The idea of constraints has gained traction in the last few years. Originally deployed in mechanical engineering, practitioners in fields as diverse as biophysics and knowledge management use it to refer to the restriction or limitation of options or activities. Generally speaking, therefore, the concept of constraint carries a somewhat negative connotation – it’s a factor that impedes one from doing something.

Going back at least to Howard Pattee, biologists were among the first to recognize the need for a parallel idea, that of enabling constraints, which, far from restricting or limiting options or activity, instead open up and make possible -- enable – the appearance of novel and innovative events or processes. In this sense enabling constraints facilitate emergence and evolution. How so?

Why not just use the term “cause” instead of “constraint”? Answer: constraints take the role of context seriously, which the classical notion of causes/effects does not. The idea of constraint is, therefore, particularly useful for thinking about ecological and social organization, complex dynamics that are particularly recalcitrant to being shoehorned into the idea of (forceful) causes. And when you take context seriously, different forms of management follow.

In this talk, Alicia will defend the importance of distinguishing between constraints (both enabling and constitutive/governing) on the one hand and causes on the other.