Questions and Tasks

• 1. What is the meaning of the evaluative word “complex”?
• 2. Which characteristics of the system are chosen as classification criteria for the different classifications?

Conclusion

In conclusion, it should be noted once again that classifications, like all models, describe reality only of interest to us and only approximately, with satisfying accuracy. Reality is always more diverse than our ideas about it. Therefore, the real difficulties that lie in wait for a person in his interactions with the environment may have a character that does not meet the characteristics of any particular type of difficulty from the above classification.

Quite often, the cause of a particular difficulty encountered in work is the simultaneous action of several types of complexity (e.g., statistics combine objective and subjective uncertainty). Usually, in such cases, a hybrid algorithm is built to overcome the combined difficulties, constructing a suitable combination of ways to work with these particular difficulties (which is not an easy task).

In practice, however, more often we have to deal with such natural situations, the complexity of which is not fully covered by our rational models. In the professional language of systemology, such problems are called “soft”, “chaotic”, and “confusing, (wicked)”. Although some of their partial subproblems can be formalized (e.g., by methods of operations research), and for others several heuristic methods of consideration have been developed (methodology of soft systems, brainstorming, synectics, project thinking, leverage points, search for connections and patterns, etc.), their complete solution is still beyond rationality. In management practice, increasingly used conscious use of irrational recourses of the brain—the subconscious, intuition, abduction. In an effort to get closer to fulfilling the law of Ashby’s necessary diversity, the complexity of our brain is contrasted with the complexity of the nature around us. In one respect, this has already been achieved: the number of possible combinations of states of all neurons in the brain exceeds the number of elementary particles in the universe; however, the possibilities of the brain in the search of proper combinations are unknown