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Complex approaches are more time-consuming, necessarily involve vastly more knowledge and understanding than is ‘efficient’ to obtain, require more patience and experimentation, require trust in the individual rather than the hierarchy to decide what to do and to take the responsibility to do it, and entail massively more consultation, attention, listening, competencies and constant adaptation and improvisation than merely-complicated approaches. Whereas complicated-system cause-and-effect driven solutions can be deduced by analysis, complex-system understanding of appropriate approaches can only emerge over time. Civilization society has little patience for this ‘inefficient’, exhausting, and imprecise way of doing things — even if it may well be the only way that can work.
The basis for sharing and building on this understanding of complexity is through stories and bottom-up working models, not top-down, hierarchical, constructed systems that everyone has to ‘buy into’. Stories for learning, working models for discovery — these are the means to emerging understanding and effectively and sustainably dealing with complexity.
Building on this, Princen’s The Logic of Sufficiency has proposed an extensive set of (incomplete) principles, assumptions and theory for dealing with complex adaptive systems , drawing on learnings from businesses and local communities that have have achieved sustained success where competing hierarchical approaches and processes have, while achieving short-term profit and wealth, proved unsustainable and in the long run disastrous.