Dear Don and all,
I'm enjoying reading Don and Pieter's paper. I'll sleep on it before commenting more fully.
Caution, what follows is opinion. It's opinion based on some experience, a lot of reading and a reasonably good knowledge of complex socio-technical systems, but its opinion all the same rather than validated and evidenced theory.
That in mind...
I suggest in many, perhaps almost all, cases, heuristics are a dead loss in complex socio-technical situations. Perhaps even worse than useless.
I suggest decisions made on the basis of heuristics are commonly as wrong as simply misunderstanding or guessing in the realm of complex socio-technical systems.
The main saving grace is that complex socio-technical situations commonly fail slowly and (relatively) gracefully regardless of how bad the decisions made on the basis of heuristics. The benefit is in most cases the slow mode of failure offers enough time for multiple other rounds of similarly bad quality decisions to be made until something works out at least tolerably well. Sometimes decisions are lucky and result in more successful outcomes than others. Mostly, if understanding causal relations and behaviours are wrong then interpretation of results will be also (because it is based on wrong assumptions about causality). One potentially successful strategy is to keep making decisions until the outcomes seem to be going in the right direction.
This slow mode of failure is more a property of large complex socio-technical situations, rather than a property of the heuristics.
The slow mode of failure offers three ways forward for designers and managers: a) improved dynamic modelling (which I've written about in the past); b) incremental nudging change (this seems to be the approach Don and Pieter are suggesting if I understand the paper right); and in the case of some politicians and professionals, rewriting history and project aims to make it seem like things were more successful or to avoid blame and responsibility.
As part of their interesting way forward in Design X, Don and Pieter suggest for designers to participate more in implementation. This extends designers roles and that at least offers more organisational learning and a more comprehensive contribution by all parties. The approach is likely to be sensible good practice for any work in complex socio-technical systems design.
The real challenge, however, for designing complex socio-technical systems is, of course, the behaviour of significant hidden actors who participate in the complex socio-technical system but are not included in the design process directly .
I've raised the issue many times describing the 2 Feedback Loop Law as the upper boundary for human comprehension of complex systems (i.e. systems with feedback loops). Where the design/management group cannot in mind manage to understand situations with 2 or more layered feedback loops, then there is potential for others to introduce significant system controlling effects via hidden feedback loops.
I've published several approaches to address these issues.
Regards,
Terry
==
Dr Terence Love FDRS, PMACM, MISI
Director
Design Out Crime & CPTED
Perth, Western Australia
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www.designoutcrime.org
+61 (0)4 3497 5848
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ORCID 0000-0002-2436-7566
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