WARNING – You are entering geek territory, Sisu Shibui After Hours. Don’t expect anything practical, and feel free to pour yourself an adult beverage.

Organizations such as businesses are complex adaptive systems (CAS). The inevitably leads whoever digs deeper into the patterns and pathologies of corporate function and dysfunction to CAS concepts. That’s a high level of abstraction, many layers removed from practical solutions and tools. But to improve a system, it helps to understand how the system works. And as a professionally trained engineer, it is very much in my nature.

They say you don’t understand something if you can’t explain it, and that writing is proof of thinking. So this is me trying to explain CAS concepts to me, grappling with one keyword at a time. The goal is to make the list longer and the articles shorter.

Proximity

Hierarchy

Context