The idea of a complexity entrepreneur

Gabriele Bammer and Jean Boulton identify a role and a set of capacities needed for research teams, and they call that role a “complexity entrepreneur.” This style of operating in a complex world requires engendering a milieu in which people regain confidence in working with intuition, making sense of subjective and evolving information, and are able to hone the skills of judgement. Traditional methods of mapping and modelling have their place in surfacing less visible systemic patterns in relatively stable situations, but such methods can also mask the qualitative, contextual and emerging aspects central to facilitating a deeper understanding of the dynamics of change, stuckness and opportunity. Complexity entrepreneurs need to go beyond the analytical and gain experience in handling the ambiguous, the paradoxical and the co-evolving nature of context and action. To brand these skills as entrepreneurial puts them in a positive light. It is hard not to feel at odds in a world seeking…