What are Complex Problems and Complex Work?

Complexity science is a discipline unto itself and it’s worthwhile to study it in order to gain a deep understanding of how to make sense of a very complex world.

However, for our purposes we can think of complex problems as those with many “unknown unknowns.” That is, there are aspects of the problem that we either haven’t identified or that will surprise us because they turn out differently than what we expected.

In complex problems, we don’t know what we don’t know, and we don’t know what they are until we encounter them.

We contrast complex problems from those that are simple and those that are complicated.