More Is Different: Complexity Theory in Business and Economic Development

Get out of the box!

In an intricately networked world, the study of “nonequilibrium” systems is teaching companies how to overcome risk.

In 1972, the (future) Nobel Prize–winning physicist Philip Anderson published an article in the journal Science titled “More Is Different.” Dr. Anderson was exploring what happens when a number of elements — atoms or molecules, but perhaps ants or even people — interact with one another. Interactions lead to messy interdependence; for observers, they ratchet up the difficulty of understanding what goes on and why. But Dr. Anderson’s point was that interactions also lead to “emergence” — to the spontaneous appearance of features that cannot be traced to the character of the individual parts.

Today, science is increasingly concerned with understanding not only how more is different, but how “more” becomes “different” — how thousands of genes and proteins interact to create the human organism, or how an ant colony organizes its members into an intelligent community. This research, broadly associated with the term complexity science, is gathering attention in the business world as well, as executives and scholars recognize that conventional theories of management, forged in the era of industrialization, vertically integrated companies, and relatively impermeable institutional borders, can no longer cope with the immensely complex organizations that have emerged during two decades of rising globalization and decentralization. With the global economy now far more integrated than it has ever been, chains of economic cause and effect reach across the world with disconcerting speed, exposing individuals, firms, and governments to a new kind of “interdependence risk” — to the possibility that events quite far away can undermine the activities on which their security and prosperity depend.

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How can we apply this same thinking to advance economic development? If businesss are using this thinking, then we had better get with the program. Maybe the subject is worthy of a national or international summit on the role of complexity theory in economic development.