Complexity science-made possible by modern analytical and computational advances-is changing the way we think about social systems and social theory. Unfortunately, economists' policy models have not ...kept up and are stuck in either a market fundamentalist or government control narrative. While these standard narratives are useful in some cases, they are damaging in others, directing thinking away from creative, innovative policy solutions.Complexity and the Art of Public Policyoutlines a new, more flexible policy narrative, which envisions society as a complex evolving system that is uncontrollable but can be influenced.
David Colander and Roland Kupers describe how economists and society became locked into the current policy framework, and lay out fresh alternatives for framing policy questions. Offering original solutions to stubborn problems, the complexity narrative builds on broader philosophical traditions, such as those in the work of John Stuart Mill, to suggest initiatives that the authors call "activist laissez-faire" policies. Colander and Kupers develop innovative bottom-up solutions that, through new institutional structures such as for-benefit corporations, channel individuals' social instincts into solving societal problems, making profits a tool for change rather than a goal. They argue that a central role for government in this complexity framework is to foster an ecostructure within which diverse forms of social entrepreneurship can emerge and blossom.
The ever tighter coupling of our food, water and energy systems, in the context of a changing climate is leading to increasing turbulence in the world. As a consequence, it becomes ever more crucial ...to develop cities, regions, and economies with resilience in mind. Because of their global reach, substantial resources, and information-driven leadership structures, multinational corporations can play a major, constructive role in improving our understanding and design of resilient systems. This volume is the product of the Resilience Action Initiative, a collaboration among Dow, DuPont, IBM, McKinsey en Co., Shell, Siemens, Swiss Re, Unilever, and Yara designed to explore possible corporate contributions to global resilience, especially at the nexus of water, food and energy. Aggressively forward-thinking, and consistent with an enlightened self-interest, the ideas considered here represent a corporate perspective on the broad collaborations required for a more resilient world.
Dealing with climate change means accepting tough tradeoffs: giving up certain energy sources, products, and conveniences, all of which have economic impacts. Politicians balk, but there are ...solutions. Roland Kupers turns to the new science of complexity to show how we can untangle a knotty global economy and start making progress.
Humanity's best hope for confronting the looming climate crisis rests with the new science of complexity. The sheer complexity of climate change stops most solutions in their tracks. How do we give ...up fossil fuels when energy is connected to everything, from great-power contests to the value of your pension? Global economic growth depends on consumption, but that also produces the garbage now choking the oceans. To give up cars, coal, or meat would upend industries and entire ways of life. Faced with seemingly impossible tradeoffs, politicians dither and economists offer solutions at the margins, all while we flirt with the sixth extinction. That's why humanity's last best hope is the young science of complex systems. Quitting coal, making autonomous cars ubiquitous, ending the middle-class addiction to consumption: all necessary to head off climate catastrophe, all deemed fantasies by pundits and policymakers, and all plausible in a complex systems view. Roland Kupers shows how we have already broken the interwoven path dependencies that make fundamental change so daunting. Consider the mid-2000s, when, against all predictions, the United States rapidly switched from a reliance on coal primarily to natural gas. The change required targeted regulations, a few lone investors, independent researchers, and generous technology subsidies. But in a stunningly short period of time, shale oil nudged out coal, and carbon dioxide emissions dropped by 10 percent. Kupers shows how to replicate such patterns in order to improve transit, reduce plastics consumption, and temper the environmental impact of middle-class diets. Whether dissecting China's Ecological Civilization or the United States' Green New Deal, Kupers describes what's folly, what's possible, and which solutions just might work.
The ever tighter linking of our food, water, and energy systems in the context of a changing climate is leading to increasing turbulence in the world. As a consequence, it becomes ever more crucial ...to develop cities, regions, and economies with resilience in mind. Because of multinational corporations’ global reach, substantial resources, and information-driven leadership structures, these entities can play a major, constructive role in improving our understanding and design of resilient systems.
This volume is the product of the Resilience Action Initiative, a collaboration among Dow, DuPont, IBM, McKinsey, Shell, Siemens, Swiss Re, Unilever, and Yara designed to explore possible corporate contributions to global resilience, especially at the nexus of water, food, and energy. Aggressively forward-thinking and consistent with an enlightened self-interest, the ideas considered here represent a corporate perspective on the broad collaborations required for a more resilient world.
