Philosophers have taught us that we cannot understand reality directly, rather that we perceive reality, and, not only that but that we perceive reality through "mental models." Mental models are thus defined as "abstractions of reality." Furthermore, all models are wrong, in the sense that they cannot objectively describe reality, but some models can be useful, because they can provide useful insight (Richmond).

Our Daily, Simple World

Our daily lives revolve around the understanding of simple, goal-seeking systems. When we are hungry, we eat. When we are tired, we sleep. We see an apple that we want, and we pick it up. There is a discrepancy between the desired and actual states, and we take action to correct it. Experience teaches us to believe that cause and effect are closely related in time and space, but we eventually find out that this is not usually true.

The Complex World

When our actions affect not only ourselves, but also affect others, then we are increasing the space distance between cause and effect. As the actions we take today, affect our ability to take those same actions in the future, we are increasing the time distance between cause and effect. These two factors enter us into the realm of multi-ordered, nonlinear dynamics – high complexity.

1. "In general, we associate complexity with anything we find difficult to understand." (Flood and Carson, 1993). This involves people perceiving things.

• Since we understand things through our personal, subjective perception of how things are objectively, we each perceive things differently.
• Things are "complex" when they have many varied interrelated parts, patterns, or elements (Webster’s Third International Dictionary)

2. Through the interaction of a number of elements with a number of relationships, there is a diverse set of phenomenon that can develop.

We differentiate between detail complexity and dynamic complexity. Detail complexity is a function of the number of variables involved. Dynamic complexity is a function of the distance in time and space between cause and effect. In summary, our ability to perceive the world is complicated by many factors. Many tools have been developed to help us start to better understand issues that involve detail and dynamic complexity.

Click here to see what we do at the Institute for Strategic Clarity to intervene in this same decision making process to strengthen the decision makers ability to understand and make decisions within complex environments.