The Institute has brought together some of the best and the brightest scientists in the world. There are physicists, chemists, economists, biologists, computer scientists and other specialists who have joined together in an old monastery in the foothills of the Santa Fe Mountains. These scientists are devoted to creating a new kind of scientific research community, built around the emerging science of systems. The Institute seeks to break down barriers between traditional scientific disciplines. Its mission is to spread ideas and methodologies to other individuals and institutes and encourage the practical applications of its theoretical research. Most of the Institute's funding comes from corporations, the Defense Department, and government run scientific laboratories like Los Alamos down the road. All are trying to adjust to the end of the cold war and undertake the mammoth conversion known as technology transfer.

One afternoon I had lunch with one of the Directors of the Institute, a scientist named Richard Palmer. Dr. Palmer is a physicist whose area of specialty is the structure and properties of glass. But he was in route later that week to a conference in Washington on what the study of complex systems could tell economists about the stock market and global market fluctuations.

I wanted to see what he had to say about complex systems and if the ideas and theories this kind of thinking produced were applicable to social marketing, and making the world a happier and healthier place to live.

I gave him a social marketer's introduction to teen pregnancy, drug and alcohol abuse and violence. "What can the study of complex systems tell us about social problems like these and how to solve them?" I asked. Dr. Palmer, a reserved man with a pleasant smile and an open face shifted uncomfortably in his chair. "It isn't what they can tell us about solving problems," he said, "They can give us a new way of looking at them, and a new language for speaking about them. It tells us it's ok not to know an answer. Sometimes there are no answers, or the answer is a paradox."

Struggle as we may, we cannot fix a systemic problem by attacking it head on, he suggested. There is no acheless heel. A problem of the immune system, for example, cannot be fixed with any one drug. The environment too is a system. It is a giant system of birth and decay that involves the conversion of sunlight, water, and gases. There is no simple adjustment to right it once it's wronged. Our economic system is also complex beyond the forecast of any computer model, and tied not only to worldwide monetary fluctuations, but to politics, innovation, the mood of the people and even the weather.

Different as all these systems are however, he explained that they have some things in common. All systems are comprised of a number of relatively simple actions, which render an extraordinarily complex product. The action in all systems, really, is in the interaction.

Every system has agents, I learned. Economic systems have business firms. Immune systems have viruses. Nervous systems have neurons. Teen pregnancy has sex and alcohol. Violence has guns, drugs and media and role models and dysfunctional families. These agents interact on the basis of some very simple rules that lead to some very complex behaviors.

Because the whole does not equal the sum of its parts, studying the parts alone will not tell us what we need to know to learn how the system works. Because they do not behave in a linear fashion, systems cannot be explained by science and reductionist thinking. Because the action is in the interaction, you do not have a frame of reference you can freeze and easily study. Studying systems can inspire a scientist to begin to write poetry, rather than fall back on facts. To use a word that is commonplace at The Santa Fe Institute, the behavior of systems might best be described as "chaotic."

Being the advertising man that I am, I found this word "chaotic" especially appealing. And I immediately began a search to see if what we knew about chaos could help us understand how to bring about social change. I re-read Fritjof Capra's Turning Point and his new book, Web of Life. I read Margarete Wheatley's book, Leadership and The New Science. I even read The Lost World by Michael Crichton, and recently saw the movie.

The Lost World is a work of fiction based on some real life facts and institutions, like the Santa Fe Institute. The book opens with Ian Malcolm, the scientist played in the movie by Jeff Goldbloom, giving a lecture to his fellow scientists on this new field called complex adaptive systems.

Of crucial importance, the Ian Malcolm character explains, "is the way complex systems seem to strike a balance between the need for order and the imperative to change. Complex systems tend to locate themselves at a place we call "the edge of chaos." We imagine the edge of chaos as a place where there is enough innovation to keep a living system vibrant, and enough stability to keep it from collapsing into anarchy. It is a zone of conflict and upheaval, where the old and the new are constantly at war."
In the book Ian then goes on to explain how change is a balance between order and chaos.

"Finding the balance point must be a delicate matter. If a living system drifts too close, it risks falling over into incoherence and dissolution; but if the system moves too far away from the edge, it becomes rigid, frozen totalitarian. Both conditions lead to extinction. Too much change is as destructive as too little. Only at the edge of chaos can complex systems flourish." And only at the edge of chaos, I thought, can complex systems be changed. I thought of that place on the playground see-saw, just between up and down.

But how can a complex system be changed? Clearly changing a systemic problem demanded neither the strategic strike of an intervention nor the upheaval of a revolution. It required leverage.

A lever, of course, is a simple machine. Like the screw, the gear and the inclined plane, it makes work easier. Dr. John Holland, a MacArthur genius award winner who spends time each summer at the Santa Fe Institute, tells us that lever points abound in systems: "We just don't know where to look for them...it's possible," he says by way of example, "that a small intervention could make an enormous difference in solving inter-city problems."

We need levers large enough to move the world, and we have them. The levers are us. They are our leaders, our organizations, our creativity and our illogical mind. Leaders because they possess the power to inspire, and, by dint of their authority, they cause things to happen. Organizations because they direct what we pay attention to and how we go about our work. And our own creativity because that is the illogical leap across the gap of common wisdom. It is the extra weight on the see-saw, the sensitive initial condition on which change depends.