The challenges of teaching complexity sciences to novice learners in public administration

Introduction

This article explores the challenges faced by educators when they seek to develop how public administrators comprehend and response to complexity. First, there is a rationale for why complexity theory is a foundational construct for public administrators (PA) to learn, in reference to the rich history and knowledge which has explored complexity within the domain of public administration. This paper subsequently examines the demands which educators and educators face when designing learning experience for those working in the field of public administration. Specifically, using the lenses of adult developmental psychology and applied cognitive psychology, several unique challenges facing the educator are raised and practical implications for the practice of educators are discussed.

Why should public administrators learn about complexity?

Complexity theory defines the operational environment in which a PA will need to make decisions. Public administration, and therefore PAs, are concerned with the work required to enact and manage government policies and programmes on behalf of its citizens (Dooley, 1997; Franklin and Raadschelders, 2023; Raadschelders, 2011). The interconnection, non-linearity, and emergent properties associated with complexity theory provide a useful heuristic for understanding policy making (Cairney, 2012), which subsequently influences the activities and direction of a PA. French et al. (2023) have recognised the relevance of complexity theory for conceptualising outcomes in public administration – a key concept given the pressure placed on public sector organisations to achieve reliable results for the citizen. In addition to these macro-level considerations, complexity is also relevant for shaping the day-to-day experience of a PA. For example, Geyer and Harrison (2021) noted the relevance of complex systems for governance. Hawkins (2023) recognised how the properties inherent to performance management can be profoundly affected by the complex nature of a system. In summary, there are many ways in which complexity theory defines the operational environment of those working in public administration.

One of the ways in which this complex operational environment is relevant is the direct effect it will have on PA decision making. Within interconnected, emergent and open systems, PAs are likely to face great ambiguity (Boulton, 2024). This will instigate a process of comprehending the situation and how they should act – a process referred to within the psychological literature as sense-making (Holt and Cornelissen, 2014). How individuals undertake this sense-making will fundamentally affect how a person comes to a decision and, therefore, the subsequent impact they might have (Weick, 1995; Gilbride et al., 2021). It is for this reason that many in leadership, a domain focused on the social process of influence (Northouse, 2016) have called upon the need to increase leaders understanding of the complexity sciences (Boulton et al., 2015; Varney, 2021). Hence, there is a rationale that PAs could benefit from comprehending the complexity of their environments so that they are best prepared to make decisions in accordance to the complexity which drives their working environments. (Hawkins and James, 2018; Stacey, 2000).

Complexity theory is more relevant to the work of PA than ever before. The internet and tools such as social media platforms have broadened professional networks, provided greater access to information for PAs, and increased the speed at which they encounter new information (Child and McGrath, 2001; Uhl-Bien et al., 2007). The growing adoption of distributed management models (Jakobsen et al., 2023) has resulted in individuals being exposed to the complexities of decision-making processes that would have previously fallen outside their scope of responsibility (Hartley, 2007; Morrison, 2010). Preferences for more comprehensive management styles (Boyatzis et al., 2013) and the roles that leaders may be expected to play in areas such as social justice, diversity, mental health, and inclusion (Mullin et al., 2021) have expanded the scope of individual and group interactions to encompass broader social and organizational goals. These changes can be said to increase the exposure of PA to interaction, emergence and the interconnection - all core features of complex human systems (Lewin, 2000; Varney, 2021).

The importance of teaching complexity concepts to learners has been acknowledged within the field of complexity sciences (e.g., Byrne, 2014; Cairney and Geyer, 2017) as well as in the professional development of public administrators (PAs) (e.g., Rhodes and Eppel, 2018). Specific tools such as vignettes and case studies (Straussman, 2018), as well as learning communities (Wilson et al., 2023), have been identified as beneficial for helping PAs understand and manage complexity in their work. This special issue aims to explore how we can further advance the education of PAs by supporting their recognition and application of complexity in their professional practices. This paper aims to contribute to the existing knowledge by providing a psychological analysis of the key characteristics of complexity theory and identifying new challenges that teaching complexity poses to both learners and educators in public administration. By integrating two distinct psychological fields—applied cognitive psychology and adult developmental psychology—it seeks to offer a broader understanding of public administration learners and a wider range of instructional methods than using a single domain alone.

Our role as educators should be to help individuals think through the complexity of their environment. That is to say that their underlying structure of thought anticipates their environment as complex (e.g. dynamic, adaptive, emergent, interconnected etc.) as opposed to thinking about their contexts as linear and reductionist. The metaphor introduced in this article to describe this underpinning structure of thought that subsequently shapes and provides a framework for understanding our environment will be ‘thought architecture’. This metaphor is unique in stressing how an individual’s approach to thinking will require two key components:

• Acquiring knowledge on complexity theories and systems.

