Complex Systems and New Forms of Federal Agency Involvement

Complex Systems and New Forms of Federal Agency Involvement
By Chris Durney, Glenn Eugster and John Wilson

Federal agencies planning their programs in wide range of areas—environment, health, emergency preparedness, land conservation, and community development, among many others—face a real dilemma. Pressures in the current national environment, such as the demand for speed and responsiveness that is being driven by the growth of the Internet, the growing role of empowerment in program implementation, and the recognition that sustainable program implementation development can only occur at the local level, are forcing agencies to recognize that, in order to be successful, more of their programmatic activity must lake place within the target community.

However, this need to work in the community fostering private-public partnerships, working collaboratively as one member of a widely-diverse team, and always dealing with different local conditions, concerns, and resources¾challenges the traditional top-down, control, regulation, and enforcement approaches that have characterized much federal involvement in the last century. Federal managers with responsibility for managing community-based programs must find new strategies for dealing with these new realities.

Individual communities display many of the characteristics of complex adaptive systems (CAS) perhaps a brief definition here? Insights from this evolving field of study suggest a new direction for federal agency managers in deploying and using their limited resources. Recent attempts to work in specific communities—in South Florida, the East Shore of the Delmarva Peninsula, and in the neighborhoods of many of the nation’s largest cities—shed some light on a path forward for working in this new way.

Introduction
For the last three decades, the standard model for much federal action has been a national system of top-down control and regulation, with predictable, uniformly designed implementation and enforcement. Effective for use with organizations with essentially similar designs, functions, and concerns, this system resulted in significant community, quality of life, and environmental improvements over the years and it is still the backbone of most of the core programs at federal agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency, the Departments of Energy, Housing and Urban Development, Agriculture, Transportation, Justice, Treasury, and the Federal Emergency Management Administration.

However, the achievement of additional societal and environmental gains now requires a new, complementary blueprint for federal involvement. Faced with a rapidly evolving electronic environment and the greater demand--locally and nationally, for partnerships and empowerment of local decision makers, the regulatory, deterministic approaches that have been employed up to now by many agencies are no longer sufficient.

Several societal and technical changes are working to drive the need for this new approach.

First, the speed, power, reach, and adaptability of the Internet are driving a demand for faster, more informed responses to stakeholder demands, both in commercial and government services. In response, organizations in all sectors—public, private, non-profit—are being driven to become more customer-oriented in order to meet the growing expectations of their clientele. Under this impetus, Government agencies have been trying to move out of their traditional regulatory mode into these more community-centered, deeply involved approaches to fulfilling their missions.

Second, the last twenty years has seen an increasing democratization of information in practically all areas of human endeavor. Information that was once privileged is now available to anyone that wants it. The federal agency role as the central information provider, a role that brought power and influence when information was hierarchically managed, is no longer a role that justifies the agency’s existence.

Third, the concept of empowerment¾that is, the strategy to push recognize decision-making down to at the most appropriate, local level , whenever appropriate, possible, where the knowledge, information, and experience exists required to make the best, quickest, and most responsive decisions¾is making its way into the center of management thinking, including many some government approaches. Centralized, bureaucratic organizations are learning that they cannot mandate change but instead must collaborate with local citizens to make change happen. The local community has become more readily acknowledged as the most appropriate locus for much environmental, social and emergency decision-making.

Such local empowerment brings the notion of public-private partnerships onto center stage. Since no single player has all the knowledge, authority, energy, or resources necessary for responding to complicated situations, collaboration among the interested players is essential.

A fourth major influence is the emerging recognition that sustainable change in societal and environmental conditions—even in societal concerns that span countries and in ecosystems that span regions—must take place at the local level, since the source of these conditions always lies in the actions and decisions of the individual actors in the local populace (however remote that local populace may be from the ultimate effect of their actions). And since each locality has its own combination of concerns, knowledge, experiences, and people, each town, country, and city around the country has a unique story, based on the history, culture, and geophysical conditions of that place.

Fifth, the last twenty years have seen increasing pressure on federal agencies to “behave in a more business-like way.” While it is important to state emphasize that the federal government is different from a “business” and has its own mission, purpose, and values, this pressure has led at least to a focus on greater fiscal responsibility and accountability for federal managers.

Based on our experience, either directly or through discussions with project managers team members, with a wide number of community-based federal projects—the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) involvement with South Florida’s efforts to protect the Everglades, the efforts of communities on the Eastern Shore of the Delmarva Peninsula to protect and restore save the Chesapeake Bay (see text boxes), the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) efforts to improve disaster readiness in our communities, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) efforts to bridge the digital divide in low income neighborhoods, among others—we have begun to see the advantages of thinking of communities as complex, adaptive systems (CAS) that evolve and change in response to internal and external changes in the specific community and its surrounding environment. This CAS approach stands in fairly stark contrast with traditional modes of federal involvement.

In the following sections, we discuss the various characteristics of a CAS, show how they contrast with a more linear, mechanistic view of systems upon which much traditional management has been based, and use examples from our community-based experiences to illustrate these observations. Next, we describe three tactics that federal agencies can employ to work within a CAS: sustained “nudging through collaboration”, working with “design and discovery” and expecting “incremental co-evolution.” Finally, we suggest new perspectives and approaches that federal agencies need to adapt to take advantage of the demands and opportunities of looking at communities as complex, adaptive systems.

Traditional Approaches vs. Complex Adaptive Systems
Interest in CAS has grown significantly in the physical and biological sciences over the last two decades. Since the mid-1990’s, the literature that applies CAS thinking to management challenges has been growing and the CAS model has been developing into an important theme in social and behavioral research.
CAS have definable characteristics that make them different from the way systems have been traditionally conceived.

CAS Model Vs. Mechanistic Model
CAS MECHANISTIC MODEL

Focuses on meeting multiple environmental, societal and economic objectives simultaneously with regard to the health and condition of others.

Often single-purpose objectives with little, or no, regard to the impact on other publicly beneficial goals, values and functions.

