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What is governance of complex systems?

In a world where systems continually evolve and grow in complexity, traditional forms of governance become increasingly complicated, facing new challenges and limitations. To advocate for safety in complex systems requires understanding of the interactions within it. This can be between different layers of a system that people are embedded in, be that individual, societal and physical.

Governance mechanisms fit for complexity intend to provide frameworks or approaches that can help create safer outcomes. It can involve a multitude of stakeholders, such as national government, professional bodies, regulatory bodies, and the wider society, who collaboratively help to steer towards a safer future.

Our work

We commissioned four groups in Europe , US and UK, and internationally diverse geographical locations (Kenya, Dhaka, Cape town) to undertake a series of roundtables to create reports with the aim of provoking new conversations on the safer governance of complex systems.

The Govern Project

This project involved a series of workshops that resulted in four themes. They explore how to develop a better understanding of the challenges and future governance structures that may contribute to safer complex systems.

The 4 themes being explored in the project are the following:

  1.  Political actions have consequences.
  2.  Learning from failures.
  3.  Laws and regulations fit for complexity.
  4.  Listening to Diverse Voices.

The work has developed over a period of months by the authors in collaboration with their own networks and under the mentorship of a group of advisors, chaired by Dr Chris Elliot MBE FREng.

Workshop output

The workshops sparked discussions on how interactions on formal and informal governance, the relevance on the inclusion of diverse voices, adaptive regulation and how improve approaches to learning from failure in organisations

Reports

Learning from failures in complex systems: Embracing rules and principles in practice for effective governance

Report summary

  • Published: July 2024
  • Authors: Professor David Denyer and Professor Colin Pilbeam

This report focuses on the identification of 18 categories of safety practices to prevent future failures in complex systems. It highlights that these can be framed either as rules-based or principles-based practices, which are found to be complementary, and both regarded as important for effective governance. The report reflects on how understanding lessons learned from failure are framed, impacts the nature and success of change initiatives.

Key findings

The overall objective of the research study provides four key findings, through utilising the Delphi approach, to enhance learning from failures and enhance governance in complex systems.

  1. Safety experts identified 18 categories of safety practices to prevent future failure in complex systems.
  2. Safety Practices can be framed as rules-based or principles-based, which both are important and necessary for effective governance.
  3. Successful implementation of change following failure depends on a context-sensitive balance between rules-based and principles-based approaches to governance.
  4. To become excessively focused on rule-based practices, while aiding implementation, may limit the breadth and effectiveness of change initiatives.

Diversifying governance of fire risk and safety in informal settlements

Report summary

  • Published: July 2024
  • Authors: Kindling, Helen Underhill, Laura Hirst, Danielle Antonellis, Lesley Gibson, Sandra Vaiciulyte

Fires are an everyday occurrence in informal settlements in cities around the world. Their consequences can be catastrophic and include fatalities, long-term injuries, emotional trauma, destroyed homes and assets, and disrupted education and livelihoods. With a quarter of the world’s urban population (approximately one billion) living in informal settlements, this risk urgently needs addressing.

This report explores the governance of complex systems to address the problem of fire risk in informal settlements. It highlights the dynamics within informal settlements, where fire risks arise from unequal urbanisation and where fire hazards and socio-economic vulnerabilities interact to create and reinforce each other, while also recognising there is a lack of recognition of diversity within the system. By understanding and recognising this complexity as an injustice, the case of emergent informal safety practices and systems is argued to shape better policy and interventions.

Key findings

  1. Recognising and incorporating the spectrum and diversity of experiences and conditions is vital for complex systems approaches.
  2. Within a complex system, risk can result from numerous ‘failures’ in the system. Building on ‘listening to diverse voices’, we look critically at how failure may be defined differently by different actors in the system, ‘whose reality counts?’, who learns what from whom, and what needs to happen for learning for safety to go beyond performative commitments ‘to learn’.
  3. A key feature of complex systems is their openness/permeable boundaries, which has is considered in terms of how fire risk and safety is influenced by political economy and governance decisions at different levels that flow from this.