Applied cognitive psychology enhances our understanding of how individuals acquire and retain knowledge, which is essential to our cognitive processes (Willingham, 2017). The term ‘applied cognitive psychology’ in this article will be used as a term to define the use of theories and ideas from cognitive science that is being brought into the field of education and learning (Willingham, 2017; Rittle-Johnson et al., 2020). On the other hand, adult developmental psychology is the domain which primarily explores how adults organise their knowledge to make sense of the complexity of themselves and their environment. Adult developmental psychology has sought to analyse the experience of adulthood and how we develop through the later stages of our lives (Kegan, 1982; Loevinger, 1976) and there’s an array of different theorists within this domain. In this article, Jane Loevinger’s’ theory of adult ego development (AED) is used in this article to define the developmental trajectory by which adults develop the capacity for comprehend complexity across the adult lifespan (Hy and Loevinger, 1996; Loevinger, 1976). I have selected this theory as it is a robust theory of how adults develop over the lifespan (Manners, Durkin and 2004; Lanning et al., 2018), and how the content of each stage directly explores capacity for comprehending complexity (Gilbride et al., 2021; Gilbride et al., 2023).

These domains have been brought together for two reasons. One, that each individual and unique contributions of each domain add substantive value to understanding the learning experience in a way that the other domain cannot on its own. Second, as a form of triangulation. There is power in how two domains with different underlying philosophies, nomenclature, methodologies, and dominant theorists can derive the same conclusion. This conclusion being that, as a body of knowledge, complexity theory has unique considerations that will be challenging for the learner to comprehend and transfer into their own practice.

This analysis will be driven through the following three questions:

• The readiness of individuals to undertake learning.

The readiness of the learner - why are public administrators likely to be ‘complexity novices’

Understanding the starting point of the learner is a foundational requirement of any educator in any field. It is recognised that those with substantive background knowledge within the domain to be learnt respond to problems and stimuli in fundamentally different ways compared to novices (Auerbach et al., 2018; Rosenshine, 1995). Kirschner et al., (2006) recognise that those who are new to a discipline will require a fundamentally different approach to that of those with prior experience and acquired expertise. This section will articulate that the likely starting point for many PAs embarking on a piece of professional development are novices in relation to complexity. In other words, Pas are likely to be ‘complexity novices’.

There are two reasons why it reasonable to assert that many PAs will be ‘complexity novices’. The first reason is that, within their thought architecture, they are unlikely to hold deep conceptual knowledge on complexity. In applied cognitive psychology, a novice is considered to have little to no prior experience or knowledge within a specific domain, whereas experts have both a greater breadth of knowledge and a more developed schema within a specific domain (Persky and Robinson, 2017). Individuals are therefore considered a novice when it is deemed unlikely that the individual will hold one of the pre-requisites of expertise – the domain specific declarative and conceptual knowledge of the concept (Zambrano et al., 2019). It is unlikely that adult learners will have spent extensive time studying features of complexity sciences within any mandatory study programmes. Complexity theory is not mandated topic on graduate curriculum or leadership programmes within the public and private sector (Hood and Jackson, 2019; Stoten, 2021) and calls for complexity to place a more prominent role in PA curriculum remain (Bottom et al., 2022). Indeed, many systems of management appear to reinforce the opposite to complexity, giving very little change for individuals to learn this knowledge through an experiential approach either (Varney, 2021). As such, in relation to the knowledge a PA is likely to hold, many PA professionals are likely to be a complexity novice.

The second reason is that PAs are unlikely to be at a stage of adult development whereby they can recognise complexity in their environment. Jane Loevinger’s’ theory of adult ego development (AED: Loevinger, 1976; Hy and Loevinger, 1996) described how sense making system can change over the life span. It’s only as adults progress to later stage of development where features of organisational complexity are truly recognised. These include the challenge of establishing direct causality recognising relative unpredictability, the relative ambiguity of a complex system and inter-connectivity between parts of a system (Gilbride et al., 2023; McCauley et al., 2006; Pfaffenberger and Marko, 2011; Vincent et al., 2015).

The typical distribution of AED stages in the population will therefore be an important factor in the readiness of adults in their sense-making capacity. However, only circa 6% of adults occupy the later stages of adult development associated with greater recognition of complexity (Cook-Greuter, 2004; Lanning et al., 2018). Therefore, according to stages of AED, it is unlikely that any group of adult learners will recognise and tolerate complexity from their experiences without considerable scaffold or support. As such, even if they are presented with complex circumstances, it is unlikely that their thought architecture will be sufficiently developed enough recognise or perceive the features of complexity that are inherent to that environment independent of instructional scaffold and support.

