a science fair in eighth grade with software I wrote to generate strange attractors. These books are why I studied computer science. However, I never could have predicted how profoundly they would influence my personal and professional life. 

My teenage self lacked the math skills to absorb all the ideas in these books. But two key ideas from these books permeated into my very core:

Beautifully ordered systems can and regularly do emerge from the independent actions of molecules or cells or people, without anyone being in charge. And in fact, seemingly small interventions into a complex system could send it spinning out of control and even destroy it.⁷

These concepts were fascinating to me but didn’t seem to have much practical use when, as a computer scientist and software developer I was writing banking software or studying how to classify the earthquake-readiness of government buildings. 

But when I became a lawyer, I repeatedly saw very smart people trying to design rules to govern complex systems with little humility about what success they should expect. Laws and regulations often looked like a series of software patches, each applied to correct the unintended consequences of the previous patch—and each applied with full confidence that this time the system was tamed and controlled.

Now, emergent order had something to say. And what it said was that there was a real mismatch between what regulators were trying to control and what they could control. 

Meanwhile, I myself became part of the policymaking process. At the Federal Trade Commission, I advised Commissioner and eventually acting Chairman Maureen Ohlhausen on a wide range of legal cases. I struggled with how to know that I was making things better. What principles ensured that our interventions improved lives, both in the immediate term and over the long term? Again, I leaned heavily on the idea of emergent order when describing whether and what kind of intervention was appropriate as I advised Chairman Ohlhausen. 

This idea of emergent order, in my bones from an early age, also shaped my personal practices. As I have transitioned from grad student to lawyer to husband and father, life has grown more complicated. More demands on my time but also less direction on how to spend it forced me to establish habits while accepting the impossibility of keeping everything the same. I became a productivity junkie but still to this day struggle with the insecurity that I am not being as productive as I could or should be. I still wonder how I should spend my time. 

From Policy to the Personal: The Emergent Mindset

All of this has shaped what I’ll call an emergent mindset. This is the framework I use to explain, understand, and deal with complexity at home and at work—at both the personal scale and the policy scale. Because I use this mindset as I lead myself and others in both worlds—personal and policy—I’ll talk about both in this book.

This is admittedly unusual, but it is wholly intentional. There aren’t many books that discuss leadership both in the world of public policy and in private life; typically, these are seen as separate spheres with separate challenges and different tool sets. I intuitively felt that common principles connected these two spheres of life. But it took talking this over with some friends (in particular, my friend Mike Tolhurst) to help me vocalize the connection. Emergent order is ubiquitous in both the personal and public spheres of life. For those who seek to lead, the same principles apply even though the scope of the application differs.

Emergent order links private life and public policy in another way. Policy leaders seek to build systems to protect and empower people. Understanding how emergent order affects everyday life can help policymakers more accurately assess what gaps need filling. It can also help prevent well-intentioned but unnecessary and even harmful policy interventions. This understanding can help policy leaders avoid overreaching into private spheres where their particular tools may not be a good fit.

And from the position of everyday citizens, understanding emergent order can help us step beyond our ingrained, tribal tendency to approach difficult challenges by seeking to control things—or to demand that leaders control things for us. In a rapidly changing world, understanding emergent order can help us improve our personal actions and interactions with our families and communities. It can also alleviate the public’s sense of unease that might otherwise drive rash policy choices. 

Six Principles of the Emergent Mindset

To sum up, there can be order without control. In fact, we see this result constantly, in nature’s patterns and throughout human society. This has important implications for leaders in public and private life. Here are six basic principles for leadership in a complex world of emergent order.

•Expect complicated results even from simple actions. Complex group behaviors can and often do emerge from many interactions of individual actors following simple rules. Likewise, when we take a simple action expecting a predictable result, if that action feeds into a complex system, we should expect the unexpected. And when we see a complex phenomenon, we should consider whether it is generated by relatively simple individual behaviors repeated many times across many individuals.

