The system is not the parts. It is what happens between them.
Landscape systems are complex systems: countless heterogeneous elements whose interactions generate patterns that no individual element controls.
Complexity changes what intervention can promise.
Complex systems are open, adaptive and continuously self-organizing. We can read their current patterns and headingHeading: The direction in which the landscape is currently moving, produced by many actors and their interactions., but we cannot specify in advance exactly how the system will respond.
Context and interaction matter, so cause and effect do not unfold in fixed proportional ways.
Order arises through interaction among many agents following local rules.
You can identify tendencies and opportunity points, but not fully predict system response in detail.
Every intervention becomes part of the next context, altering the conditions under which future action unfolds.
Three conditions shape how a system self-organizes.
We use Glenda Eoyang’s CDE model as a practical way to read system conditions: Container, Difference and Exchange. These are not fixed categories; in real landscapes each condition sits somewhere along a spectrum.
Background on the model: Glenda Eoyang’s brief introduction to the CDE model.
Systems regulate themselves through loops.
The crucial distinction is the direction of the response. An amplifying loop pushes change in the same direction as the original disturbance. A dampening loop pushes back in the opposite direction, reducing the disturbance and pulling the system towards its previous condition.
Dampening feedback
As rabbit numbers rise, deaths also rise. That response works against the original increase, constraining growth and pulling the population back towards its previous range.
Amplifying feedback
More rabbits produce more babies, which become more rabbits. The response moves in the same direction as the original increase, reinforcing it and making the disturbance grow.
Real systems contain both kinds of loop at once. Which one is stronger helps determine which patterns persist, which fade, and where the system heads.
Will your intervention fade – or cascade?
The scale of the intervention does not decide the scale of the result. What matters is the feedback architecture it encounters.
A disturbance travels outward but weakens with distance. Nodes closest to the original push are affected most, and the effect fades as it moves away.
What passes between elements matters more than what the elements are.
Landscape patterns, fragmentation, integration and heading are produced in relationships: in strandStrand: An actor group and the practices through which it shapes the landscape over time. crossings, regulatoryRegulation: Any way actors shape what others can or cannot do, including rules, money, prices, custom and persuasion. It is broader than government regulation. exchanges and interaction spacesInteraction space: Where strands meet and influence one another. It can extend beyond the landscape’s geographic boundary..
Direction can change before the state does.
A pattern is an observed regularity. A state is a relatively stable configuration of patterns. Heading is the direction the system is currently moving. A tip is a qualitative reorganization into a new state.
Coherent patterns can emerge without anyone directing them.
The murmuration is useful because each bird responds to nearby birds and to the changing flock, while the flock as a whole continuously reorganizes into new forms. For a landscape practitioner, the lesson is practical: watch for patterns that emerge from many local interactions rather than looking only for a single actor or plan that caused them.
The portfolio was not designed as a complexity experiment. Its patterns still tell us something.
The programme provides mostly implicit evidence for systems thinking because projects rarely used complexity vocabulary at design stage. Several recurring patterns become more legible through a systems lens.
Projects with comparable resources and designs produced strikingly different results depending on context and interaction.
Accumulated activity gradually built relational infrastructure that no single activity had specified.
The same intervention produced different effects in different settings because the surrounding system differed.
Where the intervention lacked enough diversity of perspective, knowledge or relational reach, it struggled to match the system’s complexity.
Where next?
Systems gives us the language for behaviour, feedback, emergence and heading. The next concepts show where that behaviour is patterned and how intervention can find openings for change.
Terms used on this page
- Strand
- An actor group and the practices through which it shapes the landscape over time.
- Heading
- The direction in which the landscape is currently moving, produced by many actors and their interactions.
- Regulation
- Any way actors shape what others can or cannot do, including rules, money, prices, custom and persuasion. It is broader than government regulation.
- Interaction space
- Where strands meet and influence one another. It can extend beyond the landscape’s geographic boundary.
- Ripple
- An effect that spreads from an initial disturbance but weakens unless something sustains it. In the Playbook, it may remain dependent on the intervention.
- Cascade
- Change that becomes self-reinforcing: responses trigger further responses, so the intervention no longer supplies every push. It can spread harm as well as benefit.