So far, I have argued that many learners are likely to be a ‘complexity novice’ This could be because their unpinning thought architecture is likely to hold the declarative and conceptual knowledge associated with complexity, that they are likely to be at an earlier stage of AED of development, or both. The next section of this article will discuss how learning within the domain of the complexity sciences affords unique challenges to the educator seeking to develop the novices’ knowledge and awareness of complexity

Complexity sciences offer unique challenges to the education of the novices

So far, the argument has been as follows. Different psychological domains recognise that it is likely for many PAs to be complexity novices because of their knowledge and AED stage development and that the status of novice is important when designing learning experiences. In this section, attention will be turned to the unique challenges which an educator will face in teaching novices in the domain of complexity.

Discussion

In this paper, I have used two different psychological domains to shed light onto what challenges educators are likely to face in developing the learners’ ‘thought architecture’ in relation to complexity. Indeed, someone of these challenges involves them reconciling the paradox between the features of complexity and the sorts of teaching approaches which are known to be particularly effective for novices. Others is recognising that the advanced progression required places negative pressure on teaching approaches worked for earlier stages of development. The question to now turn to is how can educators design with these challenges and paradoxes in mind?

Recognising these paradoxes and challenges in of itself can help the educator direct their attention in how they adjust the design of their sessions. For example, case study methods are commonly used across many programmes as a way of providing a concrete and detailed example of given phenomena (Krain, 2016). The question, considering the argument above, should be how the educator designs case studies which balance the novices’ need for concrete, broken down instruction without creating the misconception of a complex system?

One way the design of these cases to gradually could be to increase the exposure to specific features complexity over the course of a series of case studies, linking each exposure to the incremental development of knowledge. Gradually revealing the complexity inherent could help minimise cognitive load, enable a broken-down approach complexity whilst remaining ‘true’ to the nature of a complex system over time. Such an approach has been applied to other approaches which have taken a psychology-informed model of complexity development, such as Getting Heads Together (Getting Heads Together, 2021).

There is the challenge of supporting a learner to analyse and comprehend a concept which is likely to be outside of the learners’ stage of AED. As such, without a scaffold to support how novices think and identify complexity, even broken-down case studies could be rendered ineffective.

Applying a metacognitive scaffold here could overcome challenges presented by earlier stages of AED. A scaffold can be defined as an instructional instrument, tool or device which is utilised by educators to support a learner in achieving an outcome which might otherwise not be possible for them to complete on their own (Rosenshine and Meister, 1992; Van de Pol, Volman and Beishuizen, 2010). Metacognition can be loosely defined as thinking about thinking (Flavell, 1979). Approaches which therefore embrace metacognition will structure the way in which a learner can think through the case study, enabling the learner to expose ideas that they might not otherwise on their own (Vukman, 2005).

There are several ways in which a metacognitive scaffold could be employed. Such an approach might be directly through the teaching modelling the process for deconstructing or analysing the case study, actively showing where and how a system is complex (Shulman, 1987; Rosenshine, 1995). Tools such as the ladder of inference (Argyris, 1982; Senge, 1990) facilitate the process of individuals deconstructing an example and their own inherent potential biases through to recognising the ambiguity, different forms of evidence and wider range of perspectives. Finally, reflective cycles such as Gibbs (1988) and Kolb (Kolb and Kolb, 2018) could enable individuals to deconstruct their own experience and scaffold new meaning, especially when paired with targeted questioning.

Finally, the educator might need to recognise the learners’ emotions in designing complexity informed instruction. The learning process has long since been recognised to be trying and the socio-emotional conditions of learning have been demonstrated to impact on a range of learning outcomes (Kwon et al., 2020). This is particularly pertinent to learning within the complexity sciences, where the learner is likely to be a novice and find the concept of complexity challenging to adopt. The consequence could be that asking learners to embrace complexity will require learners to feel psychologically safe to be wrong, admit to vulnerabilities and weaknesses and be prepared to collaborate meaningfully.

Psychological safety “describes perceptions of the consequences of taking interpersonal risks in a particular context such as a workplace” (Edmondson and Lei, 2014: p.24). If an individual does not experience psychological safety, these three features can be undermined, and their capacity o transfer their learning into different environments could be compromised. Although the necessity of complexity to the PA has been made clear in this article, the educator might wish to consider whether the learner is ready to be challenged in the manner required and that they have made the risk clear to the learner. Furthermore, they should encourage the learner to reflect on whether the conditions of psychological safety are sufficiently established prior to commencing their programme of learning. the necessary conditions are in place for the learner to engage in their professional learning.

Conclusion

The paper has re-articulated the relevance of complexity to the PA. The novel integration of two psychological lenses within this paper – applied cognitive and adult developmental psychology, has exposed how complexity theories can places unique demands upon the development of a learner’s thought architecture in relation to complexity. Furthermore, it is the combination of these applied cognitive and adult development psychology that suggests solutions into how to teach complexity, such as the approaches suggested at the end of this paper. Rather than provide a complete and finished solution, it is hoped that this paper will ignite a discussion around the specific challenges faced in the teaching of complexity and the solutions that the section can move toward by bringing together different psychological narratives to understanding the problem facing educators in this field.