The whole point of Com­plex­i­ty The­o­ry is to un­der­stand why in­tri­cate prob­lems and sys­tems are so dif­fi­cult to solve, pre­dict or com­pute. Some years ago, I de­vel­oped an in­ter­est in the the­o­ry when I joined the World Fu­ture So­ci­ety (WFS) based in Wash­ing­ton, DC.

In 1993, as ex­ec­u­tive di­rec­tor of the then In­sti­tute of Busi­ness (IOB), now the Arthur Lok Jack Glob­al School of Busi­ness, I met Man­fred Jantzen, an Amer­i­can pro­fes­sor here, who knew a lot about Com­plex­i­ty The­o­ry and com­plex adap­tive sys­tems and through talk­ing with him and read­ing some of the books and ar­ti­cles he shared with me, I be­gan to learn and un­der­stand more about it. The then IOB be­came one of the first busi­ness schools any­where to in­tro­duce com­plex­i­ty, com­plex adap­tive sys­tems and Chaos The­o­ry to teach­ing about busi­ness strat­e­gy. More fa­mous schools came to it much lat­er.

Be­cause of my de­vel­op­ing in­ter­est in com­plex sys­tems, I al­so learned about Chaos The­o­ry. The two are deeply re­lat­ed. Chaos The­o­ry fo­cus­es on how sim­ple sys­tems can be­come com­plete­ly un­pre­dictable. And Com­plex­i­ty The­o­ry fo­cus­es on how com­plex sys­tems adapt, or­gan­ise and cre­ate or­der. But these two the­o­ries meet. The bridge where they meet has been la­belled “the edge of chaos” by com­plex­i­ty the­o­rists.

I of­ten think that we here in Trinidad and To­ba­go are liv­ing on the edge of chaos con­stant­ly. Some­times, I mean this in the com­plex­i­ty sense. Oth­er times, I just mean it as con­fu­sion!

Cari­com is a clas­sic com­plex adap­tive sys­tem made up of sov­er­eign “agents” (mem­ber states), and they have dif­fer­ing fis­cal de­pen­den­cies, ge­o­graph­i­cal ex­po­sures, and for­eign pol­i­cy align­ments. Things hap­pen­ing out­side can have high im­pact and one mem­ber’s gain does not al­ways trans­late to gains for every­one else. So, with­draw­al of OFAC li­cences by the US can spoil things for T&T. So can tar­iffs for one or many. T&T and Venezuela can have co­op­er­a­tion on cross-bor­der gas while Guyana and Venezuela have a stand­off over the Es­se­qui­bo basin. T&T can be out­raged about the reap­point­ment of a sec­re­tary gen­er­al, but then every­one com­mits to re­gion­al food se­cu­ri­ty, col­lec­tive cli­mate fi­nanc­ing and shared mar­itime lo­gis­tics. At the end of the day, sharp di­ver­gences melt to bring all states in­to equi­lib­ri­um.

What, there­fore, is the take­away from a Com­plex­i­ty point of view? Con­flict in Cari­com is not a prob­lem to be elim­i­nat­ed. It is just a good ex­am­ple of a method which prompts sov­er­eign na­tions to bal­ance in­di­vid­ual sur­vival with re­gion­al in­te­gra­tion and sol­i­dar­i­ty and to es­tab­lish a for­mu­la of mul­ti-track diplo­ma­cy. Top-down man­dates had to give way. The eco­nom­ic mu­tu­al de­pen­den­cy in the re­gion, even be­yond Cari­com, is a sta­bil­is­ing force be­cause it is first and fore­most a feed­back loop. In spite of ide­o­log­i­cal dif­fer­ences or re­gion­al mil­i­tary pos­tur­ing, it in­cen­tivis­es peace­ful ac­com­mo­da­tion.

T&T’s hu­man­i­tar­i­an ges­tures to both Venezuela and Guyana in their time of need make a qual­i­ta­tive and psy­cho­log­i­cal dif­fer­ence that pos­i­tive­ly im­pacts the sys­tem.

What about the man­age­ment of the T&T econ­o­my? From a com­plex­i­ty stand­point, re­ly­ing on Drag­on, Man­a­tee and Exxon to off­set struc­tur­al deficits is an at­tempt to treat a non-lin­ear prob­lem with a de­ter­min­is­tic gam­ble. What do I mean? We are gam­bling on nat­ur­al gas, which has al­ways been the sav­iour, and even if we win, we will not have solved the prob­lem of struc­tur­al deficits. All we are deal­ing with is solv­ing fis­cal liq­uid­i­ty through debt ac­cu­mu­la­tion ($3.7b TT now) and wait­ing for nat­ur­al gas to flow. How­ev­er, in com­plex­i­ty terms, post­pon­ing struc­tur­al re­forms while wait­ing for gas cre­ates la­tent in­sta­bil­i­ty. If Drag­on gas en­coun­ters po­lit­i­cal fric­tion or Exxon gas is late, such de­lays will com­pound debt ser­vice costs and forex star­va­tion.

Let’s take the State of Emer­gency (SoE). It is in­evitable that pro­longed rigid­i­ty and sup­pres­sion by the State will prompt crime net­works to op­er­ate as com­plex adap­tive sys­tems, shift­ing ter­ri­to­ries and adapt­ing strate­gies and op­er­a­tions. More­over, both sys­temic stress and cit­i­zen strain be­come height­ened. At the house­hold lev­el, anx­i­ety over af­ford­abil­i­ty, crime and the econ­o­my has an emer­gent feed­back ef­fect. While we wait for re­lief from gas flows, high debt does lim­it spend­ing on pub­lic goods; forex short­ages lim­it both im­ports and di­ver­si­fi­ca­tion; and a pro­longed SoE cre­ates fric­tion for small busi­ness, im­pact­ing liveli­hoods every day.

How you see a prob­lem, there­fore, how you dis­cern them con­nect­ing and, what kind of sys­tem you see emerg­ing, are all im­por­tant for so­lu­tion find­ing. That is the val­ue of Com­plex­i­ty The­o­ry and the crit­i­cal and cre­ative think­ing that it de­mands.