The small things can bring the house down

[Derrick]

Complexity is a funny thing. We encounter it in so many aspects of our daily lives. We use things we rarely understand, some of which are leveraged tools to get what we need or do what we need doing. Thus you have intricate systems allowing the flow of information in a restaurant for instance, where you have orders coming and going. The orders are placed on a touch screen and passed along a network cable to a centralized server where all orders and changes to them are kept track of. Printers at various points of sale and preparation have different names and are connected to different communication ports. You need to keep your wits about you if you manage a system like that because for it to function optimally a whole range of skills had to come together to make the process simple in the end. Out of initial complexity is born something easy and useful.

Complexity runs into the realm of problem solving too. The other day I was fiddling with a wonky wireless connection. Wireless network setups can be tricky and there are tons of variables, that if you are lucky rarely become an issue due to the advancements of wireless equipment, but when they do, it could lead to hours of frustration. In this case I tested everything from the security gates, metal frames, burglar bars wall thickness, the whole shebang but nothing stopped this one computer from disconnecting, but even worse was the terrible internet transfer rates on the computers who did stay connected. After a long search and multiple access point moves all over the office where it was located it turned out to be the cable connecting the access point to the broadband router. It had a bad kink indicating a damaged cable. I replaced that and voila the speed increased dramatically but the one laptop still disconnected from the wireless network. It was a nightmare but one that in the end got sorted with a simple driver upgrade. The driver took all the time in the world to download of course and failed more than twice to download correctly because of the damaged cable that we only discovered after hours of fun waiting for the download to finish.

The problem with complexity is that it is the simple things that bring the house down. The farther we move into the collective future of humanity the more complex the underlying systems of our social existence will become, but also the more organized it will be. We already regulate traffic with immensely complex flow systems called traffic robots. Complex satellite orientation systems using quite precise timing devices are used to navigate roads using global positioning systems. You don’t even think about the complexity of what it took to give you that convenience. The rocket launches of each individual satellite, the many man hours spent by people in lab coats developing said satellites and the history of mathematical and scientific development that culminated in the existence of all the parts that made up the bits and pieces of the holistic end result we call GPS. We rarely think of the various standards organizations that needed to agree on standards for those bits and pieces.

Because things have become so inherently complex some people even opt to study complexity. Our very own Jan Smuts wrote a book on complexity even if it doesn’t really focus on it, ‘Holism and Evolution’. A brilliant book!. It is a book about the small and the not so small picture. It is a book about how things come together in the bigger scheme of things and fit together in the end. We tend not to have the capacity to see the bigger picture but with a little effort we can see glimpses of it.
Sometimes all you need is to sit back and take a good look…