Understanding Complexity

@zennie62 claims that McChrystal is not a systems thinker. What is the evidence for this claim?

Zennie's main argument is based on the fact that U.S. General Stanley McChrystal, whom President Obama recently sacked as Afghan war commander for making disparaging remarks about various people (see Mark Urban's blog), is on record making a disparaging remark about a certain systems dynamics diagram.

In my post Visualizing Complexity, I discussed this very diagram, which is an attempt to visualize the complexity of the situation in Afghanistan using system dynamics, rendered as a PowerPoint slide. (Many people have chosen to blame PowerPoint for the complexity of this diagram.)

General McChrystal's remark was that "When we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war." That's the kind of remark that can be made either by someone who doesn't get systems thinking, or at the other extreme by someone who really gets systems thinking. Surely only a novice systems thinker would claim to fully understand a system as complex as this, especially while events are still unfolding.

Furthermore, there is an important distinction between systems thinking as a theoretical exercise and systems practice as a way of engaging with complex reality. From the latter perspective, it makes a lot of sense to see "understanding the slide" and "winning the war" as inextricably linked. For a practical systems thinker, the only authentic way to learn more about highly complex systems is to engage with them. (This is a critical element of what we call "next practice".)

And maybe General McChrystal just doesn't like this particular diagram. Zennie illustrates this point inadvertently by including an alternative systems dynamics diagram in his blog, using a completely different notation, which some systems thinkers might prefer.

Zennie Abraham closes his article with a further double whammy to "prove" that McChrystal is not a systems thinker

"If Gen. McChrystal knew systems thinking, and were honest, he'd realize the best course of action is not to be in Afghanistan."

"If Gen. McChrystal were a systems thinker, he would not have got himself into the trouble that cost him his job."

But these two points contradict one another. Surely if McChrystal didn't want to be in Afghanistan, the obvious course of action would be to give an interview to Rolling Stone that would get him fired. And although Ahmed Rashid calls this a "hurtful rumour" (Petraeus's Baby, New York Blog, 14 July 2010), this is exactly what some commentators are suggesting.

"McChrystal gave the interview in order that he be fired. And why did he want to be fired? He wanted to be fired because he knew that the policies he was pursuing and championing in the war in Afghanistan were not working, could not work. And he didn't want to be the one tarnished with the public blame." (Immanuel Wallerstein, Why McChrystal Did It, Middle East Online, 1st July 2010)

So maybe McChrystal is a systems thinker after all. POSIWID.

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Scroll down to read comments by @Cybersal. See also Linear Thought (April 2017), Epistemology of Systems (October 2021).

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Update (June 2021): I just found a great blogpost on McChrystal by Pauline Roberts, ‘Eyes on- hands off’ – are you ready to make the change? (August 2017), which comes to a similar conclusion for entirely different reasons.

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Update (September 2021):

You never understand a system until you start to try to change it. Kurt Lewin

— Benjamin P. Taylor (@antlerboy) September 18, 2021

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Update (November 2021): 

Zennie (who now tweets as @ZennieAAbraham) has written an attack on this post and an extended defence of his original article. His position is that if McChrystal could make a joke about a Systems Dynamics model, this could only mean that he had no background in Systems Dynamics and did not want to learn. He also presumes that McChrystal took no other action in relation to the model, since nothing else was mentioned in the New York Times story. My position is that this is pretty weak speculation on Zennie's part, and that making a joke about something does not conclusively prove a complete lack of understanding or interest.

Zennie Abraham, On Richard Veryard, Stanley McChrystal, System Dynamics, and Afghanistan (Oakland News Now, 30 November 2021)

Visualizing Complexity

Lot of people have been mocking a Powerpoint slide produced by PA Consulting Group and first uncovered by NBC’s Richard Engel, which attempts to visualize the complexity of American strategy in Afghanistan. Some commentators refer to this slide as "Spaghetti Logic".

via MSNBC

Elisabeth Bumiller writes We have met the enemy and he is PowerPoint. (New York Times, 26 April 2010) @presentationzen picks out the money quote from General James Mattis: "PowerPoint makes us stupid".

