Several years ago a group of scientists formed the Santa Fe Institute (SFI), dedicated to a multi-disciplined collaboration on the study of natural systems. The combination of economics, biology, physics and other disciplines gave rise to a whole new generation of thought and practice in understanding how natural systems work.

In nature, most evolutionary systems are what the scientists call “Complex Adaptive Systems” (CAS), a system in which there are “agents”, who have some degree of intelligence and independence of behavior, and have the ability to modify their behavior based on their success in the “environment”. The usual examples of this behavior are the competition between the hunter and the hunted, and the collaborative nature of social insects.

If you study the behavior of these systems, some fundamental laws appear. The early identification of some of these laws has given rise to a whole new vocabulary, “emergent properties” being the ability of the ant colony to do things together that you would not expect by studying the individual ant, the metaphor of all the possible solutions to a particular problem being seen as a “solution landscape” which can be “walked” by “agents” searching for an optimum solution. “Phase transitions” being the tendency of these systems to move from one state to another suddenly, rather than gradually, and for the best solutions to lie close to the “edge of chaos”.

The following quote, taken from “Who's Afraid of Schrodlinger's Cat “ offers a contrast of this new science and the disciplines from which it was derived:

“Newtonian science was about organized simplicity . In physics, biology, and chemistry, and in associated thinking to do with economics and society, those who followed Newton 's example sought to reduce the observed world to a few simple laws and components. Scientific method itself was concerned with viewing systems in isolation from their environment, breaking them down into their simplest component parts, and then using these parts to predict the unfolding future of the system. Simplicity – including smooth linear development, determinism, and predictability – was the cornerstone of this approach.

But there are naturally complex structures that defy so reductive an approach, things like the brain, a cell, a city, a rain forest, or a beehive. If we are to study these at all, they seem more suited to the new scientific thinking of the twentieth century, which is concerned with organizational complexity . Quantum theory, chaos, and now complexity theory all concentrate on the emergent whole that cannot be reduced to the sum of its parts, on discontinuous, nonlinear change that leads abruptly to surprising new states or forms, on indeterminacy and unpredictability. Chaos and complexity, opposite sides of the same coin, concentrate on the turbulent disorder lurking at the edge of many supposedly predictable systems, and then, in turn, on the surprising new order discovered at the edge of chaos.

This new order acts as a “strange attractor,” that pulls energy or matter into a complex pattern. The whirlpool is one such self-organizing pattern. It pulls water molecules surging around it into a tight funnel, and the shape persists although the water flowing through it is different at every moment. The human body also is such a complex self-organizing system. It its case, it takes seven years for all the material content to flow through, but the pattern persists.

Complexity studies are the central focus of the Santa Fe Institute. One of its leading scientists, Stuart Kauffman, believes that the model of chaos and strange attractors can be applied to the problem of how order arises in evolution. According to him, living communities are the most striking examples available of organized complexity. The genome system of any higher metazoan cell encodes 10,000 to 100,000 genes that orchestrate development in the embryo from a single cell. The human immune system deploys about 100 million different antibody molecules in complex, harmonized patterns. Each of these systems is the result of evolution. Kauffman challenges the orthodox Darwinian idea that such wonderful order and complexity could result from the random selection and mutation of “an accidental machine”.”

That article goes on to caution about the incompleteness of the research, and the existence of several points of view on the existence of fundamental laws which govern all complex adaptive systems.

While it is not clear that such a “unified theory” of the laws of behavior of complex systems will be eventually discovered, it is clear at this point that a tremendous amount of research has been done and is ongoing in complexity science and related fields, and that there are some fundamental behaviors that seem to exist in a wide variety of systems.

It is also clear that the extrapolation of these natural system rules to business systems has given rise to a new generation of modeling and optimization techniques which promise to revolutionize the way we do business.