Composed of multiple independent agents acting together.

Composed of multiple parts, each with a specialized role to play.

Performance of CAS is not reducible to its parts. Focus on improving parts could lead to sub-optimization.

Improvement of parts improves system performance.

Evolves by learning and adapting to changes in the external environment.

Internal change is imposed by forces outside the system.

The multiple independent agents in a CAS always act on local knowledge and conditions.

Parts act on information from central source.

Cause and effect are distant, non-proportional; the “butterfly effect.” Cause and effect well known; outputs are proportional to inputs.

Over time, change is non-linear. System moves through periodic state shifts. Over time, change is linear over time. Behavior changes are incremental.

Control is dispersed; no one agent is in change.

Control is centralized; a designated group of parts controls the whole.

CAS are composed of multiple independent agents, with different objectives, acting together. Traditional management approaches are generally based on a mechanistic view of systems that provided the basis for the primary organizational model employed during the rise of modern management practice. This mechanistic model regards systems as assemblages of parts, with each part best understood separately and individually. No matter how complex the system, as the properties of each part are known, the purpose and functioning of the whole becomes clear. To meet changes occurring in the system's external environment, new components must be designed and appended to the current structure. These changes are imposed by an omniscient designer outside of the system itself and cannot emerge from within the system itself.

However, in a complex adaptive system, each part is an individual agent that acts in parallel with other agents to create a result that is greater than any of the individual parts. For instance, in South Florida’s Everglades initiative (in our evaluation window we looked at the period from 1995 – 1999, although the initiative continues to evolve today), multiple players¾dozens of local communities, five counties, multiple state and federal agencies (with both headquarters and regional offices), and a variety of not-for-profit organizations¾were coming together to achieve the goal of ensuring a healthy future for the Everglades and the economically thriving communities that surround it. Each of the players had their own vision and mission, their own reason for becoming involved in the initiative. In addition, various discrete “named” initiatives¾Eastward Ho!, Brownfields, Showcase Community, the Governor’s Commission, and so on¾also existed as independent agents within the larger Everglades movement with overlap of resources and people. And the social, economic, and environmental issues that must be addressed to ensure that the future of the Everglades is adequately addressed also have their own individual logic and structures that in turn are intricately interrelated with each other.

Performance of a CAS is not reducible to its constituent parts. While individual agents can be analyzed in their own dimensions, it is their activity as part of the system that matters in producing the desired behaviors. In fact, too strong a focus on improving individual parts could lead to either sub-optimization or the destruction of the emerging order. For example, in South Florida, the ascendancy of any one limited point of view without the concurrence of the whole partnership would inevitably lead to countervailing actions by other partners —public protests of minority groups, behind-the-the-scenes attempts to influence project direction, or outright withdrawal of critical resources.

A CAS evolves by learning and adapting to changes in the external environment. In the mechanistic model, the individual parts are fashioned from the beginning to play a specific role and perform a specific function. If new learning takes place, it occurs outside the system itself and change is subsequently introduced into the system through the design of new parts or the reengineering of old parts. In a CAS, the parts are independent agents who can learn from and adapt to environmental changes. Under the right conditions, this learning can lead the system to successively higher states of self-organization.

In South Florida, early isolated efforts led to an increase of information about the current and future state of the Everglades under the escalating pressure of expanding land use. Over time, this information flow helped the various small initiatives to recognize their common intent and purpose. The initial efforts began to combine in various ways, creating successively higher levels of organization for the movement¾becoming most visible perhaps in the declaration of the extended area as a federal Showcase City, making the initiative eligible for significant federal aid.

The multiple independent agents in a CAS always act on local knowledge and conditions. The parts of a mechanistic system react as programmed to specific stimuli. Stimuli are either sent by the central processing unit, that is, the senior management team, or they are received from outside the system.

On the other hand, the multiple individual agents that comprise a CAS act on the basis of local knowledge and conditions. It should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with human nature that the individuals we interviewed in our program evaluations were always acting in their own self-interests first. As one woman in South Florida remarked, "Saving the Everglades is nice. But I'm involved [in a neighborhood clean-up action] because I want to make sure that when they build on the empty corner by my house, they put in a supermarket and not another high rise."

This principle suggests that efforts to control every aspect of the system's behavior from some centralized nerve center will ultimately become frustrated. The multiple independent agents will not allow someone else to dictate their own individual course of action.

In a CAS, cause and effect are distant, non-proportional; the “butterfly effect.” Otherwise known as sensitive dependence on initial conditions, the butterfly effect describes the characteristic of a complex system in which iterative feedback multiplied throughout the system can cause small changes in the initial condition of the system to grow into much larger than expected consequences.

Because of the "butterfly effect" observed in such situations, small interventions
often have quite dramatic results—and these results can increase the viability of the movement as well as lead to its demise. In South Florida, answering a simple question, “What’s a Brownfield?” led to an organizing concept that galvanized and motivated a series of unprecedented collaborations between citizens and politicians that ultimately formed the basis of a new multi-county effort for restoration and economic development.

The result of this constant internal motion is that linear performance measures are almost impossible to set early in the project (and maybe never) and end results are often surprising and unpredictable. On the Eastern Shore of the Delmarva Peninsula, the overall environmental and economic regeneration preservation visions and goals were never articulated¾success in the larger sphere was dependent on the additive function of multiple opportunistic attempts to meet individual goals and visions.
Over time, change is non-linear. A CAS moves through periodic state shifts. The work of John Holland, Stanley Kauffman, and others suggests that a CAS moves through periods of “bifurcation” in which it jumps from one state of behavior to another. One particular state, known as being "far from equilibrium" or on the "edge of chaos," is key to the generation of new ideas and new levels of self-organization.

