Complexity: When 1+2 becomes 4

If you search for fix-its only after nasty surprises arrive, it may be too late. Singapore has leapt into the world of trend-spotting with more centres dedicated to finding ways to reduce its vulnerability to future shocks in today's highly unpredictable world. This is the first of a five-part series on experts in Singapore tackling the future today.

Mr Jan Wouter Vasbinder understands complexity science and tries to make it simple.

Think of a boy playing with sand on the beach, he says. The boy dribbles sand particles and starts to make a pile. He builds it higher and higher until, suddenly, it collapses.

The intricate connections and collisions between nature, human beings and systems are like that pile of sand on the beach, says Mr Vasbinder, 68.

And he points out a paradox - it was instability that first held the thousands of sand particles together, and it was also instability that caused the pile to crumble at some critical moment.

"Just one particle of sand can cause the pile to collapse. The trouble is, no one can predict when and which particle will cause the collapse," he says.

The interactions between sand particles offer a way to explain a relatively new science that tries to identify and understand the underlying principles that lead to complexity. What happened to that pile of sand on the beach can also be applied to a society facing new challenges in a turbulent world that will be rocked by shocks and changes.

Because the world has become so interconnected, an event in one place can have an impact on the lives of many people in far-flung regions.

For example, the 2011 earthquake in Japan triggered a tsunami that in turn damaged the Fukushima nuclear reactor. For some time afterwards, the triple disasters disrupted Japan's extensive supply chains to the world.

Clueless about complexity

Complexity science scrutinises the connections and contradictions, says Mr Vasbinder, director of the Complexity Programme set up in 2011 at Nanyang Technological University (NTU). Try as he might, however, he has a tough time explaining complexity science to the uninitiated.

Complexity, he says, is the label people stick on many problems they do not understand.

"When we label a problem complex, we are basically saying: 'We have no clue how to analyse this problem, let alone solve it.' The solution is not to see a problem in isolation, but to see its connections to and interactions with other problems," he explains.

For example, cancer treatments target cancer cells during therapy. He says: "But it turns out that a large assembly of cancer cells can find ways to avoid the effects of therapy. If we want to fight cancer effectively, we need to understand the connections between the growing group of cancer cells."

The lessons learnt from collapsing sand piles and spreading cancer help explain the importance of understanding complexity in preparing for future shocks.

"The world needs to find ways to deal with complexity and establish some control over our future," says Mr Vasbinder.

The Dutch-born researcher graduated in physics from the Technical University of Delft in The Netherlands in 1972, before serving in various positions in research and government. In 2006, he founded a complexity science organisation called the Institute Para Limes in Holland.

Five years later, he moved to Singapore to take up his current post. He arrived here "totally ignorant of the culture, history and ways of doing things", and learnt by meeting civil servants, professionals and ordinary people.

Converts in Singapore

One thing he found out was that Singapore had a head start over many other countries in dealing with complexity issues. Its civil service had groups in several ministries with people trained to understand complexity and future studies, to prepare for future shocks.

"The thinkers in the civil service realised in the 1990s that the problems faced by Singapore were complex by nature and could not be solved by hierarchical or linear models of thinking," says Mr Vasbinder. "Singapore in itself is a complex system - one where the Western and Eastern worlds come together."

Singapore's future success, he thinks, will be determined by gaining superior insight into the dynamics of the way the world is changing.

The Complexity Programme set up at NTU three years ago was this year renamed Para Limes, which means "beyond boundaries". It laid the groundwork for the establishment of the Complexity Institute at the university this year.

Lessons from Lao Tzu

THE author of four books on innovation and knowledge management, Mr Vasbinder has not been able to put down a book he stumbled upon after arriving here, Dao De Jing.

Written in the third century BC in China by the sage Lao Tzu, it is regarded by Taoists as the essential guide to living a rich spiritual and ethical life.

"It's a beautiful book, and the more I read it, the more I sense it embodies wisdom that seems to have been lost in our Western reductionist thinking," says Mr Vasbinder.

He reaches for the book in his room, which is sparsely furnished except for the blooms from two large pots of orchids. Like an excited schoolboy, he loudly recites his favourite stanza, Verse 63:

That in the world that is difficult

Emerges from what is easy

That which is great to the world

Emerges from what is tiny

"To me, that is pure complexity thinking. Everything is connected, and everything relates to each other," he says.

The West is only just discovering the complexity of the world, he adds, whereas China has always known it and people there arrange their lives according to it.

In going from Third World to First World, Singapore relied on the Western model of linear thinking, where clear goals are set by a group of leaders and people follow and achieve results.

But many of today's issues - falling birth rates, ageing populations, climate change, rising costs of health care - cannot be solved using linear ways of thinking.

