‘If you are a student, try to be a teacher; if you are a teacher, try to be a student!’

Mehmet Murat Ildan

Moving towards more complexity

Complex problems lie at the heart of interdisciplinary studies. There are four basic prerequisites for a system to be called complex as opposed to just being complicated:

• 1 the presence of diverse ‘agents’ (i.e. atoms, football hooligans or organisations),

• 2 these agents are interconnected and their behaviour and actions are interdependent (they form a network),

• 3 this collection of agents tends to self-organise (as a result of feedback and feed-forward loops between agents), and

• 4 the agents must be able to change (in the local or global environment) or to learn (Menken & Keestra, 2016).

One example of a complex system is the order of a city, with the organisation of its infrastructure, its countless daily flows of goods, and people living their daily lives. The city functions even though there is no central planner (Page, 2010).

A complex system is unpredictable and often behaves in non-linear ways, such as system effects that are disproportionate to their causes, or sudden large shifts in the system's pattern of behaviour (Newell, 2007). This creates complex problems such as stock market crashes, sudden collapses of ancient societies, epileptic seizures, the civil uprisings that erupted during the so-called Arab Spring, and lakes that shift from a clear to a turbid state (Menken & Keestra, 2016).

As the connectedness of our world increases, at least at the social, economic and political levels, more complex problems are generated. Around 10,000 years ago, people lived in groups that were relatively isolated from each other, and they depended only on their own community (Menken & Keestra, 2016). Today, however, there are global markets that connect companies and consumers from all over the world, and these markets self-organise and are interdependent and adaptable to change. In other words, problems arising from these global markets can be classified as complex. As technology further increases interconnectedness and globalisation, more complex problems due to this globalisation can be detected.

So on the one hand, technological advancements can contribute to the complexity of the problems we are facing but on the other hand, technical advancements allow scientists to understand the underlying forces, interactions and non-linearities that together constitute complex phenomena (Van Santen, Khoe & Vermeer, 2010).