Complex systems only seem to adapt effectively to rapid environmental changes when the systems demonstrate a great rate of internal turbulence and shifting relationships while still maintaining their identity as systems. The edge of chaos state is contrasted with the “equilibrium” state on one hand—the organization has achieved some stable accommodation with the external environment so that little, if any, change occurs—and the “chaotic” state on the other—a state so unstructured that no growth or meaningful order can emerge from it. Projects near the “edge of chaos” may frustrate the federal manager looking for control and order, but will ultimately produce more energy and creativity than a project that is kept in a highly controlled state. In South Florida and the Eastern Shore of the Delmarva Peninsula, periods of turmoil were generally followed by periods of increased self-definition for the system as lessons learned about the whole were incorporated into the behavior of the system.

Control is dispersed; no one agent is in charge change. The notion that the individual agents in a CAS act on local knowledge and conditions implies that control of a CAS’ actions will be dispersed throughout the system. While individual agents can influence the shape and direction of the CAS, no one agent is in full control.

The mechanistic model assumes top down control. While often provided in specific national, state, or system-wide standards, or requirements that are put in place by local authorities, the prescriptive form of the traditional model ascribes control and direction to the lead agency.

In contrast, the distributed character of authority and power that characterizes CAS is easily observable in community-based projects like South Florida, the Eastern Shore of the Delmarva Peninsula, and FEMA’s work building disaster-resistant communities. Multiple components—, transportation, health and human services, power and infrastructure management, and others—must interact successfully for the sustain the long-term health of large ecosystems such as the Everglades and the Chesapeake Bay or to create long-term changes in a community’s economic decision-making patterns, and these components when viewed at the micro-level devolve into thousands of individual decisions.

For instance, land use, growth management and stewardship are critical components both of environmental asset management and a community’s vulnerability to natural disaster. In turn, land use in any community, while certainly subject to top-down policy and regulation, is essentially the cumulative result of many small decisions made by individual actors (individuals and/or groups), all of whom are acting in their own best interests, whether those actions are favorable or unfavorable to the environment. The years have shown that environmental degradation (and increased vulnerability to natural elements) can result just as easily and perhaps more insidiously from the countless small decisions made everyday by well-meaning people than from the single-source environmental abusers who have received the majority of environmental attention to date. Even land use decisions taken in support of unarguable societal benefits, such as better, more affordable housing, more attractive landscaping, more efficient transportation, more productive agriculture and greater access to consumer goods, can in turn contribute to losses of environmental assets or increases in disaster vulnerability. Therefore, any economic growth that aims to be environment-friendly and/or disaster-resistant must integrate these various dimensions into a system of accommodations and balances and this, in turn, requires the cooperation of organizations with multiple viewpoints and objectives.

New Perspectives Required By Federal Agencies When Working In Communities
Communities, in their many players and complex interactions, demonstrate the characteristics of CAS. In the face of such complexity, it becomes impossible for any federal (or local, for that matter) agency to engineer a single, standardized approach to societal issues that will normalize the conditions, model future behavior, and deliver a set of generalized instructions, standards, regulations, and commands, equally applicable to the diverse universe of communities. Because in communities there is no single source of control but many individuals and groups acting together, because change is non-linear and responsive to evolving conditions, and because communities resist being separated into distinct parts, federal agencies will require a new approach to the accomplishment of their missions.

Traditional federal action has often been directed toward the control of certain, fairly generalizable functions. Functions such as wastewater discharge, drinking water purification, home-building methods, land conservation, food-processing approaches, and solid waste management have specific, national parameters based on prior learning—water quality standards, construction safety and material composition standards, landfill regulations, and the like—that have been set for them by federal (and/or local) agencies. However, a plethora of social problems now demanding attention—the health of large ecosystems, the educational levels of our children, the potential class disparities created by the digital divide, a community’s exposure to natural disasters, the threat of domestic terrorism—are much less homogenous at the national level and also vary considerably from one community to the next. As such, they are much less amenable to nation-wide programs with a single mission focus.

For instance, the EPA's traditional regulatory approach to environmental management is ultimately based on determination of responsible parties—owners. But who owns a community? The mayor? The citizens? Who is the responsible party? Who has the power to make decisions for an entire ecosystem? And what should be regulated? Building codes, zoning, land use taxes? There is no “sector” or industry that encourages definition. The same dilemma applies to education, parks, transportation, policing, housing, natural areas, economic growth, and other community management issues.

Furthermore, the basic history, structures, operations, industries, and concerns that influence the day-to-day behavior of each individual community are different,
often significantly different from those in communities just miles away, not to mention in another region of the country. The way decisions are made, carried out, and measured, and the way the local community interacts with the state, the federal government, and other interested parties also differ from locality to locality.

While there are similarities from which we can learn, when we analyze the behavior of any specific place, it appears complex and unpredictable, unique to that place, it's residents, and time.

Since the CAS nature of communities is not going to fade away, federal agencies must find a way to work within CAS if the challenges of today are going to be addressed. Instead of regulating the majority, federal personnel have to learn to work with the individual, specific community in the complexity of its social, economic, political, and environmental issues.

The new model of involvement in such situations, based on collaboration and communication, complements the traditional roles of the agencies. The older models can still be and should be applied when they make sense. However, the new model is required if agencies are to achieve maximum optimum success when working in places. And this new model—the model that makes use of the insights offered from the study of CAS—will in turn require new skills and attitudes on the part of agency staff involved in working in communities.

The CAS Model Vs. The Mechanistic Model For Federal Agencies

The CAS model offers a way to redesign and refocus reconceptualize the way federal agencies need to be working in communities. Continuing the comparison of the mechanistic organizational model with the CAS model, some clear distinctions in perspective emerge (see Table “CAS vs. Mechanistic Model Perspectives).

In the mechanistic model, the federal agency has a discrete purpose or mission. The agency produces the highest quality regulations and standards, awards and manages grants of federal money, ensures that the right number and amount of benefits are provided to a particular set of stakeholders, and so on. Agency missions may abut one another and even overlap, but within each specific agency, the purpose is clear and clearly limited by Congressional mandate.

This specific mission is accomplished by precisely defining—often in legal language—the products or deliverables that need to be produced by the agency, and then designing, for each product, an organizational apparatus to produce the product.

