Attention, Predictability, Complexity

External Complexity Necessitates Internal Complexity

The morning of the day that I started this essay, I drove distracted on my way into work. I was a diffuse field of attention, stretching across the car, well outside of it and into the environment, extending forward and backwards in time—wholly scattered—being tugged back to moments from the previous week and pulled into the intense interactions just that morning with my 17-year-old son about whether and when he was waking up and why had he fallen back asleep again and then oh my god you’re using all the hot water and then of course… feeling terrible about overreacting, slipping into a rage-hangover and feeling bad about being so intense, wondering if I’m a terrible father—and then, alternately distracted, being tugged lightly into the near future just for a moment—anticipating the next few hours, my day, my week, my life... Though I’m not good at being in the future (for reasons touched on in the essay “Temporal Balance and Attenuation”), I do occasionally poke my head into the future for anticipatory and anxiety-related reasons)—and then suddenly I lurched back into the present and my actual body, when I realized just how distracted I was, when it occurred to me that I was operating a vehicle weighing thousands of pounds, hurtling at dozens of miles per hour. I fretted for a little while over just how catastrophic it would be if the traffic and road conditions on my route hadn’t been as predictable as they were... and for the duration of that little fretting session, I wasn’t exactly fully present either, though present enough to make it safely to work, on the route I have taken about 10 times per week for the last 2 years, on road systems that are nearly identical to the ones I have driven on for the last 19 years. I spent the remainder of my commute that day thinking about all of the things that make it possible to drive several miles at speed in such an absent state.

The predictability of this system that I occupy—this specific system of roads, vehicles, practices, laws, and many other factors that through a combination of past design, engineering, and present behavior takes me from place to place—the predictability of that system determines just how much focused attention is required of me, and how safe it is for me to divert attention elsewhere. This degree of predictability also determines just how much embodiment is warranted (the degree to which awareness & behavior is informed by present sensory experience). This degree of predictability perhaps determines how useful conscious memory is in navigating that system. Driving my car on this particular road proves, most of the time, to be extremely predictable. Thus, being a diffuse and disembodied field of attention isn’t necessarily going to be catastrophic. I really only need to be somewhat there in order to arrive safely 99% of the time. There are a number of factors that contribute to this degree of both felt and actual predictability:

• The road is paved and the tires on my vehicle ensure consistent and predictable acceleration, momentum, and braking.

• The design of my vehicle and regulation on design ensure it adheres to known practices to increase predictability/consistency/stability of vehicle behavior, how it interacts with the road, and how I interact with the vehicle.

• The area around the road is actively maintained, which isolates my vehicle from the environment.

• The road and driving laws provide governing constraints to ensure we remain on the unobstructed path, which other drivers will also be taking. This also means I don’t have to constantly be scanning for cars incoming from unexpected vectors.

• Speed limits make it so that even subconsciously, I can just settle into the “speed of traffic” which is fairly consistent between my house and my work.

• My car is enclosed, which isolates me from the environment, which makes the whole context and experience feel fully bounded and prevents me from feeling at risk even while traveling at dangerous speeds.

• Brake lights, traffic lights, and fixed structures like the gate to enter base offer very clear indications of when it’s time to ramp up presence, consciousness, embodiment, and deliberateness.

This is just a handful of examples of things that constrain this system to be as predictable as it is. In studying complex systems theories, I learned about different kinds of constraints that factor into making a system predictable—fixed constraints, which prevent any pattern but the specifically desired ones from occurring, governing constraints which guide patterns by, for example, compelling agents to keep within certain bounds (while maintaining their capacity to make alternate choices), and bounding constraints which… I guess they ensure the system is, functionally, wholly itself in certain regards and not constantly shifting in composition (my car is enclosed, so the weather and insects have little influence over my ability to interact with the steering wheel). As a result of these constraints, I can basically somnambulate to and from work every day. Even in traffic, I can make my way most days without a moment of conscious noticing, without forming memories. When I do engage in any kind of directed noticing, it mostly will not be related to my task.

You see, in addition to incessant (dangerous?) daydreaming, I am also that weirdo who looks at other people in their cars. I have considered writing about this as well…

But here is a topic I have attempted to write about a lot of times: the relationship between how open and complex a system is and the degree to which the system necessarily involves human attention, sensemaking, and responsive, reflexive adaptation. I’m gonna try again here, because this topic is front of mind for me.

I usually think about complexity as a descriptor of systemic openness and interconnectedness. Most of how I think about complexity is informed by Dave Snowden, but I also draw on authors like Melanie Mitchell, Geoffrey West, Stuart Kauffman,

Steven Johnson

, Sonja Blignaut, Chris Corrigan, Brian Walker, David Salt, Jennifer Garvey Berger, Ann Pendleton-Jullian, and honestly lots of others..

In contrast to that list of elements of intentional, designed, engineered things which drive the system to be predictable and closed, I opened this essay highlighting ways in which it is open, suggesting a handful of weird elements that enter into the system of vehicle traffic. These are factors like:

• Distractions of the passing environment

• Memories

• My temperament

• My relationship with my son (even though he’s not present)

• The size of our hot water heater

• My insecurity as a father

All of these elements are things that enter into the system which facilitates my commute through the open vector of my brain. Imagine if a deer had crossed the road and I had failed to react in time, as I was busy ruminating on interactions with my son. It could be said that this system experienced failure at least partially as a result of the size of my hot water heater (if it were larger, I wouldn’t be so concerned with the kid using up all the hot water).

