Pace Layering: How Complex Systems Learn and Keep Learning

emblematic ideas to take forward could include: * resilient and diverse communities as essential foundations; * the value of trust in government and civic institutions; * recognising the agility and capability latent within the public sector; * and the enormous value of inefficiency and redundancy in systems; * an understanding that there are essen... See more

Thus it didn’t matter that for much of the twentieth century, the cathedral of state didn’t work so well. Nobody, even in the mighty business world, could come up with an alternative: other models simply didn’t exist for them. The entire world of large organizations was dominated by malfunctioning and suboptimal cathedrals[390]. The state had no ch

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You might imagine that roughly around the time when TARP and the various bail-out decisions were being made, that it could have gone either way, and that we could have, for example, allowed the too-big-to-fail entities to fail, and that it would have had negative consequences at the financial layer, negative consequences probably at the economic le... See more

Cycles at higher levels of organization tend to proceed more slowly than those at lower levels. This gives the multilevel system its resilience . Rapid low-level turnover enables innovation for adaptation (flexibility), while longer-term dynamics at the higher levels provide the capacity for innovations to accumulate (stability) before more global ... See more