Lessons from Collapse – When Complexity Overwhelms Culture
Part 4: Complexity, Collapse, and the Coming Age of Actualization Series
In Part 3, we painted the challenge of scaling culture. We begin with a hard question:
What happens when a society or institution keeps adding complexity beyond its benefits?
One of the most influential theories on the perils of complexity comes from archaeologist Joseph Tainter, who studied the collapse of dozens of civilizations (from the Western Roman Empire to the Maya). Tainter observed that as societies solve problems, they tend to become more complex: they create new layers of administration, new technologies, more intricate trade networks, and so on – all of which yield benefits, up to a point. However, each additional layer of complexity requires energy just to battle entropy1, let alone evolve, and over time the marginal returns diminish. In plain terms, the first canals or roads you build greatly boost your economy, but the hundredth canal in an over-engineered network might barely add value while every built canal requires ongoing maintenance.
Tainter argues that societies collapse when their investments in complexity - especially the cost of fighting the associated entropy - reach a point of diminishing returns, such that maintaining the status quo requires ever-increasing effort for ever-smaller benefits. At that stage, when a new crisis hits, adding yet more complexity (the typical response of a bureaucracy) just isn’t worth it – and the society involuntarily sheds complexity. Collapse, in Tainter’s view, is essentially an economically rational response to what becomes essentially insane complexity: it’s the moment when simplifying (even through breakdown) or worse, giving up, makes more sense than slogging on. Think large conglomerates of the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s2.
For example, consider the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Rome at its peak was an extremely complex society – a vast territory knitted together by roads, laws, a standing army, tax collectors, and an elaborate urban culture. To solve the problems of governing its domain, it kept layering new solutions: fortifications against invasions, bureaucratic expansions, debased currency to pay for the army, and so forth. But by the 4th and 5th centuries CE, the cost of maintaining this complex edifice (in gold, grain, and manpower) was outstripping the returns (security, order, prosperity). When waves of barbarians and internal usurpers came, the Western Empire effectively decided (not consciously, but through inaction and fragmentation) to simplify – to break into smaller kingdoms that could each be managed at a lower level of complexity. In Tainter’s terms, the empire “shed a significant portion of its complexity” and collapsed into a simpler form rather than attempt a massively complex reform. The collapse was painful and violent, but from a systems perspective, it reset the balance between social complexity and what the population could support.
Similar stories can be told of the Mayan collapse (city-states abandoned when sustaining their intensive agriculture and monument-building became unsustainable) and many others3.
Challenge and Response – The Goldilocks Principle: Another illuminating lens comes from historian Arnold J. Toynbee, who analyzed the rise and fall of 26 civilizations. Toynbee’s theory of Challenge and Response says that civilizations thrive by creatively responding to the challenges they face, and they decline when they fail to respond effectively. In Toynbee’s view, there’s a sweet spot: challenges that are too extreme can overwhelm a society, causing a quick collapse, whereas challenges that are too mild can breed complacency and stagnation (think Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi‘s notion of Flow). He famously likened it to a Goldilocks scenario for history: if the “porridge” of challenge is just right – not too hot, not too cold – a society is spurred to innovate and adapt, climbing to new heights.
If it’s too hot (say, a catastrophe beyond the society’s adaptive capacity), the society collapses outright by failing to meet the challenge.
If it’s too cold (too minor), the society doesn’t develop new strengths and eventually decays from within (losing vigor, unity, purpose).
Where Toynbee and Tainter intersect is interesting. Toynbee emphasizes leadership and cultural vitality – for example, if a civilization’s “creative minority” (innovative leaders) become a complacent “dominant minority,” just repeating old formulas, then when a big challenge comes, they won’t respond creatively and the civilization declines.
Tainter, on the other hand, provides the economic/system mechanism for why that creative failure happens: often those old formulas fail because they involve adding more complexity to solve problems, and if the society is already experiencing diminishing returns, the leadership finds no workable answer that doesn’t make things worse. At that point, the challenge overwhelms the civilization (Toynbee’s too-hot scenario) or the lack of challenge leads to internal decay (too-cold scenario). In either case, the outcome is collapse or a severe crisis.
Up Next: In Part 5, we’ll bring theory into reality. From Rome to WeWork, we’ll walk through real-world collapses—both ancient and modern—that reveal how too much complexity, combined with too little trust, can topple even the mightiest institutions.
The tendency for organizations, like any complex system, to naturally drift towards a state of disorder.
Kodak’s layered R&D and market hesitation, General Motors (GM)’s overbuilt bureaucracy and brand cannibalization, AT&T’s Bell System monopoly and antitrust breakup, U.S. Military in Vietnam suffering from micromanaged complexity, Pan Am’s empire of air travel collapse
The Late Bronze Age Collapse, The Abbasid Caliphate’s Slow Disintegration, The Khmer Empire and Angkor’s Decline, The Han Dynasty Collapse, The Songhai Empire Collapse
Previously, in the Complexity, Collapse, and the Coming Age of Actualization Series
Part 1: The Culture-Complexity Collision
Part 2: Cultural Operating Systems - Why Some Societies Don’t Scale
Part 3: The Scalability of Culture: Lessons from History and Modern Design