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Without top-down control being imposed by the designer what we aim for is order in the system to emerge. Complex systems are more like living systems, they typically have lots of adaptive actors that are following their own agenda, like people in an organization, cars in a transport system or producers in a supply chain. We do not try to impose order we instead try to create the conditions that are right for it to emerge out of the actions of the agents in the system themselves.

The fact that the future emerges is a key source of the fundamental uncertainty within complex systems. If we take something like the Internet, we do not know what future technologies will be built on the network nor how those technologies will combine to form new possibilities. In this world of complexity, the future is not just unknown. It may well be unknowable, and this fundamental uncertainty changes our whole approach to the future. Needless to say, as the future is uncertain we need to design systems in a way that is open to the emergence of different outcomes.