Research Themes in Complex Informing

This paper introduces a six paper series that examines the manner in which complexity impacts the informing process. Two of these papers specifically consider how the objective complexity of the domain being studied changes the nature of the solution—with domains consisting of many interacting elements and changing criteria for success tending to produce highly rugged fitness landscapes that violate the normal assumptions of decomposability that we make in our research and incorporate into our theories. A third paper considers how the concept of utility impacts informing and is impacted by complexity. Another pair of papers examines, first, how the structure of a client’s mental models—referred to as structural complexity—changes with repetitive task performance and, then, how various cognitive filters work in concert with this structure during the informing process. The final paper specifically considers client-to-client informing processes, using the diffusion literature to argue that they are indispensible to complex informing and further mapping different models to different levels of informing complexity. Collectively, it is hoped that these papers will spur further research into the processes that enable complex informing.