The fact that such weird elements can enter into and affect what happens within the system here is a good indication of complexity. If humans are involved, a system has some degree of complexity because we ourselves are open, unpredictable systems, and therefore any system that contains us is, to some degree, complex. Design (as in experience design or human-centered design) can be framed as a method of making the behavior of humans within a system more predictable to account for and reduce this complexity. We aim to make interfaces more intuitive so that we can anticipate with some degree of certainty that when they want to perform some kind of task, they will do it in a way that is coherent with the system, the software, the artifact they are interacting with, that they will do it in the way that prevents failure.

Of course, the designers of these roads aren’t reasonably going to make it their business to ensure that all drivers have sufficiently-sized water heaters for their family-size (even though the system momentarily included my hot water heater). They are more likely to do things like put a blinking sign indicating anticipatable types of incursions into this open system, anticipating that it will prompt intentional alertness—presence and embodiment in my task—and thus reduce the likelihood of my fugue state from starting or continuing, regardless of its origins. They might also remove brush from the side of the road to make more visible movement of incoming creatures so that they serve this awakening role. It doesn’t make the system less open—it governs and incites behavior within the system. They might also build a bridge over the road specifically for wildlife, and this might be best understood as an enabling constraint, which we won’t get into, because they can actually serve to make a system less predictable.

And then in a more extreme intervention, cars might be made autonomous, taking the complex humans out of the picture entirely in favor of less complex, more predictable software. If we take this route, my hot water heater has little chance of spontaneously intruding into the system. It becomes more closed by inhibiting my capacity to participate in it. Becoming more constrained, be that through bounding constraints (what if we fully enclosed the whole route in a series of tubes), or through governing constraints like laws or perhaps increased training to get a drivers license, or through any number of other constraining approaches, the system becomes more predictable.

But making systems wholly ordered is frequently beyond possibility. Often, it turns out to be unwise, even if it is feasible. If the system that contains this system remains itself complex, then the intrusion of that unpredictability into this system’s context means constraints might result in failure. This is what it means when people say external complexity necessitates internal complexity. Only a complex thing can navigate complexity. This is why the evaluation system of the Air Force sucks, and persists in sucking across many iterations, because we’ve tried to make something excessively ordered for its context, while it still contains highly complex elements (people). This is why bureaucracies frequently harm people when they’re trying to help. Not because they are too complex, but because they are insufficiently complex. Incapable of attending and responding to nuanced, complex, unpredictable information. Roads help mitigate accidents, and then when accidents happen, they are the cause of traffic jams. If there were no road or laws about roads, cars would simply avoid taking the route with the accident, because there would be no fixed route.

So a predictable system is constrained in its capacity to be coherent with unpredictable systems that occupy it.

Similarly, a predictable system is constrained in its capacity to handle unpredictable contexts that it occupies.

The roads and cars that make up the system of my commute disrupt ecosystems. Their production drives an increased appetite for raw materials which harm us and impact how coherent our behaviors are with planetary boundaries. Increased ease of use means increased use, and culture changes as a result. Now we are a culture in which interstates drive us further from third spaces and one another and what ought to be vital, connected, convivial lives in which we actually, consciously occupy the bioregion to which we would ideally belong. In the piece “Presence and Place” I wrote a bit about how roads and cars and other technologies inhibit presence and detach us from place.

And here, having said the phrase consciously occupy let’s bring it again back to attention, where we started. We are complex things, with capacity to attend to our lives, our feelings, one another, and the world around us. And that capacity is inhibited when we constrain ourselves within overly ordered systems such as cars and bureaucracies. In order to be coherent with the larger systems that cars and bureaucracies occupy, their best move is to get out of our way—to remove constraints on us and become responsive to our attending. Mission Command is an expression of this within military hierarchies, making space for agency (the antithesis of top-down constraint) to embedded components. As is McChrystal’s “Team of Teams”.

For more on complex responses to complex things within other domains, I highly recommend Yunkaporta’s “Sand Talk”, Adrienne Maree Brown’s “Emergent Strategy”, Ann Pendleton Julian’s “Design Unbound”, and

Nora Bateson

’s “Aphanipoiesis”.

This stuff isn’t rocket science.

Rocket science is very clearly less complex than things like creating conditions for personal and interpersonal and interspecies and planetary vitality. The former is (largely) a problem that can be solved once by a handful of very smart people (I like Amy Edmonson’s explanation for why organizational culture is the actual reason for the Challenger disaster). Solutions to the latter will be fleeting, context dependent, evolving and dying and requiring significant continuous, diverse, participatory attention and attending.

Only a complex thing can thrive in complexity.
ONLY a complex thing can enable thriving in complexity.

So instead of asking yourself ‘how can we make this system more predictable’, consider whether predictability is even appropriate. In certain contexts, becoming more complex is the only logical solution, and getting the constraints of ordered systems out of the way is how you make room for that.

The morning of the day that I started this essay, I drove distracted on my way into work. I was a diffuse field of attention, stretching across the car, well outside of it and into the environment, extending forward and backwards in time… and while driving is probably a less-than-ideal context to exercise this weird capacity, the capacity to be unconstrained in my attention is a big part of what enables my thinking, my expression, my creativity…

and it is for this reason I have been exploring ways to decouple myself from systems which excessively direct and constrain my attention, my time, my unpredictability.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this quote from Ivan Illich:

Contemporary man… attempts to create the world in his image, to build a totally man-made environment, and then discovers that he can do so only on the condition of constantly remaking himself to fit it.

And this is what I see in the majority of LinkedIn traffic—people in the relentless, Sisyphean task of remaking oneself to fit the constructed and engineered systems within which we are embedded. We strive to be more coherent with the ordered and predictable systems which contain our complex and unpredictable selves, and I think that in this, we’re fundamentally barking up the wrong tree.

Now here’s a photo I took the other day at Rocky Mountain National Park