- Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice
- Managing the Complicated vs. the Complex
- The Critical Difference Between Complex and Complicated
- 10 Simple Things That Are Deceptively Complex
There are two kinds of significant systems:
- Complicated
- Complex
Complicated systems are ones that have many mechanical parts, like a 777 plane. The parts have relationships with one another, but the parts don’t change just because they interact. Aging in complicated systems is mostly that the parts wear out over the lifetime of the system.
Complex systems also have parts and relationships, but the parts change all the time because of those relationships. The relationships modify over the course of the system’s lifetime as well.
Any system is some mixture of complicated and complex. Modern complicated systems only exist within a context of some complex adaptive system. See Drift into Failure: From Hunting Broken Components to Understanding Complex Systems for the best example I have run across, about how a complicated machine can break because of the complex system in which it must exist.
Aging in complex systems is, well, complex.