Elisabeth Bumiller also quotes General McMaster, for whom PowerPoint’s worst offence is not a chart like the spaghetti graphic but rigid lists of bullet points (in, say, a presentation on a conflict’s causes) that take no account of interconnected political, economic and ethnic forces. “If you divorce war from all of that, it becomes a targeting exercise,” says General McMaster.

I don't know the exact provenance of this particular slide, but I have seen similar slides in which the original analysis has been carried out in a proper modelling tool, designed for system dynamics and simulation, and then merely rendered into PowerPoint for communication purposes. We may of course question whether PowerPoint rendering is adequate for communicating this kind of complexity, but most of the complaints about the slide seem to be about the situation described by the slide, rather than the slide itself. (Which looks to me rather like shooting the messenger.)

Richard Engel summarizes both sides of the debate.

The slide is undoubtedly overwhelming. For some military commanders, the slide is genius, an attempt to show how all things in war – from media bias to ethnic/tribal rivalries – are interconnected and must be taken into consideration. It represents a new approach to war fighting, looking beyond simply killing enemy fighters. It underscores what those fighting wars have long known, that everything matters. But for others, the diagram represents a fool’s errand that the United States has taken on in the name of national security. Detractors say the slide represents an assault on logic, an attempt to jam a square peg into a round hole. They say the concept of occupying a foreign nation to protect security at home is expensive, time consuming, ineffective and ultimately leads to the "spaghetti logic" of the slide. They say this slide is what happens when smart people are asked to come up with a solution to the wrong question. [So what is the actual surge strategy? (NBC, 2 December 2009)]

In my opinion, visualizing the complexity of America's intervention in Afghanistan is surely helpful, whether the conclusions are that the American forces can operate more effectively by paying attention to some of the subtleties of the situation, or that the situation is just too damn messy and America should never have gotten involved in this mess in the first place.

Whether this kind of diagram is the best way to visualize this kind of complexity remains an important question, but it isn't a PowerPoint question any more but a much more general question about systems thinking techniques for modelling (sense-making) and communication.

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Please scroll down to view discussion below this post.

See also

• Hypnotizing chickens, Afghan insurgents, and spaghetti (27 April 2010)
• Joey deVilla, PowerPoint is NOT the Enemy (April 29, 2010) via @skemsley
• Chris Soderquist, We have met an ally and he is Storytelling (29 April 2010)
• Linda Booth Sweeny, Why We Should be Suspect of Bullet Points and Laundry Lists (30 April 2010)
• Complexity is not the enemy (10 May 2010)

 Related Posts

• Understanding Complexity (July 2010) 
• Epistemology of Systems (October 2021)
  
• The PowerPoint Collection 

Corrupting Evidence

Edward Tufte is writing a book called Beautiful Evidence, about the proper and improper use of modern rhetorical media, such as PowerPoint.

A draft chapter on Corrupt Techniques is currently available online, in which he discusses several modes of presenting misleading or corrupt evidence.

Effects without causes	Beware of presenters using the passive voice or bullet lists.
Cherry-picking	Presenters pick and choose, select and reveal only the evidence that advances their favored point of view.
Punning	Puns enable over-reaching, as sharply focused ideas tend to sprawl, grow mushy and collapse into vague metaphors when applied to content outside their original domain.
Chartjunk	Chartjunk develops from the premise that audience can be charmed, manipulated or fooled by means of content-free misdirection: garish colors, generic decoration, phoney dimensionality, corny clip-art.

There is nothing wrong with trying to persuade people - within a framework of trust and mutual respect. Corrupt persuasion is an abuse of trust.

Corrupt persuasion also carries a metacommunication, for those able to pick it up. Tufte writes: "For consumers of presentations, gratuitous and cartoonish decoration of statistical graphics has the redeeming virtue of providing insight into the presenter's integrity and analytical skills: no integrity, no analytical skills." In other words, it ain't what you say, it's the way that you say it.

Update (August 2005): See also review by Graham Shevlin of Tufte's essay The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint.



Related Posts: The PowerPoint Collection