Such an apparatus will consist of well-designed organizational parts that function together with effectiveness and precision. For instance, a grants management apparatus is designed to ensure that the right number of grants are awarded in the right amount of time and then to ensure that the money is eventually spent on the right projects. When something goes awry—too few grants awarded or some abuse of the grant money by the recipient—lack of performance by some part of the apparatus is generally to blame. When a new product or mandate is required, the organization will tend to create a new mechanism for its production. Improvement in this model has to do with “reengineering” an essentially mechanical process and “training” the parts to execute more effectively.

In terms of authority and action, the traditional federal agency demonstrates a careful command and control perspective through which decisions are passed down from the senior managers to the various parts for execution. When the object of focus is some behavior outside the organization itself—for instance, the gathering of resources from the external environment or the management of some environmental asset—the outside world is also addressed through the mechanistic language of formulas, standards, and outputs—the assessment of taxpayers’ tax contribution or the imposition of limitations on the amount of pollutants in automobile exhausts. Similarly, the traditional agency’s approach to involvement with stakeholders is characterized by the same mechanistic perspective, often focusing on linear policy-making, regulation, and enforcement, usually imposed from a distance (although the agencies are by law required to “propose” new regulations and to invite the public to comment on them before publishing them in the federal record).

CAS Vs. Mechanistic Model Perspectives
ASPECT CAS MECHANISTIC

Purpose Interrelated Multiobjective

Discrete, single objective focus

The performance of the system

Performance of the system parts

Return on Investment (ROI)

Quality of life changes Quantifiable return

Time horizon
Long term
Short term

Communication direction
Horizontal
Top-down

Management mechanisms
Collaboration and cooperation
Command and control

Authority
Distributed
Centralized

Planning approach
Iteractive
Linear

Distance from subject
Intimate involvement
Remote policy and standards

In the traditional perspective, Congress allocates specific amounts of resources (budgets) to federal agencies for the management and control of discrete social concerns—air quality, marine fish stocks, dredge and fill permits, illicit drug traffic, emergency preparedness, air traffic control, often even naming the specific pollutant, type of fish or drug—and expects (at least from a political position) to receive a quantifiable return on the investment.

Furthermore, this return on investment must take place within a limited time span. Unless the designed organizational apparatus can produce measurable, fairly immediate returns, it must be revised and redesigned. Solutions that take many years to produce results—and in the case of systemic social challenges, this is nearly always the case—are often seen as intractable by both Congress and the agency. For example, the questions that EPA managers wanted answered through our program evaluation of the Agency’s involvement in South Florida were “What value did the EPA gain from the resources it spent in South Florida. What evidence was there that the expenditure of federal dollars contributed in a real way to the accomplishment of stated EPA goals and objectives?” Rather than a systems approach to community action, these well-intentioned approaches often reflect a tyranny of small solutions.

On the other hand, in the CAS model, the basic perspective of the agency would be one of adaptation and co-evolution with its environment. The agency still must produce products and deliverables that create some additional inflow of resources (additional budgets from Congress, mainly), but the focus of the agency is on its successful adaptation to changing political, social, and economic realities.

In accomplishing this purpose, management attention will be paid to the performance of the organization as a whole. When something goes wrong with the organization’s outputs, the functioning of the system as a whole is explored more than the reliability of each individual part. For instance, by examining the quality of system inputs, the interactions and communications between subgroups, the learning ability of the employees, and so on, the organization looks to find points of leverage in the system that can affect (improve) overall system behavior. When a new function is received, the individual agents within the organization are rearranged (not necessarily reengineered) to respond to the new need. The ability of employees to play more than one role (redundancy of function) is the organic organization’s hedge against possible shifts in user demand. The traditional mechanistic organization must maintain a cadre of extra employees (redundancy of parts) to guarantee the same resiliency.

Since many community-based projects—the Everglades initiative, efforts to encourage “smart growth” or to help communities become more disaster-resistant, or strategies to help specific groups overcome the growing digital divide—are concerned with sustained (perhaps practices instead of changes?) changes in the health of the specific place, they often require sustained action, sometimes over decades, to protect existing resources and allow for continued development and change. This long-term point of view requires that agencies find a way to provide consistent support over long periods—an extremely difficult perspective to master with the innate shifts of program focus inherent in the frequent turnover of senior agency managers that is an element of our political system.

When working at the community level on systemic social--or economic or environmental issues, command and control approaches are not appropriate. No single agency, especially when often operating from a remote location, can "control" the dozens of independent agents—local governments, non-profits organizations, other federal and state agencies, and individual citizens—that make up a large scale social action. In fact, such an action, as it gains momentum, interest, and most importantly, resources, will often appear to be near the edge of chaos, as the various agents move together and alone in ever changing relationships in pursuit of their own goals and interests.

In such situations, the agency is not "in control" in any sense. Although the agency—EPA, FEMA, USDA—may become involved in the community, either through the invitation of the local participants or through their own offer to provide a requested service or assistance, the agency is not in a position to control the local activity. In fact, it is often hard to conceive just what activity would be controlled in the first place. In South Florida, EPA was invited to participate in the growing efforts to save the Everglades through the investment of analytic resources and personnel time. On the Eastern Shore of the Delmarva Peninsula, EPA brought modest monetary resources, a template for heritage conservation preservation planning, and the capability to develop relationships between disparate projects. However, neither of these situations provided a “controlling” interest for the Agency. More importantly, both efforts were intended to help people help themselves achieve locally-determined goals.

These projects also call for some degree of extended "on the ground" involvement that values and demonstrates a long-term federal interest and commitment to the change project. A "fly in, do some work, fly out" approach by federal agency personnel frequently undermines the creitiability of outside government does not carry much weight with the local stakeholders, especially when the challenge to be faced requires sustained commitment over years.

The mechanistic model of organizing has, of course, resulted in many gains for organizations and individuals. However, as some writers have suggested, the mechanistic model has become so ingrained in our everyday thinking about organizations that it has become fairly difficult to think about organizing in any other way. Overcoming this reluctance to think differently about organizations becomes increasingly important in an age characterized by the escalating velocity of change, since the mechanistic model may no longer meet the needs of federal agencies as they strive to respond to increasingly rapid changes in their environments.