Now that Singapore has become a First World country, its leaders have to create new ways of leading, says Mr Vasbinder.

This phase will be more challenging as there are no models for Singapore to follow. It must create new paths for itself, he says.

"The good news is that Singapore, which seems to have rules for everything, has no rules for complexity - yet," he says.

"Learning how to master complexity will allow it to gain a decisive advantage over those who don't."

Softening the effects of future shocks

Rather than live dangerously and react only after disaster strikes, Singapore believes problems of the future ought to be tackled now.

The effects of future shocks can be mitigated by building expertise to prepare and plan for trouble well before it comes.

The civil service made a head start on dealing with complex issues more than 20 years ago by setting up the Scenario Planning Office. Its officers planned for the unthinkable problems that could affect Singapore.

In 2010, the Government formed a Strategic Futures Network involving deputy secretaries from all ministries, as part of efforts to anticipate and deal with unexpected problems.

Government units now tackle everything from climate change to population issues in a coordinated way. No fewer than four research centres have been created as well.

The newest is the Complexity Institute set up by Nanyang Technological University this year.

The institute is headed by Professor Steve Lansing, an anthropologist, and Professor Peter Sloot, a computer scientist.

It will work with sociologists, computation scientists and psychologists, among others, in other universities and research bodies in Singapore. It will do inter-disciplinary work in complexity science to look for hidden connections between seemingly unrelated problems. Researchers will identify and aim to understand underlying factors that drive many of the world's issues on urbanisation, energy shortage, terrorism and the impact of technology on society.

Failure on the part of governments and people to see connections between problems can lead to decision-making that creates even bigger problems.

Dutch-born physicist Jan Wouter Vasbinder, who helped set up the institute, says a complex system contains many individual parts, and when these parts interact, new phenomena emerge.

You see this happening in traffic jams, food crises or a stock market crash. For example, the 2000 stock market crash that resulted in Wall Street losing US$8 trillion of wealth is said by market experts to have been caused by corporate corruption and the dot.com bubble bursting, among other factors. Or take the insecticide DDT, which was effective in the war against malaria but proved lethal to the environment. Solving one problem led to the creation of a new one.

Mr Vasbinder, whose expertise is in helping organisations develop their strategies for the future, says complex problems cannot be solved but they can be dealt with.

"A top-down approach is often not the best way because that tends to overlook the hidden connections between parts of the system," he says.

He sees complexity science at work all the time, even in the political arena. He thinks Singapore voters have begun sending signals to the Government that change and new pathways are needed.

The fall in support for the ruling People's Action Party in the 2011 General Election, the angry reactions to policies allowing more foreigners into Singapore and expressions of frustration with public transport congestion and train breakdowns were symptoms of complex problems, he said. They show how individual, separate issues can interact and lead to unexpected outcomes.

Knowing that, policymakers who gain a better understanding of what problems are about can craft policies that not only address the issues but also take into account people's concerns.

The creation of the Complexity Institute complements the setting up of the Social Lab last year at the Institute of Policy Studies to study how social perceptions, attitudes and behaviours will evolve in future.

Research on demographic trends and the way society adapts to changes will shed light on changing social attitudes, says Dr Tan Ern Ser, a sociologist who heads the lab. His eight-person team will conduct a long-term longitudinal study of 5,000 households to track changes in the lives of the same people over time.

The two research centres are the most recent efforts by Singapore to tackle complexity and stay focused on the future.

In 2004, the Government set up the Risk Assessment and Horizon Scanning programme as part of the National Security Coordination Secretariat at the Prime Minister's Office (PMO).

And in 2009, the Centre for Strategic Futures (CSF) was started at the Public Service Division of the PMO. Its researchers analyse problems to detect future trends in governance, food sources and economic survival, among others.

To study problems, researchers seek a diversity of ideas during discussions.

"People who think about the future tend to congregate with others who do the same. Failure in foresight is usually because of insufficient diversity," the centre said last year in its publication for a foresight conference.

Writing in The Straits Times last month, former civil service chief and senior adviser to the CSF Peter Ho said tackling the problems of complexity calls for breaking down organisational silos so common in bureaucracies.

A "whole of government approach" has become a government priority in tackling large multi-faceted issues, he wrote.

Coordinating bodies have been set up to deal with cross-cutting strategic issues, such as the National Security Coordination Secretariat, the National Climate Change Secretariat and the National Population and Talent Division. Mr Ho said the Our Singapore Conversation series of more than 600 dialogues involving nearly 50,000 participants could be thought of as a "whole of nation" approach to surfacing insights from citizens for the Government.

And that, too, is tackling complexity head-on.

mnirmala@sph.com.sg

This article was published on Aug 25 in The Straits Times.

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