How to Drive your Elephant - Dealing with Complex Problems

[profgoose]

The elephant is a nice metaphor for what I would like to tell you today. You see, you can't fit a harness to an elephant, at least not of the same kind that is used for horses. Then, how do the people who ride elephants tell the beast to start, stop, where to go and the like? The way it is done, I understand, is by means of such things as vocal orders, pressure with one's legs and also by a big pointed stick that is used to prick the elephant's head. I don't think the elephant is very happy about being pricked in that way; actually, there is probably a good deal of cruelty involved. But we'll be using elephant driving just as a metaphor for controlling complex systems, so let me just say that it seems to work: you can control an elephant by very small external influences. This is the core of control theory: you want to be able to control large and complex systems doing the smallest possible amount of work.

Control theory is a fascinating subject, often used for controlling such things as planes, ships, and other kinds of machinery. It might also be used for elephants, but there is a difference. With a car or a truck, you turn the steering wheel so much and the wheels turn of so many degrees. You don't need to make a big effort with the wheel to turn a large truck, but the point is that the result is proportional to the effort. On the contrary, the elephant may not like to go the way you would like it to go and may react in ways that are not at all proportional to what the driver does. That must make things much more difficult. Now, there is a whole class of systems, we may call them "complex systems," which are difficult to control because they react in ways that are not simply proportional to the intensity of an external influence. That means economic and social systems, for instance and - perhaps - also elephants. For what we are discussing here, we might consider that these systems are dominated by internal feedback effects.

The behavior of complex systems is often difficult to predict, but that doesn't mean it is impossible and there is a whole branch of control theory that deals with this problem.

http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/6317