Rather, the CAS model provides new insights for federal managers and employees into the present and future of federal action and services.

What New Approaches Tactics Does The Federal Employee Need To Work At The Community Level?

New Tactics Approaches for Working in Communities

Sustained Nudging
* Spend time on the ground, listening to local leaders and citizens. Facilitate the building of relationships.
* Encourage a “good enough” vision. Nurture the vision’s evolution. Connect the dots.
* Seek and support diversity. Create multiple pockets of focus.
* Build local capacity.
* Introduce timely and fitting information.
* Help develop a shared context. Manage the glossary.
* Nurture learning and its continuous application.
* Provide a communication infrastructure.
* Bring money for specific activities.

Design and Discovery
* Understand what tools are available. Adapt them as needed.
* Identify opportunities for expansion. Be opportunistic.
* Extract new designs from current discoveries. Operationalize lessons learned.

Incremental Co-Evolution
Based on our direct experiences and observations and on our discussions with project managers and team members directly involved in a wide range of other federal projects, we believe that working within such complex situations requires new tactics approaches on the part of the involved federal employees (we include federal managers in this group, of course). We suggest three tactics approaches that we observed in the case studies: sustained “nudging through collaboration”, working with “design and discovery” and expecting “incremental co-evolution.” These tactics are designed to take advantage of the CAS characteristics and thereby help the involved employees to work in concert with the complexity of the situation rather than to become confused and frustrated by it. While some of the specific skills that comprise the tactics are familiar to managers of large projects—negotiation skills, for example are often taught in federal management programs—the particular slant here is on the tactical approach that makes use of the characteristics of complexity that exist in our local communities.

Sustained nudging through collaboration management
The “butterfly effect” suggests that small changes in initial conditions can have disproportionally large effects down the road. If the key leverage points within the complex system are known, then significant changes in outcome can be produced by fairly small inputs. Even the suggestion of such a possibility should be welcome news to federal managers who are challenged with delivering more with fewer resources. As Douglas Kiel says, “Knowing that unstable systems often require small nudges rather than heavy-handed control may help managers think in terms of changing relationships, altering processes, and examining the dynamics of time series.”

Our observations indicate that this is in fact the situation. In South Florida, for instance, a small grant to help bring additional diversity into the core group, and the notification of a federal recognition program, all fairly small actions supported by EPA employees, each had the effect of creating higher levels of organization for the overall Everglades movement.

We asked several employees intimately involved with EPA's involvement in the South Florida project what advice they would give to a team just starting out on such an engagement. One of the primary players responded that the first move should be to hire an expert in collaboration management trained in skills such as facilitation, negotiation and compromise, outreach, consensus-building, relationship-building and communication skills, and motivational skills—skills that emphasize working with others rather than controlling or commanding them. This emphasis on collaborative, non-hierarchical modes of involvement was a consistent response of interviewees, not only from the federal employees but also from the other local parties involved.

The natural desire of a federal agency that is contributing significant resources in terms of people, money, expertise, tools to a community has been to control the situation enough so that visible, quantifiable results can be produced that can be reported back to superiors, Congress, and ultimately to taxpayers as demonstrations of the good use of these resources.

When working locally in communities, however, this natural desire for control has to be sublimated in favor of working collaboratively within the community to create forward momentum and direction. The federal employee can "nudge" the situation here or there by carefully introducing new information, additional money, and other resources, finding and introducing new independent agents who could have a stake in the action (as in the case of using a small grant to increase the diversity of the group), or increasing the number of connections and information channels among existing players (by providing a communications infrastructure, for instance). The effects of these nudges can then be monitored to see that the resultant increases in self-organization seem to be leading toward the stated goals. A series of such nudges over time will be necessary to create the kind of sustained self-organization within the community that will move the community steadily toward the accomplishment of its (and the federal agency’s) goals.

Such nudging requires intimate knowledge of the situation. It requires that the federal employees involved spend significant amounts of time on the ground, listening to local leaders and citizens and facilitating the building of relationships. It requires a good deal of patience on the part of the federal employee’s managers back in Washington, since it may appear for periods of time that little progress, if any, is taking place and because the outcomes of these nudges will be hard to measure in a traditional, linear, ROI sense.

Several points of leverage are available. First, the multiple independent agents in a community-based projects are all working on partial information sets, many of which may contain potentially conflicting bits of data. One of the key means of getting these people on the same page is to create an over-arching “vision” of where the project needs to go. The vision provides direction but also a means for resolving disputes between parties.

“Vision,” of course, is a concept that can create some real skepticism among the parties involved, since it has been much used and abused over the past few years. However, having a vision that captures the essence of the group’s concerns can galvanize the group, enabling constructive discussion and creating self-organizing activity. The federal employee can nudge the partnership in this area by providing examples of vision statements that have worked in other, similar situations.

Furthermore, since a “perfect” vision will probably not be achievable, the federal employee should encourage the acceptance of a “good enough” vision around which in initial consensus can consolidate and then nurture the vision’s evolution over time.

In South Florida, on the Delmarva Peninsula, in FEMA’s disaster resistant communities, and in HUD’s neighborhoods, multiple actors—politicians, civil servants, healthcare and environmental groups, developers, technicians, financiers, and others—are involved in various aspects of the social actions in their communities. These actors combine in various ways and at multiple levels to form new, often ephemeral subgroups, each with its own interests and concerns. These individual actors have complex relationships among themselves and these relationships ebb and flow depending on the issue and each individual agent's level of interest in it. Likewise, multiple-layered motives make unitary goals often hard to establish and the "vision" of the movement tends to float from one articulation to the next without settling for long on any one.

In such a situation, creating the right conditions for system growth and for collaboration among agents and coordination of their activities in light of an over-arching "big picture” is an appropriate federal management responses in complex situations.