The ever tighter coupling of our food, water and energy systems, in the context of a changing climate is leading to increasing turbulence in the world. As a consequence, it becomes ever more crucial ...to develop cities, regions, and economies with resilience in mind. Because of their global reach, substantial resources, and information-driven leadership structures, multinational corporations can play a major, constructive role in improving our understanding and design of resilient systems. This volume is the product of the Resilience Action Initiative, a collaboration among Dow, DuPont, IBM, McKinsey & Co., Shell, Siemens, Swiss Re, Unilever, and Yara designed to explore possible corporate contributions to global resilience, especially at the nexus of water, food and energy. Aggressively forward-thinking, and consistent with an enlightened self-interest, the ideas considered here represent a corporate perspective on the broad collaborations required for a more resilient world.
The essence of scenarios Wilkinson, Angela; Kupers, Roland
2014., 20141002, 2014, 2014-02-20, Volume:
57544
eBook
In 1965, Royal Dutch Shell started experimenting with a new approach to preparing for the future. This approach, called scenario planning, eschewed forecasting in favor of plausible alternative ...stories. By using stories, or "scenarios," Shell aimed to avoid the false assumption that the future would look much like the present-an assumption that marred most corporate planning at the time.The Essence of Scenariosoffers unmatched insight into the company's innovative practice, which still has a huge influence on the way businesses, governments, and other organizations think about and plan for the future.In the course of their research, Angela Wilkinson and Roland Kupers interviewed almost every living veteran of the Shell scenario planning operation, along with many top Shell executives from later periods. Drawing on these interviews, the authors identify several principles that characterize the Shell process and explain how it has survived and thrived for so long. They also enumerate the qualities of successful Shell scenarios, which above all must be plausible stories with logical trajectories. Ultimately, Wilkinson and Kupers demonstrate the value of scenario planning as a sustained practice, rather than as a one-off exercise.
Scenarios are best described as a highly innovative, pragmatic field of practice grappling with theoretical grounding. Complexity science, in contrast, is a theoretically grounded, highly conceptual ...field searching for more effective and extensive application in practice. This paper explores how these largely separate fields might be better related in enabling groups and organizations cope with uncertainty. It focuses on non-probabilistic scenarios and the so-called Intuitive logics school of scenarios, with its emphasis on plausible, alternative futures because of its increasing dominance. The benefits of incorporating key insights from complexity science into scenario practices seems an obvious ‘must have’ in engaging complex, messy and puzzling situations and guiding action in the 21st century. Similarly, the persistent and recent significantly increased interest in scenarios offers insights relevant to extending complexity ideas beyond academe and inquiry, into broader spheres of corporate strategy, public policy-making and change management. Plausibility-based scenarios are being deployed to grapple with complexity for a variety of different purposes, including strategic renewal, anticipating systemic risks and enabling the large scale, transitions implied in meeting the challenge of global, sustainable development. This paper suggests that intuitive logics scenarios offer an ‘on-ramp’ to complexity, encouraging attention to the systemic framing of systems, situations and problems and enabling complexity concepts to penetrate beyond the domains of scholarship. It notes that complexity thinking challenges one-off scenario building practices, especially when the scenarios are developed using the deductive building method. As plausibility-based scenario practices continue to evolve they encounter practical challenges of linking to other processes, relating to other futures methods, broadening beyond the organizational scale, engaging heterogeneous agents and in enabling deeper reframing, exposing deeply held beliefs about progress and assumptions about change management in complex systems. This paper concludes with implications for practice and future scholarship associated with each challenge.
► We examine how core concepts in complexity science and scenario practices might be related. ► We focus on the plausibility-based, Intuitive Logics School of scenarios because of its prominence. ► We suggest scenarios are not enough in grappling with complexity. ► We suggest the role of intuitive logics scenarios is in framing rather than forecasting. ► We highlight 5 challenges that are shaping further evolution in intuitive logics scenario practices.
Recent investments in “clean” hydrogen as an alternative to fossil fuels are driven by anticipated climate benefits. However, most climate benefit calculations do not adequately account for all ...climate warming emissions and impacts over time. This study reanalyzes a previously published life cycle assessment as an illustrative example to show how the climate impacts of hydrogen deployment can be far greater than expected when including the warming effects of hydrogen emissions, observed methane emission intensities, and near-term time scales; this reduces the perceived climate benefits upon replacement of fossil fuel technologies. For example, for blue (natural gas with carbon capture) hydrogen pathways, the inclusion of upper-end hydrogen and methane emissions can yield an increase in warming in the near term by up to 50%, whereas lower-end emissions decrease warming impacts by at least 70%. For green (renewable-based electrolysis) hydrogen pathways, upper-end hydrogen emissions can reduce climate benefits in the near term by up to 25%. We also consider renewable electricity availability for green hydrogen and show that if it is not additional to what is needed to decarbonize the electric grid, there may be more warming than that seen with fossil fuel alternatives over all time scales. Assessments of hydrogen’s climate impacts should include the aforementioned factors if hydrogen is to be an effective decarbonization tool.
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