International Research and Events Blog

Category: Complexity

        • 04/28/2013
          Delivering Development: learning about complexity from a few cases

          I just finished reading Ed Carr‘s excellent book Delivering Development: Globalization’s Shoreline and the Road to a Sustainable Future. The book is anchored in Carr’s field research in Dominase and Ponkrum, two villages in central Ghana, over the span of a decade.
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        • 04/05/2013
          “Go with your gut”? Just how useful is intuition in a complex situation?

          I recently finished reading Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow. Four stars out of five. It’s a fascinating book full of insights from decades of research, interspersed with anecdotes about how those ideas developed over time.
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        • 03/12/2013
          Overdue followup on the roots and webs post
          Several folks chimed in on last month’s post about complexity and traditional views of causality. They offered a few links that I have just now gotten around to checking out. (Apologies — it’s been a long month of moving, job hunting, etc.
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        • 02/16/2013
          Forget about roots and embrace the webs: What complexity means for our traditional views on causality

          Our tools for identifying cause-and-effect in the world are matched by a particular view of how causality works. Ideas from complexity theory are forcing us to update our views on causality, so our tools must be updated as well.
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        • 02/13/2013
          A few links on Big Data for Development
          The idea of Big Data for Development (or “BD4D” — you saw it here first, I’m coining it update: um, nevermind.) seems to be gaining momentum. The practice of mining large datasets has been around in private business for a while, as large corporations use sales records or other data to better understand customer behavior.
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        • 02/04/2013
          Monitoring and complexity
          Commenting on a paper about monitoring, Rick Davies notes: Complexity theory writers seem to give considerable emphasis to the idea of constant change and substantial unpredictability of complex adaptive systems (e.
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        • 01/16/2013
          Complexity, politics and management — upcoming posts
          My number one piece of advice for new bloggers: Write whatever you would want to read if you weren’t writing it. Later on, you can worry about things like your writing style, scope, target audience, blog layout, etc.
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        • 01/16/2013
          Pritchett, feedback loops, and the accountability conundrum
          Last week I attended a seminar given by Lant Pritchett at the Center for Global Development where he discussed his new working paper (co-authored with Salimah Samji and Jeffrey Hammer), “It’s all about MeE: Using Structured Experiential Learning (‘e’) to Crawl the Design Space.
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        • 10/15/2012
          Complexity theory, adaptive leadership, and cash-on-delivery aid: one of these things is not like the others
          How do you make decisions and manage resources in the face of complexity? It’s a tough nut to crack. Owen Barder recently wrote several blog posts on the implications of complexity theory for development.
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