•Don’t try to control what you cannot. Your actions contribute to many larger systems, but usually it’s impossible to directly connect your actions to the outcomes. All but the simplest events have multiple inextricably integrated causes. You cannot control what others do, but you can choose how you react. In fact, the only events you have substantial control over are your actions. Focus there, because trying to control what you cannot is a recipe for stress in personal life and a prescription for disaster in public policy. Attempting to exert control isn’t just futile; it can actually destroy the very thing you are trying to preserve, like grasping an eddy in a stream. 

•Be humble. Because you cannot control the results in the world, you should be modest in your promises to others and yourself—particularly if you are making decisions that affect other people’s lives. The bigger the potential effect of your decision, the more humble you ought to be when predicting the likely outcome. 

•Push decisions down close to the important information. Emergent systems work best when there are simple rules at the lowest level possible. Rules can be simpler at the local level because the domain is smaller and there is less need to relay reliable information. Rather than centralizing decision making several levels removed from the facts, empower those closest to the relevant facts to decide.

•You can make the world better by making yourself better. You are part of many different dynamic, complex adaptive systems. You have influence, even though you do not have control. But by taking control of what you can—yourself—and letting go of the rest, you can help the various systems in which you participate to become more fitted to their function.

•Learn from constraints—and choose them well. Habits and societal institutions constrain us as individuals. Both provide the simple rules that often enable emergent order to produce something complex in our lives and our society. Our habits are the result of feedback loops; when we repeatedly exercise conscious decision-making, we push our complex selves toward a new pattern that can endure in the face of varying conditions. Societal institutions, too, are the result of untold individual choices. We can think of them as the emergent habits, routines, and processes of groups. When we participate in an institution, like a church or a social norm, we help shape and perpetuate it. And the institution also shapes us. We must recognize the wisdom accumulated in such constraints, but without holding them too sacred. We should pick our habits and our institutions carefully and work to develop them.

These principles are not easy to implement. They require a perspective that at once embraces our autonomy as leaders and admits our limitations as part of something bigger. But they offer a chance to productively grapple with the increased complexity of the world and of our lives. If you have ever looked around at the modern world and thought that it is out of control, the message of this book is that you are right! My goal is to help you grow more comfortable with that idea and salvage some personal improvement or fulfillment from it. If you wonder how to think about big policy questions, this book offers a new perspective on the challenges and opportunities of government leadership in an age of complexity. If you are tired of new productivity hacks having temporary effects, this book will help you understand why so many of our attempts to improve fail and how to adapt to that.

Here is how we will approach this journey: 

•In Chapters One and Two, we’ll explore how life got so complicated, bestowing enormous benefits yet taxing our physical, mental, and organizational capacities. 

•In Chapters Three and Four, we’ll learn what emergent order is and how the study of emergent order developed. 

•In Chapters Five and Six, we’ll examine lessons for leadership and where you fit in a world of emergent order.

•In Chapters Seven and Eight, we’ll see how emergent leadership applies to public policy and explore two policy case studies. 

•In Chapters Nine, Ten, and Eleven, we’ll examine why, in a world of emergent order, your actions matter because they can change you, your community, and the world. 

•Finally, in Chapter Twelve I’ll recap the six principles listed above and show how, based on lessons in the book, you can apply these principles as a leader in public or private life. 

Emergent order is a counterintuitive concept to most people. When we seek to lead, we often seek to control. But if we cannot even control the functioning of our own bodies, what hope is there? In an age of increasing complexity, our hope as leaders lies not in gaining control, but in relying on emergent order to help us understand ourselves and our world better and react appropriately. So, how about it? Are you ready to get out of control?

1 R.I.M. Dunbar, Neocortex size as a constraint on group size in primates, Journal of Human Evolution, 22, no. 6 (June 1992).

2 John LaRosa, What’s Next for the $9.9 Billion Personal Development Industry, Market Research, January 17, 2018.