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Glossary

The following list of complexity terms have been defined and is continually undergoing additions and revisions.

Agents - Entities that produce the environment in which they live and work as a result of their interactions with other agents in the system. Agents at one level serve as building blocks for agents at higher levels.
Profiles of human agent types, as characterized in The Tipping Point written by Malcolm Gladwell

Connectors - People who connect otherwise unconnected or loosely connected people to each other or connect unconnected or loosely connected groups to each other. The latter group of connectors are also known as boundary spanners.

Mavens - People who love to connect and share information to help other people. They are socially motivated experts. They are sometimes known as knowledge brokers.

Salespeople - People who are persuaders with natural exuberance who, if they like an idea or a person, will use their positive attitude, charm, likeability, and enthusiasm to promote others and their ideas.

Complex Adaptive System - A type of complex system where the diverse elements/agents exhibit multiple interconnections and have the capacity to change and learn from experience.

Complex System - A system of many parts which are linked in a nonlinear fashion, implying that change in one part does not predict a direct causal, proportional change in another and the behavior of the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. It can only be understood and continue to function when the interacting parts are left in wholes or chunks and this interaction gives rise to some sort of collective behavior and transformation.

Complicated System - A system with many interacting parts, but can be broken down to be understood and productive (e.g., the paper delivery process).

Emergence - the process of complex pattern formation from simpler rules.

Epidemic - An instance of emergence where something that was very uncommon or unknown suddenly, in a non-linear way, reaches a threshold of critical mass (a tipping point) and becomes very common, widely known, or adopted.

Links - Information pathways between nodes in a network.

Multi-Agent System - A system composed of many agents, capable of reaching goals that are difficult to achieve by an individual system.

Network - A complex, interconnected group of agents.

Nodes - Elements in a network that supply and demand information.

Nonlinear System - A system whose behavior is not expressible as a sum of the behaviors of its parts or agents.

Power of Context - also popularized in Gladwell’s Tipping Point. This reflects characteristics of complex systems in that who or what is in one’s environment sends a message about expected behavior, demonstrating simple rules and patters of interactions that set up norms of behaviors. This includes the power of groups and their ability to spread or stifle the innovation of individuals.

Self-Assembly - Pre-existing parts or disordered components of a pre-existing system for structures or patterns (e.g., people gathering into groups).

Self-Organization - A process in which the internal organization of a system, usually an open system, increases automatically without being guided or managed by an outside source. They typically display emergent properties (e.g., a crowd of spectators).

Simple Rules - Codes of instruction that individual agents act upon. They direct agent behavior within a system.

Social Networking - Network models applied to people and their relationships, especially as they relate to information sharing.

Stickiness Factor - Another factor of epidemics, this demonstrates the characteristic of the message or “viral body” to be more or less memorable, acted upon, and able to stay alive and spread throughout the system.