A second point of leverage is in the introduction of timely and fitting information into the system. While EPA was neither in control of or the initiator of the work in South Florida and the Delmarva Peninsula, the federal employees involved were able to bring unique information from their perspective as a national organization, such as availability of a grant, significant opportunities for peer matching with other communities or even international programs that support planning.

Third, a key to a successful self-organizing system is the system’s “internal variety,” which should reflect the same variety that exists in the external environment. In other words, if minority populations play a significant role in the overall community (the external environment), they should play a significant role on the project team. Sometimes it is difficult for local team members to recognize this need for diversity.

Related to diversity is the need to establish multiple pockets of focus within the program. As long as the core vision stays intact and each of the areas of focus are seen as contributing to the overall project, then multiple points of focus allow more stakeholders to attain a closer relationship to the project as a whole. In South Florida, it seemed important to local leaders to be able to point to real improvement projects in their own neighborhoods as signs that the overall Everglades initiative would create real benefits. Similarly, both FEMA’s efforts at building design resistant communities and HUD’s efforts in Neighborhood Networks involved working in multiple specific places as a means of building nation-wide momentum for the programs.

Working within the community, the federal employee can also work to build local capacity. Successful environmental action requires long-term commitment. Federal agencies cannot provide the energy needed to sustain a movement throughout its full lifetime. Instead, the initial federal involvement must lead to a self-sustaining situation within the local community. This can only be accomplished by consciously building local capacity in every resource decision. For instance, instead of locating someone halfway across the country to give a talk on community housing and telecommunications, the help of the less-well-known expert residing on the local college campus should be solicited. That agent, already a member of the community, now becomes a local resource for the movement, something the more distant lecturer could not be.

Providing support for communication is yet another point of leverage in a complex system. The federal government has significant resources in terms of existing communications infrastructure—often including videoconferencing, teleconferencing, and Internet resources—that can be used to provide a communications backbone for the community-based project. Diverse actors in the community who may not know of others or who may not traditionally work together can be “connected” through the infrastructure into a group with wider reach and power.

Achieving the required diversity on broad-based community projects will also mean that the potential for significant misunderstandings in all project communications has been increased, especially when the differences between the cultural backgrounds of team members are great. Understanding this, the federal employee can volunteer to manage the project glossary. Defining key terms and ideas for project use will increase the ability of the team to communicate clearly over time, enabling it to reach consensus earlier and avoid costly disagreements.

Finally, there is no better nudge than a little money at the right time. But this investment should be focused on providing some concrete, definable contribution to the project.

Design and Discovery
One of the more interesting aspects of our experience with working in communities has been the dynamic interplay of two salient features—a general emphasis on designed approaches and an openness to discovery—that appear to work together to create forward progress in working in places situation.

By “design” we mean the use of tools, methods, and approaches that have been developed and proven outside the community and that are brought in to respond to specific issues or concerns. On the Delmarva Peninsula, for instance, discussions with community stakeholders led to the suggestion that the community develop a local "heritage protection plan." This process—already applied in other places—followed a set of steps from the initial goal-setting, through the identification of local environmental heritage concerns, the prioritization of those concerns, and the development of action plans for the protection of the highest-priority assets. Good designs can be applied repeatedly in very different geographic, social, and environmental situations. Furthermore, design elements—models, approaches, planning methods, and so on—can often be linked into new programmatic designs that address more wide-based societal issues.

On the other side of the design coin is discovery. Discovery is the emergence of locally conceived and instituted actions developed to meet a particular need or demand that may have emerged during the design process. On the Eastern Shore, for instance, the development of a Heritage Protection Plan led to discussions with the mayor of a town with a small marina over whether the town should outsource the marina. Although generally not the type of issue that would gain EPA attention, the federal employee on site agreed to contribute support to the investigation.

Surprisingly, the effort led to the identification of environmental benefits that would accrue to the local community only if the town continued to manage the marina itself, a finding that eventually sealed the mayor's decision.

Discovery is the commitment to the local place and local goals that allows the active participants to uncover the internal logic of the local challenge and respond to that, rather than to some dictated issue or point of entry (the design) that may not get to the point. Discovery challenges design in that it requires an adaptive, intuitive response to unique stimuli, challenges, and opportunities. Discovery is creative and decentralized and unique in the sense that it arises out of the specific situation. Discovery, ultimately, challenges the traditional mechanistic model. Discovery requires a willingness to bend the design to respond to new ideas, needs and opportunities in the community that will contribute to progress.

Design and discovery interact. A recognizable issue—for instance, a community's growing concern for a structured approach to safeguarding their environmental legacy or for making their community more disaster resistant—can lead to a structured query for help and a structured response, for instance in the case of the development of a heritage protection plan. At the same time, the learning done by the independent agents involved in the design will often lead to the discovery of some other need, slightly off-center perhaps, not necessarily well-articulated, but that calls forth an enthusiastic response from the group. And though while unique in its genesis, the result of this discovery is not necessarily non-reproducible. In fact, the learning done during a discovery encounter can be captured, categorized, and turned into a design itself, available when the specific stimuli reappears under new conditions.

Figure 1 shows a map of the relationship between design and discovery as it emerged through the experience of one of EPA's "circuit riders" on the Delmarva Peninsula from the years of 1990 – 1993 (?). This program—an early experience working in communities that took place during the critical middle years of efforts to address the needs of the Chesapeake Bay as a regional environmental asset—stationed EPA personnel in certain environmentally-threatened areas to provide information, advice, and other resources when and where they were needed.

The "backbone" of the map depicts the occurrence of successive projects that moved from town to town on the Eastern Shore. The "ribs" of the map show the discovery offspring of each design activity. On the map, projects in UPPERCASE represent design projects, that is, those projects that followed a previously designed approach or method, such as the development of a heritage plan for which there already existed a plan template and method. In almost all cases, the major design activities along the map backbone lead to the spawning of additional opportunities for action within the local community.

The map also captures the circuit riders’ insight that as projects that were originally “discovery” projects are repeated several times, they begin to take on characteristics of design. For instance, “visitor center assistance” and “exchange programs” are repeated at multiple points along the map, moving from the initial discovery into a structured, repeatable format.

