Perspective: organisations as complex systems

Back in 1983, in the inaugural issue of Civil Engineering and Environmental Systems, editorsin-chief Colin B. Brown and John Munro opened their editorial by stating that ‘The complexity of civil engineering practices has greatly increased over the last 30 years’, concluding that ‘this places on the engineer the onus of communicating efficiently with other professionals’. This observation has become increasingly prominent, with the built environment now being composed of a wide range of systems, interacting together across different scales and at almost real-time. With this Special Issue, we sought to take this observation towards one possible direction by addressing two interrelated questions: (1) should civil engineers play a role in understanding how organisations operate, and (2) is complex systems perspective a viable way for doing so, compared to other more established perspectives. Contributors to this Special Issue and I argue that the answer to both (1) and (2) is a reassuring yes. Focusing on (1), resolving the major challenges of the built environment requires coordinated collective action between formal organisations. Civil engineers play a central role to this collective action due to their position at the interface between multiple organisational functions. This provides a unique vantage point, as well as capabilities for solving the most pressing problems in terms of organisation. Porse (2019) and McDonald et al. (2019) provide good examples of how this vantage point can support this collective action at a policy level, in the context of water supply and earthquake resilience respectively (this issue). Focusing on (2), a complex systems perspective provides a unifying framework for understanding the collective action between organisations, and eventually deriving actionable insights. The perspective has found its home within the natural sciences, where it is typical to abstract the context in search for unifying frameworks (e.g. evidence shows that the underlying connectivity of a wide range of systems shares common features [Watts and Strogatz 1998]). This perspective has arguably improved our understanding of how these complex systems operate (Vespignani 2012). However, when it comes to deriving actionable insights, progress has been relatively slow. This has been partly due to the (justifiable) scepticism by which the engineering community has viewed the complex systems perspective: how can context be abstracted away when it serves as the background for the system’s function? (Willinger et al. 2002) Guo et al. use the context of construction safety to argue for a middle ground, where the complex systems perspective can