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  • About
  • Building Blocks
  • Complexity Bits
  • Blog
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Building Blocks

Social acupuncture emerged out of the need to help decision makers both explore the deep interactions shaping complex patterns and design the means to subvert, disrupt, and transform them. The different conceptual underpinnings that make up this new approach can be read below, with more building blocks, analysis and case studies to come.

1. Social Acupuncture - An Introduction

We live in a hyperlinked and interdependent world, in which new opportunities and constraints emerge in ever accelerating fashions. As our technological, economic, and institutional webs continue to grow denser, the problems we face seem to take on similar web-like forms.

2. Between Science and Action - Why Complexity

The aim of any action is to alter an existing reality. What we do, and how we collectively organise our resources are all based on our understandings of cause and effect relations in our environment and our own capacities to leverage them.

3. Between Western and Chinese Strategic Thought

In an interview in 2000 Steven Hawking suggested that the 21st Century will be the century of Complexity. It therefore might seem strange to search for its expression in methods developed three thousand years ago.

4. Operationalising complexity - The Strategists Dilemma

Eric Beinhocker once suggested complexity thinking will only be embraced if it can transform from a Sunday afternoon thought into a Monday morning action, i.e. from complexity thinking to complexity doing. Building Block 2 explored how complexity science provided us with new and deeper understandings of both our natural and human environments, specifically the hidden mechanisms through which natural and social orders emerge, sustain themselves, and transform.

5. Pattern Analysis - Making Sense Of A Rival System

The epic battle waged during the 1960s between Jane Jacobs – writer and community activist, and Robert Moses – the master planner and builder of New York City, has long become the stuff of legends. While usually depicted as a tale of David vs Goliath, this rivalry and the strategies that had decided its fate hold all the underpinnings of Social Acupuncture at its very best. Jacobs was not simply fighting an all-powerful agent, rather she was fighting a complex dynamic system within which Moses was but one formidable player. Her now celebrated success was in undermining and transforming this system, changing not only the urban landscape she lived in, but how cities are viewed, designed and managed to this day.

6. Pattern Disruption



Coming Soon!

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