Governance of safer electricity systems in Kenya

Report summary

  • Published: July 2024
  • Authors: Anne Wacera Wambugu
  • Co-authors: Dr Betsy Muriithi, Augusta Njogo, Vincent Muchiri, Hope Njoroge, Professor Eng Izael Da Silva
  • Editors: Sandra Banda, Louise Mathu, Cynthia Omondi

This report focuses on a holistic understanding of how socio-economic systems and technical engineered systems interact regarding to access, maintenance, and regulation of electricity systems in Kenya. It concludes electricity access is an emergent feature resulting from interactions between technologies, governance, and economic considerations in such complex ecosystem.

Key Findings

  1. Electrification efforts rely currently on large numbers of informal technicians. The improvement of technicians skills on safety and quality is a key to improve safety, reliability, and access.
  2. To understand and recognise that local governance structures form an important part of creating and extending safer electrical systems.
  3. Dismantling and overcoming barriers to secure women’s involvement in the electricity sector as technical practitioners would enable the shortfall in skills to be addressed.

 

Regulation fit-for-complexity

Report summary

  • Published: July 2024
  • Authors: Richard Judge, Director, Bartlett Judge Associates, Shirin Elahi, Senior Associate, Normann Partners

Regulation struggles with the ambiguities, trans-boundary nature of risks in our highly interconnected world. The emergent behaviours of complex systems cannot be controlled or predicted in the sense that typical causal logic or reductionist frameworks would suggest, or that laws and regulatory practices often rely on. This new reality presents a profound challenge for policymakers, and a powerful catalyst for regulatory innovation.

This report reviews and explores potential responses to five different, but interrelated, attributes of complexity. How different aspects of complexity can undermine existing, previously successful, regulatory practices, and identifies potential options for responding to the associated challenges. However, regulation is highly contextual, so there is no ‘one size fits all’ solution and no single design that will make all regulatory frameworks ‘fit-for-complexity’. The review concludes that what is most needed, even more than any new regulatory tools, is a new mindset fit for this disruptive age.

Key takeaways

  1. The inherent characteristics of laws and formal rules (regulations) make them unlikely to cope with the realities of complexity. It will be important to think in terms of regulatory systems, and to use the full breadth of regulatory tools available to governments and regulators.
  2. What is most needed, more than any new regulatory tools, are new mindsets that are fit-for-complexity. This requires acceptance that complexity will be navigated (as opposed to controlled), with regulatory systems explicitly designed for anticipation and adaptation.
  3. Navigating societal uncertainties and disruption also places an even greater premium on inclusiveness, perceived fairness, and trust as essential lubricants of regulation fit-for-complexity.

Safer Complex Systems: An Initial Framework

Report summary

  • Published: 2020
  • Authors: University of York (Professor John McDermid OBE FREng, Professor Simon Burton, Dr Phillip Garnett, Dr Rob Weaver)

In late 2019, the University of York was commissioned to undertake an initial review of safety in the design, management and governance of complex systems. The report has made several recommendations to the Safer Complex Systems programme and produced an initial framework that enables people in different sectors and disciplines to talk about, analyse and manage safety issues arising out of complexity in different contexts.

Key findings

The growth in complexity of designed systems and the emergent complexity of ad hoc systems are outstripping our engineering methods and challenging our ability to manage systems safely.

  1. Develop approaches for better communicating risk, increasing trust and forming consensus on acceptable levels of safety
  2. Acknowledge and address complexity in oversight, regulatory structures, legal accountability and policymaking
  3. Develop methods to address equality, diversity and inclusion during risk management and promote heterogeneity of thought
  4. Integrate simulation, model based analysis and digital twins into design and operational-time controls
  5. Develop an integrated and complementary set of methods for analysing risks in complex systems
  6. Identify design-time and operation-time controls for increasing system resilience