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Kevin Foster

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Entry Comments posted by Kevin Foster

  1. Yes Geoff.

    The ISO definition of complexity is pretty close to the one typically used by social scientists since the mid 1960s.  The management and political sciences have needed to distinguish between complicated and complex decision systems.  In 1965, Herbert Simon described a complex system as “one made up of a large number of parts that interact in a nonsimple way.  In such systems, the whole is more than the sum of the parts, not in an ultimate, metaphysical sense, but in the important pragmatic sense that, given the properties of the parts and the laws of interaction, it is not a trivial matter to infer the properties of the whole.”  Simon was of course describing political decision systems.  
     

    Simon, Herbert A.  1965. The Architecture of Complexity, in General Systems Yearbook vol 10.  pp. 63-64.

  2. An interesting ISO technical specification in the ISO22300 (Societal security) series is:    ISO/TS 22375:2018 Security and resilience — Guidelines for complexity assessment process.   This document discusses organisational complexity and how one might asses complexity to improve societal security and resilience.   

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  3. Draft ISO/DIS 22300:2020 currently defines complexity as the "condition of an organisational system with many diverse and autonomous but interrelated and independent components or parts where those parts interact with each other and with external elements in multiple-end non-linear ways."  This definition is subject to change in the final publication.

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