The Royal Society of Arts
I'm an RSA Fellow and have been since 2008. I'm currently writing a paper about how we can connect up the whole of the Fellowship into what I call a mind of minds. The working title for this is RSA Connect. So I'm going to post here sections of the Paper as they evolve. This is one of the many Appendices and this covers an aspect of complexity in systems.
Appendix – Complexity
Failure in Public Administration and Infrastructure Delivery
Handling complexity and uncertainty in project delivery and organisational operation requires adaptive networks of communication and trust. Here, we examine a set of major UK failures in which such networks were missing, weak or poorly designed, and we group them into three broad types: ‘non-system’ or architecture failures, fragmentation and reorganisation failures, and megaproject governance failures. In each, there is no effective system-of-systems capable of integrating information, aligning action and updating in real time; the result is significant, often catastrophic, failure.
This is one of a set of appendices on complexity, focusing on failure in UK public administration and infrastructure delivery. It examines a series of major cases – from infected blood, Shipman and Mid Staffordshire to Grenfell, Horizon, Crossrail, HS2 and Covid-19 – and shows that, beneath their differences, they share a common pattern: systems designed as if complexity and uncertainty could be tamed in advance by rigid contracts, regulatory processes and siloed expertise, rather than by adaptive, fully networked ways of knowing and acting. The appendix groups these failures into three types – missing “system-of-systems” architectures, fragmentation and reorganisation failures, and megaproject governance failures – and argues that in each case, critical knowledge existed but could not be assembled into a coherent, shared picture in time to avert disaster. It closes by sketching an alternative: the proposed RSA Connect “mind of minds”, in which Fellows’ expertise and experience form evolving semantic clusters that allow surprise to be registered, tested and turned into new meaning, offering a template for a more honest and intelligent way of handling complexity.