Making Things Work: Solving Complex Problems in a Complex World

"Making Things Work" describes how the concepts of complex systems can help in solving the complex problems facing us today. In easy to understand language, this book explains how effectively organizing people can solve complex problems in: ? healthcare ? education ? military conflict ? ethnic violence and terrorism ? third world development. When a problem is highly complex one person cannot solve it alone, but organizations of people can, if they know how to work together. Making Things Work explains why traditional organizations and traditional forms of control and planning are not effective for addressing these tasks. It draws on basic insights from complex systems research - emergence, complexity, patterns, networks and evolution to explain how effective teams form through cooperation and competition, and how to make non-hierarchical organizations effective at their tasks. Everyone can take away something from the practical and instructive problem-solving approach described in this book.              Praise for Making Things Work:  "Yaneer Bar-Yam is among the world's two or three best writers on complexity. In Making Things Work, he homes in on a handful of complexity theory's most important ideas, such as emergence, interdependence, scale, networks, and evolution. With beautifully clear writing and examples, he explains what these ideas mean in the context of complexity theory, and he shows why they're important to understanding the world around us. Making Things Work is a superb introduction to complexity theory-suitable for students, policymakers, and the educated lay public. Yaneer Bar-Yam is one of few specialists able to make complexity simple." -Thomas Homer-Dixon, author of "The Ingenuity Gap," Director of the Trudeau Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, and Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science, at the University of Toronto.