An Exploration of Complex Unbounded Problems

Abstract

This thesis presents a post-modern exploration of complex unbounded problems (CUPs), seeking to provide generally applicable insights into their overall character, an effort that may inform a number of strategies to address them. Here, CUPs are serious systemic poly-domain disruptions, as complex threat risk situations far beyond the normally encountered routine problems, and although at times related to but also distinctly beyond the more common and tractable non-routine problems as described in disaster literature (e.g. Handmer and Dovers, 2013) and confronted by strategic, planning and response agencies. My first proposition is that a broader-than-usual grouping of CUPs is valuable and needed, across disasters, technological threats, humanitarian crises, security and conflict, planetary environmental degradation, widespread economic crises, and dangerous geopolitical situations. CUPs thus span those stemming from human (anthropogenic) causes and from natural (naturogenic) processes, and those that are more common in having their roots in both causal complexes. Most literature and indeed policy and responses treat these admittedly already large and complex domains separately. This wider grouping allows consideration of commonalities and variations across situations and disruptions. I propose CUPs thus categorized, have commonalities at least at a broad strategic and conceptual level, while endlessly displaying the latter in their specific manifestations and particular features. This is consistent with, but widens the scope of, Ducote's et.al (2010) PMESII+ model (political, military, economic, social-ecological, informational or infrastructural) which we have modified to incorporate the social-ecological domain; works with information-action (Polkinghorne, J. 2006); is supported by Max-Neef's Human Scale Development (HSD) (1989, 2010); fits with Complex Systems theories (Bar-Yam, Y. 1997, 2002, 2003), (Ackhoff, R.L.1994); (Holland, J.H. 1992, 2014); and those models, means and methods found in related scientific and warnings analysis fields (Grabo, C. 2003, 2010) and (Kent, S. 1949). The second and third propositions involve a number of attributes characterize CUPs in their many and deeply worrying forms. The key attributes of CUPs identified and explored here are coalescence; exceedance; porosity and unsoundness. A critical concept throughout is that of information-action, following Polkinghorne (2006), and the related phenomena of actioner and trajectorates, whereby the vectors of dynamins cause change. As an admitted eucatastrophist (sensu JRR Tolkien 1942), seeking perhaps optimistically hopeful endings amidst dismal prospects, and to counterbalance the apparent entropic direction of global problems, I respond with the idea of anti-entropy. Along the way, sub-attributes emerge and are noted. CUPs chapters: Introduction and general concepts; 2). Earth System; 3).Complex Civil Nuclear Disasters ; 4). Biologics; 5). Near earth Space Ecology; 6). Summary and Conclusions. The three propositions relate not only sequentially. If key attributes such as those above are indeed observable across varied CUP situations (proposition 2 and 3), then the validity of (proposition 1) is supported. Show more