"Spiral" and complex systems

Dear WSN,

My background is quite different from most of the people on this list, so I
thought it might be instructive to toss my own career perspective into the
discussion of "The Spiral of Capitalism and Socialism" (SCS).  My main
purpose is to draw out some very basic analogies between my area of
expertise and the World System (WS) perspective in general, and SCS in
particular.

I am a computer scientist, specializing in the design of large, complex
software-intensive systems. A recent example of my work was helping NASA
design the ground data system  (the system that controls the spacecraft in
deep space) for the Cassini mission, currently en route to Saturn.

Managing complexity is the big challenge today in system development, and
the study of complexity has become a discipline in its own right (e.g., for
several years I have been loosely affiliated with the Santa Fe Institute, a
think tank that studies "complex adaptive systems").  Managing complexity
has become especially important since the advent of software-driven systems
-- indeed, software is arguably the most complex artifact of modern
technology.

Let me comment on some of the dynamics of building complex
software-intensive systems that seem to have a likeness to the WS
perspective. 

Although some systems are developed as brand new systems, many are
developed from existing ones.  This usually happens because the
requirements for the system have significantly changed. For example, when
AT&T was broken up in the early eighties, the requirements for its main
systems radically changed.   I was part of a consulting team hired to
perform the initial re-design work (starting from the existing systems)
that would lead to new systems (based on the new requirements). 

Building a new system from an old one means working with two models. The
designer must first make sure that the existing system is modeled and
documented correctly. In other words, s/he needs to understand exactly the
attributes of the existing system.  Then, working from that model the
designer can factor in the new requirements and create a model of the new
system. 

The process of building a new system from the existing system is not an
easy one, and is rife with pitfalls. Foremost among these is making sure
that the requirements for the new system are clearly understood and agreed
upon, that they don't conflict with each other, and that they are feasible
to implement. 

I trust that from reading the preceding section the similarities to
creating a new world-system from the existing one is apparent. Let's
explore the analogy a bit.

WS analysis has been good at the task of examining and modeling the
existing world-system.  When I first came across the WS writings, I was
indeed excited. As an old lefty, I had become increasingly frustrated with
analyses that centered on important issues, but were not truly
comprehensive in scope. WS seeks to capture the "big picture," a job that
is central to how complex systems must be approached. 

Continuing the analogy, probably most progressives who embrace a WS
perspective have at least a general agreement on the attributes of the
world-system we would like to see. However, up to this point WS has not
been very good at visualizing what the new system should look like, nor has
there been any serious effort to build the initial design models that will
help us get from here to there. Boswell and Chase-Dunn express their
frustration on this point in SCS and I share their sentiment. As several
people on this list have already attested, SCS makes an important
contribution in beginning to fill this void.  

In my world of designing and building complex systems, ambiguity is enemy
number one. For most large systems, essential information about thousands
of system attributes must be shared among hundreds of system engineers and
other stakeholders. Unfortunately, natural language (e.g., English) by
itself is little help with this problem, for it is intrinsically ambiguous
(for example, consider the statement, "flying planes can be dangerous";
whether the word flying is meant as an adjective or a verb makes all the
difference in interpretation).  

A common catastrophic manifestation of this problem occurs when the
requirements for the system are understood differently by different people.
 Entire books have been written about systems that failed because of
communication problems between the key stakeholders. Therefore, designers
try to create an unambiguous "language" with which to communicate essential
system information by using abstract modeling techniques based on graphical
representation schemas (directed graphs, etc.), supplemented by other tools
such as "Structured English" (a rigorous form of predicate logic intended
to eliminate ambiguity). 

Along this theme of providing clarity through graphical models (i.e., "a
picture is worth a thousand words"), I think that the understandability of
SCS would have profited by the use of additional graphical models to help
illuminate some of the more knotty ideas. The section on market socialism,
for example, would have benefited from such a model. Although there are
several helpful statistical tables and graphs in the book, there are only
two figures that show complex relationships between system components. 

Finally, a point about the concept of the spiral. When Chris Chase-Dunn
showed me a draft of the first chapter of the book last fall, I was
immediately intrigued, not only by the fact that this was clearly a book
that was breaking new ground in terms of implementation strategies, but by
the idea of viewing historical development as a spiral. Over the years, I
have come to believe that conceptualizing complex systems according to the
dynamics of the spiral makes a great deal of sense (albeit the specifics of
the model differ greatly from one context to another). Indeed, one of the
most popular design paradigms in my field (to which I subscribe) is called
"The Spiral Model of System Development." 

I hope this is useful. I think that all fields whose subject matter is
complex systems have much to share with each other, and that we should
always be looking for useful models and common patterns.

-Pat