The result is a clear picture of the adaptive, evolutionary nature of an ongoing environment action. (In fact, over time the main stem and offshoots eventually merged with other self-organizing systems to become part of the broad-based Chesapeake Bay project.)

We do not mean to imply that the circuit riders on the Eastern Shore were specifically applying this design and discovery approach. By their own testimony, they were scrambling to keep up with stakeholders’ requests for assistance in the most effective ways they could devise. Upon reflection, however, the design and discovery approach they employed seems to be an important tactic for working in the adaptive systems that are our local communities.

Incremental Co-evolution
Equilibrium is a threat to a CAS. No evolution or new self-organization can take place in an equilibrium situation. One way to kill a community-based movement swiftly is to impose too much organizational structure on it; such structures have a way of becoming their own rationale for continued existence and draining the energy of the movement. On the other hand, death of a social movement can also result from too much unfocused energy. Without any structure, the movement’s energy eventually dissipates in random activities without having accomplished any project goals.

The way a CAS can survive and evolve is to attain the edge of chaos, maintaining its existence there without either falling back into a comfortable equilibrium (disguised sometime as “orderly” progress) or sliding completely into chaos. By continuously taking in new information from other systems in the external environment and passing new information back to those systems, a CAS can co-evolve with its external environment in a relationship that can be sustained for long periods of time.

Co-evolution is the coordinated and interdependent evolution of two or more systems within a larger ecological system. There is feedback among the systems in terms of competition or cooperation and different utilization of the same limited resources.

For example, Kauffman and Macready give as examples of co-evolution the way in which alterations in a predator will alter the adaptive possibilities of the prey. Businesses or institutions can co- evolve in various ways such as with their suppliers, receivers, even competitors. For instance, the numerous types of joint ventures that are recently emerging in the business environment can be considered a kind of co-evolution.

Community-based social movements can also co-evolve, as conditions change within the systems with which the movement interacts and within the external environment as a whole. In fact, this co-evolution can provide a constant source of energy for the CAS to keep it slightly disturbed, never quite settling into equilibrium.

From afar, of course—for instance from the perspective of a federal agency’s headquarters in Washington, DC—the appearance of constant turmoil can seem chaotic and ultimately frustrating. However, from within the situation, in the view of the stakeholders involved with the effort, this energy is experienced as new learning, new opportunity, and new excitement.

Organizational learning is a major contributor to this co-evolutionary balance that can be nurtured between the external environment and the social movement in the community. For instance, lessons learned from similar social movements in other parts of the country can be fed back into the specific community as a spur to new insights and courses of action. Similarly, lessons learned by the stakeholders in this specific community can be fed back into the larger environment, creating additional levels of awareness and responsiveness there. Certainly something of this exchange can be seen in the map of activities on the Delmarva Peninsula. Indeed, this co-evolutionary aspect underlies all great social transformations.

Often, this notion of co-evolution is hidden, however, since it takes place incrementally over time. Incremental co-evolution requires not only an attitude of continuous learning, but also one of patience. In South Florida, for instance, a deep feeling existed among stakeholders in the Everglades initiative that until legislation was passed at local, state, and federal levels, the safety of the Everglades would never be truly assured. And legislation would only result, many felt, when the learning that was being achieved within the various Everglades-related activities made its way back into the general populace.

The federal employee involved in communities can aid this kind of co-evolution in a number of ways. Federal agencies have access to lessons learned from around the nation. Functioning as a “national knowledge manager” in their assigned areas, federal agencies can provide employees on the ground a wide range of valuable lessons to be introduced into the local setting. Examples of successful projects in other areas of the country can elicit create responses from a community struggling to move forward toward the achievement of a social goal.

In addition, the federal employee can remind the group than an entrepreneurial, public relations oriented component is an important component of a fully-functioning social movement. After all, “Save the Everglades” bumper stickers and “Save the Bay” license plates function as information pulses introduced into the external environment to can begin the gradual changes that lead to long-term sustainability for the movement.

What Will The “New” Federal Agency Look Like?
In many ways, our federal agencies do not have to change. The structure of standards, research, and enforcement provides the basis for much effective federal action in defining and supporting national goals for environment, education, housing, and so on. While there might be a stronger emphasis on one issue or another, the basic structures of our laws and regulations provide a significant backdrop. In fact, that system of standards provides the necessary framework and measure of much local action and must be maintained to guide individual and local action. In fact, the system of standards and “typical” efforts to meet them or essentially the design components of federal involvement and, in themselves, provide a rich and valuable resource. Finally, the federal agencies, in fact the entire government, is moving towards a redefinition of results in response to GPRA and those results will be based on the goals in national laws and the standards they created. The federal agency’s system of measurements and rewards will have to change to accommodate longer time frames and a new definition of success as capacity building and environmental change rather than activity. This is the work envisioned and begun in GPRA, but where much needs to be done to really change the existing, top-down, activity based system.

Likewise, the need for better information is a trend that would continue. Not only because the measures are shifting to real results but information can, if properly analyzed and assembled, be a significant driver for good decisions regardless of whether the federal agency is a central player. With some care, such as a much better understanding of how different people receive, interpret and use information, this is a growing area that deserves continued attention.

The major change will be how the federal agency will work in the field. Discovery and adaptation can only work if an agency is a player—a presence where it counts. Federal agencies are notorious for their history of rapid entrances and departures. Like the tax man or some crazy relative, the agency will sweep in when it’s least expected or wanted and then disappear when the crisis is over or has shifted elsewhere. If the federal agency hopes to be effective in achieving national goals, its employees have to be there when they are needed, not when they choose to be.

