Working with Complex Systems: Approaches, Techniques, and Philosophies

I’ve given a number of talks on software design and documentation methodology in the past. It has recently occurred to me that there is a lot of overlap between elements of those systems and learning/teaching dance and martial art. In software engineering and mathematics, one of the primary paradigms is the concept of modularity – that is, breaking complex tasks and systems down into more easily manageable units that can be independently completed and verified. In teaching dance and martial art, the general approach is to teach individual steps or techniques, and then as the student becomes more proficient, the modular elements become integrated into the whole. Further, the iterative nature of the above tasks, and increasingly complex development lend themselves to new methods of self-organization and new approaches to personal metrics and planning. Hence the growing popularity of systems like Getting Things Done (GTD). In a lot of ways, GTD and the like are ways to implement software design methods and apply them to real world tasks. Although the concept of metrics is usually applied to software or to hard engineering disciplines, they can be very useful in any complex endeavor, and the same approaches apply. Today, there are a multitude of tools available for implementing such approaches. This talk will be split between discussion of the philosophical principles linking complex systems and tools that make the process of working with them more manageable.

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