I just got back from Iqaluit - Nunavut, Canada’s capital city - as part of a climate change adaptation project through the Canadian Institute of Planners.  It was my second time there and during a drive-around tour, I was reminded of their local infrastructure setup and how a good portion of the houses in Iqaluit get water and remove their sewage.  Because parts of their communities do not have piped servicing, they have to receive their water and sewage services by truck. 

Each house in these areas has a light at the front with a red bulb.  If the light is out, it means they need water.  An illuminated red light means that they have an adequate amount of water.  Five days a week, a team of five trucks will head out on their assigned route and look for houses with that light out.  They will fill the water tank until the red light flips back on, letting them know the tank is full, and then move on to the next house.

Not quite a red light district like the infamous one in Amsterdam.

 Even on a stormy day, you can still see the red light is on at the right side of this house in Iqaluit. 

Iqaluit’s system got me thinking about the importance of information within bigger, more complex systems – whether it be our cities or natural systems.  Systems experts call this process of information dissemination “feedback”.  In Iqaluit, this information then causes the action of refilling the water tank.  This system of cause and effect is known as a “feedback loop.”  Another good example of a feedback loop is your nervous system.  If you put your hand on a hot stove, your nervous system creates a feedback loop from your fingertips to your brain to tell you to move your hand.  These feedback loops are vital to understand the world around us and to adjust our behaviour accordingly. 

With a system that is as (relatively) simple as Iqaluit’s water system or your hand on a stove, these feedback loops are fairly straightforward and provide the necessary information nearly immediately.  The trouble is that many of our natural and human-made systems are very complex, so there isn’t the direct relationship between one element to another.  An example is in the issue of traffic and how we build our cities.  Many people assume that there is a simple relationship between the amount of roads and traffic flow.  Gridlock?  Just build more roads!  Unfortunately, it’s not that simple.  Transportation and traffic issues are a complex mix of city design, housing location and density, employment location, transit service, fuel costs, local economic makeup, personal choice and cultural norms.  Just to name a few.  There’s also the issue of “induced demand” – the phenomenon where building new road capacity actual creates demand for more road capacity.  Thus, the saying that “solving traffic problems by building more roads is like solving your weight problem by buying bigger pants.”

So what to do about it?  In these complex systems, it is necessary for everyone (including and especially our leaders) to find the deeper causes for issues that we face.  A good way to do this is to act like a 3 year-old and ask “why?” a few times.  Let’s give this a try:

We have gridlock in our city.

“Why?”

Because there are too many vehicles on the road at the same time.

“Why?”

Because they are all leaving the same area and heading to the same area all at once. 

“Why?”

Because we have separated where people live and work through our zoning.

In just 3 “why’s” we were able to get to a deeper cause than if we just reacted to a problem.  You could dig even deeper, but just this level of inquiry will allow you to make decisions at a more meaningful level.  Many times, people don’t have the time or the right job description to look for those deeper reasons.  Very few jobs reward understanding complexity.  This ends up causing us all trouble in the long run.

The other difficulty with complex systems is that there is often a lag time for getting the information (the feedback) to understand the consequences of decisions.  In the traffic example, the zoning decisions likely happened decades before the gridlock showed up.  In the meantime, the overall culture of the community may have shifted to a car-centric one – creating even more decisions that would eventually lead to the current day gridlock. 

Now what?  We need to continually work to shift how we perceive problems and look for solutions. 

In an interesting 2006 TED talk, Jamais Cascio, co-founder of WorldChanging.com articulated this very well.  He stated that one of WorldChanging’s goals was to “make the invisible visible.”  This is a great way of putting it.  If we can do a better job of understanding the nature of our systems and see the connections, along with doing a better job of understanding the feedback loops, then many of the invisible causes or consequences in our world will become more visible.  At the end of the day, we will make wiser decisions.

So while many of the issues we face are daunting and complex, our communities, organizations and institutions need to transform how they think to find the connections between the parts of our world and positively influence the decisions they make.  We all need to look for – and create – the red lights like in Iqaluit.  

- John, March 15, 2009

Labels: complexity, feedback, sustainability

¶ 8:34 AM