The federal agency has to bring the ability to suggest direction and outcomes (the design), provide resources that contribute to the larger good (information, measures, access to the larger federal community, tools that support consensus, such as helping to overcome conflicts arising from language or cultural differences) and then contribute as partners, primarily by keeping the work moving with creative ideas, proposals and encouragement. One of the challenges in the community is sustaining this learning and increasing self-organization over time, since at successively higher stages of self-organization, higher levels of resources are required to prevent the system from falling apart. In many cases the these are not additional federal resources, in fact the most significant resources may be early in the federal involvement. Over time, local and other resources can increasingly be brought to bear.

The federal agency also need to pick its communities carefully. The federal budget is not likely to grow to a size that agencies can afford widely distributed, permanent offices in many places. Most deferral agencies have always been centrally located and while some redistribution is necessary, they can never grow to meet the demands in all places at all times. Therefore the agency needs to pick the communities they go into with an eye towards significance as well as likelihood of success. Two conditions need to be present, at a minimum:

A significant regional or national issue (a threatened environmental asset, for instance; or a nation-wide concern for the increasing costs of emergency response).

A level of concern, turbulence, and momentum already present in the community.
In the first condition, significance could mean a unique natural resource, a region with a large or special human or natural community at risk, or a situation that , if a successful approach can be demonstrated, it could be repeated in many other similar places, without significant federal involvement. While every place is significant to the people that live there, some selectivity will need to be exercised. Several conditions helped to make this work in South Florida:

* An endangered ecosystem that is a recognized regional (and international) asset.
* A history of concern for the ecosystem
* Clear demarcation of that asset from the encroaching development.
* An urban area that is experiencing stress in several areas: sewage, water, transportation, energy, poverty.
* A fairly well-accepted assessment of future growth that suggests continued stress on the area.
* A significant amount of activity focusing on the challenges.
* A political climate that is inclined to support the project.

The second condition is based on the experience that without local energy, concern, and leadership, a federal agency cannot come in from outside and make it happen. EPA, FEMA, or HUD cannot start local work from scratch. To use the “nudging” tactic, there has to be something there to help along. This may be a case were conflict, even stalemate is an opportunity rather than a barrier—those places in chaos may be ripe for a new approach.

Additionally, the federal agency has to change its notion of time. Because working in communities is complex and non-linear, results there will not fit the set expectations that traditional approaches have. While the goal is building local capacity so that the agency can move on, the agency will have to be prepared for a variety of arrangements that could be very short term and also could be “forever”.

In South Florida, EPA was able to locate personnel in a temporary housing with a borrowed office. This arrangement worked well for the nine months, and was accommodated, albeit with some creativity, within the existing travel and training practices of the agency. In other cases a more permanent arrangement may be necessary. While a design approach may indicate the sufficiency of a temporary arrangement, being open to the process of discovery requires the freedom to be flexible.

Finally, just because they are well-intentioned, many local (and, for that mater, federal) initiatives have no inherent right to survival. Multiple examples exist where such actions lead only to single, isolated environmental achievements—a block cleaned here, a waterfront reestablished there—and never create the synergy that allows the whole to become more than the parts. Federal managers dealing with communities as CAS must nudge, evolve and look for new approaches, through increases in communication, monitoring, and mid-course corrections to meet the national challenges of the 21st Century.

Books and Articles
A wide range of books and articles about complexity and its implications exists. In addition, over the past decade, literature has begun to emerge that applies the complexity metaphor to the social sciences and various management concerns. The following list contains a sampling of some of these sources, but should not be viewed as complete in any sense.

Arthur, W. B. (1990). "Positive feedbacks in the economy." Scientific American, 262, 92-99.

Arthur, W. B. (1996). "Increasing returns." Harvard Business Review. July/August.

Beinhocker, Eric D. (1999). "Robust adaptive strategies." Sloan Management Review, Spring.

Cambel, A. (1993). Applied chaos theory: A paradigm for complexity. San Diego: Academic Press.

Capra, F. (1996). The web of life: A new scientific understanding of living systems. New York: Anchor.

Gleick, J. ( 1987). Chaos: Making a new science. New York: Viking.

Holland, J. H. (1995). Hidden order: How adaptation builds complexity. Reading, MA: Addison-'Wesley.

Innes, J. & D. Dooher. (1999). "Metropolitan development as a complex system: a new approach to sustainability." Economic Development Quarterly, May.

Johnson, G. (1995). Fire in the mind: Science, faith, and the search for order. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Kaplan, D., & Glass, L. (1995). Understanding nonlinear dynamics. New York: Oxford University Press.

Kauffman, S. A. (1993). The origins of order: Self organization and selection in evolution. New York: Oxford University Press.

Kauffman, S. A. (1995). At home in the universe: The search for the laws of self-organization and complexity. New York: Oxford University Press.

Kiel, L. D. (1993). Nonlinear dynamical analysis: Assessing systems concepts in a government agency. Public Administration Review, 53,143 -153.

Kiel, L. D., & Elliott, E. (Eds.). (1996). Chaos theory in the social sciences: Foundations and applications. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Kiel, L. D. (1994). Managing chaos and complexity in government: San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers.

Lewin, R. ( 1992). Complexity: Life at the edge of chaos. New York: Collier Books.

Mathews, K. M., M. C. White, & R. G. Long. (1999). "Why study the complexity sciences in the social sciences?" Human Relations, V. 52, N. 4.

Pascale, Richard T. (1999). Surfing the edge of chaos. Sloan Management Review, Spring.

Preismeyer, H. Richard. (1992) Organizations and chaos: defining the methods of non-linear management. Westport, Connecticut; Quorum Books.

Robertson, R. & A. Combs (eds.). (1995. Chaos theory in psychology and the life sciences. Mahwah, N.J: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Stacy, R. (1996). Complexity and creativity in organizations. San Franscisco: Berrett-Koehler.

Tenner, E. (1996). Why things bite back. New York; Alfred Knopf, Inc.

Warren, K. C. Franklin, & C. Streeter. (1997) New directions in systems theory: Chaos and complexity. Social Work, 21, 1, 86 - 100.

Waldrop, M. M. (1992). Complexity: The emerging science at the edge of chaos. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Wheatley, M. (1992). Leadership and the new science: Learning about organization from an orderly universe. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler.