Scale and Complexity Overview

Two of the factors that make societal level conflicts so difficult are their scale and complexity.  Conflict resolution strategies that work in interpersonal disputes do not easily "scale up" to work at the level of communities, let alone whole societies or international conflicts. And scale leads to immense complexity, which not only means that conflicts are difficult to understand, but they are constantly changing, with causes and effects interacting to make the conflict trajectory very difficult to control or even predict. 

To understand the scale of societal-level conflict, it helps to have a gut-level understanding of orders of magnitude (factors of ten). The difference between a person walking at a slow stroll (1.7 miles or 2.7 km per hour) is four orders of magnitude slower than the speed at which the international space station buzzes around the earth (17,000 miles or 27,000 km per hour). The difference between what we call a "standard mediation triad," two parties and a mediator, is roughly seven orders of magnitude smaller than a moderately-sized international conflict, for instance the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, which involves roughly 15,000,000 people (not counting the outsiders involved, such as the Iranians and their proxies such as Hezbollah). The population of the United States is 332,000,000. So that is eight orders of magnitude larger than the standard mediation triad. Is it any wonder that the conflict resolution strategies that work for two people and a mediator do not easily work for the hyper-polarized political conflict in the United States or the Israeli/Palestinian conflict?  Just by size alone, the difference is immense! 

And immense scale also leads to immense complexity. Long ago, physicist-turned conflict resolver Wendell Jones taught us about the difference between "complicated systems" and "complex adaptive systems." 

In "complicated systems," Wendell explained, the system elements are known, and the connections between the elements are understood and predictable. That means that the components of the system react to each other and to changing conditions in consistent, predictable ways.  System components do not have their own goals, nor do they make independent decisions.  He explained such systems in terms of mechanical metaphors — machines that work the same way every time (at least until something breaks).

In "complex systems," many independent actors, each with their own goals and decision making processes, seek to advance their own interests, based on their image of the environment and their own rational and non-rational decision making strategies. The actors, the relationships between the actors, and the behavior of the actors are much less understood and predictable.  Wendell explained such systems in terms of organic metaphors — living organisms or entire ecosystems that are continually growing and changing and trying to adapt to the environment around them. Like organisms and ecosystems, complex systems develop through evolution; they are not designed.  So, there are no central control points or controlling entities, no firm connections, no firm rules of behavior for the system as a whole.  As a result, an action in one part of the system will affect other parts of the system in indeterminate ways. 

This makes the behavior of complex systems very difficult to predict. At the same time, however, complex systems can be remarkably stable.  People get caught in certain repetitive behavioral patterns (Peter Coleman explains that physicists call them "attractors") that cause us to do the same things over and over again, even when they are hurting us.  Addiction is one example of such an attractor. We keep on drinking or smoking or using drugs or eating chocolate, even though we know it is hurting us.  Political hyper-polarization is also an attractor.  We are so used to, and take comfort in, knowing that we are on the "good side" and "the others" are on the "bad side" that we keep on acting in ways that reinforce our polarization, despite the fact that it is preventing us from meeting our fundamental needs or solving our pressing social, environmental, and economic problems. 

Most people have a difficult time comprehending or dealing with complexity, so they tend to vastly over-simplify intractable conflicts. This is particularly true if they are caught up in the conflict themselves.  As we point out in our discussion of overlays, there is a very strong tendency to view very complex, intractable conflicts in simple terms: "us versus them", "good guys versus bad guys," or just "good versus evil."  With that view, the obvious way to go about dealing with the conflict is by attempting to decisively defeat the "bad guys" (and disempowering them to the point where they will no longer be able to effectively assert their "evil" positions).

This seldom works, however. The other side is virtually certain to fight back with all of the powers at their disposal --- and, if the power of the two sides is relatively close to equal — this will lead to a continuing series of escalating and ever-more destructive confrontations. If the power of the parties is very unequal, it will lead to the oppression (or worse) of the low-power group(s).

Further, such simple, us-versus-them framing is almost always a gross oversimplification of a very complex set of problems. Differing understandings of "facts," different values, different attitudes, different cultures, different economic concerns, different educational levels, different religions, different geographies all give people different understandings about what the problem "is," and what should be done to address it.  All of these issues come into play as people try to address these conflicts, and then the interactions between the people, between the issues, and between the conflict dynamics cause these conflicts to spiral out of control quickly. Unless one makes a concerted effort to understand and work in and with the complexity of the complex conflict system, any response is almost certain to fail to achieve the desired outcome. 

Intractable conflicts are often even more difficult because there seldom win-win solutions. What people want can be fundamentally incompatible. Some may want lower taxes, some higher taxes.  Some may want abortion or immigration completely banned; others may want one or the other (or both) unrestricted. It is, hypothetically, possible to compromise on any of these issues: taxes could stay the same (not higher or lower), abortion could be banned after a certain time period or extenuating circumstances, immigration could be allowed under particular circumstances, and disallowed otherwise. But given the degree of hyper-polarization, win-lose, all-or-nothing thinking that is common in the U.S. (and elsewhere) today, such compromises are very hard (if not impossible) to come by, as compromise is seen as "selling out" to the other side. 

There's also complexity associated with the ways in which people think. Though we like to think we are rational calculators, we are not.  A huge host of cognitive biases (that we all have) cause us to perceive the world inaccurately, process the information we get in biased ways, and come to conclusions that are anything but "rational." Because of this, it's not enough to just come up with a solution that will make sense based on rational cost-benefit calculations.  The human brain is considering countless emotional factors as well, such as whether an outcome will make them "look good," or whether it involves taking risks, whenever we try to make a decision.

It is easy to conclude that all is lost, that intractable conflicts and democracy itself are far too complex to understand or deal with, so we will just have to sit back, cross our fingers, (or put our head in the sand) and hope everything will work out okay.  If we all do that, most likely, things will go very badly.  Instead, we need to learn how to understand and work with complexity, and begin to do our small part to make the system behave more according to our wishes.  No one, no matter how powerful they are, can do this on their own.  But many people together — engaging in a massively parallel effort (be it peacebuilding, problem solving, democracy-building or something else), can influence complex systems. So, unfortunately, can malevolent actors. So, one needs to watch for and develop a plan for containing that. These are all ideas that we will be developing further in later sections of this guide.