Surgery Was Successful but the Patient Died

Haven’t we heard the statement I have used as the title of thiseditorial several times in the ﬁeld of medicine? What is the causeof this unfortunate end, and what are the symptoms? The patientprobably died because the complicated problem addressed by thesurgery could not be sustained by the complex system of humanphysiology. We encounter similar situations in the ﬁeld of engi-neering, but they do not have such clear-cut endings as the deathof a patient, except in the case of bridge or structural failures thatcatch the designer or user standing under or over it. Here I shouldinclude as an anecdote that in the past the designer was expectedto stand under a bridge when it was initially opened. I do notknow if this is still the practice!In environmental and water resources systems, after partiallyor even completely achieving the narrow goals of a study, weoften ﬁnd ourselves trying to justify how successful the project orresearch was as we articulate the end story and extrapolate theutility of the research on a broader scale. At this point engineersoften fail to be convincing, and mistakes are made. Unfortunately,engineers’ justiﬁcations of their research tend to ignore the effectsof implementation on a broader scale because this was not ini-tially analyzed or studied. Thus, the projection simply becomes aspeculative extrapolation of the success achieved in the narrowﬁeld of the project or research.As engineers and researchers working in the ﬁeld of environ-mental and water resources, we are trained, and are very good at,understanding and solving complicated problems in specializedareas. This of course requires us to specialize in one area ofresearch and application—and in that area alone. Unfortunately,as we very well know, environmental and water resource pro-cesses and the outcomes of our recommended solutions cannot bestudied and implemented in isolation, in the narrow ﬁelds of ourspecialization. More and more, we are realizing that the systemswe have to deal with are not just complicated; they must be rec-ognized as complex as well. Components of complex systemscannot be studied in isolation from each other, and research onsuch systems will require the participation of specialists fromnumerous ﬁelds and also generalists, who can show us the linksbetween specializations.A complex system comprises many interconnected compo-nents, such that the behavior of each component depends on thebehavior of the other components. The traditional approach toenvironmental and water resources management, on the otherhand, is based on the premise that the systems we deal with arecomplicated but not complex. The approach used to analyze andsolve the problems of complicated systems involves designing away to control change within the system, which is assumed to bestable. The idea we have here is “Change is possible to control.”We can characterize this approach as the command-and-controlapproach to complicated problems. Unfortunately, this is not agood strategy to use to analyze complex problems.To give an example of a complex system, today we know thatenvironmental and water resources systems do not respond toclimate change in a smooth and predictable way Aral 2010; Bar-tels et al. 2009; EPA 2010 . There are other examples of complexsystems in the current engineering literature, such as carbon di-oxide sequestration and disposal and the effect of environmentaland water resources management problems on human health. Acase in point is the disappearance of the Aral Sea in Asia as aresult of irrigation practices. Similarly complex are water transferprojects that involve elaborate systems of canals and pipes anddredging over long distances to convey water from one basin toanother to make up for water shortages. These systems can haveserious consequences. Their adverse effects can be seen, for in-stance, in the Three Georges Dam project in China, which re-quired drastic reconﬁguration of the proposed managementprojects. Also consider sea level rise resulting from climatechange and expected degradation of coastal water supplies, andtheir effects on societies and ecosystems. Examples of this nature,in which tipping points are nearby and critical, are many. Theseproblems cannot be solved through control but may be addressedadequately by understanding and managing change.Depending on the control decisions chosen, a stressed or per-turbed complex system can suddenly shift from a seeminglysteady state to a different state that is difﬁcult if not impossible torevert back to its original state. Further, not only do complexsystems in nature and society change, but over time they beginto change in different ways. This is a very important characteristicof complex systems. Thus, the premise that it is possible to con-trol change becomes untenable in the analysis of complex sys-tems. The individual components of a complex system and theinteractions between them may cause large-scale changes and be-haviors that are not easily predicted from the analysis and knowl-edge of the individual components. This concept is in contrast tothe perspective that the world is in near equilibrium and/or in asteady state, as assumed in most of our current environmental andwater resources applications.When analyzing complex systems, in addition to understand-ing how dynamic systems behave, it is important to understandthe concept of the return to equilibrium. For this concept, themethodology originally developed for ecological system analysis,which embraces resilience and its components—latitude, resis-tance, precariousness, and panarchy—is very important Gunder-son and Pritchard 2002; Holland 1995; Kauffman 1993; Neubertand Caswell 1997 . See Fig. 1. Resilience,