"Complexly structured, non-additive behavior emerges out of interactive networks.... Interactive agents unite in an ordered state of sorts, and the behavior of the resulting whole is more than the sum of individual behaviors. Ordered states... [arise] … when a unit adapts its individual behaviors to accommodate the behaviors of units with which it interacts. Poincare observed this phenomenon mathematically among colliding particles, which impart some of their resonance to each other leading to a degree of synchronized resonance. Interacting people and organizations tend similarly to adjust their behaviors and worldviews to accommodate others with whom they interact. Networks with complex chains of interaction allow large systems to correlate, or self-order."
"A basic assumption within these theories is that organizations are complex adaptive systems (Anderson, 1999; Axelrod and Cohen, 1999), composed of semiautonomous agents that seek to maximize fitness by adjusting interpretative and action-oriented schema that determine how they view and interact with other agents and the environment."
"The inductive-reasoning system I have described above consists of a multitude of “elements” in the form of belief-models or hypotheses that adapt to the aggregate environment they jointly create. Thus it qualifies as an adaptive complex system. After some initial learning time, the hypotheses or mental models in use are mutually co-adapted. Thus we can think of a consistent set of mental models as a set of hypotheses that work well with each other under some criterion—that have a high degree of mutual adaptedness. Sometimes there is a unique such set, it corresponds to a standard rational expectations equilibrium, and beliefs gravitate into it. More often there is a high, possibly very high, multiplicity of such sets. In this case we might expect inductive reasoning systems in the economy—whether in stock-market speculating, in negotiating, in poker games, in oligopoly pricing, in positioning products in the market—to cycle through or temporarily lock into psychological patterns that may be non-recurrent, path-dependent, and increasingly complicated. The possibilities are rich."
"A complex adaptive system acquires information about its environment and its own interaction with that environment, identifying regularities in that information, condensing those regularities into a kind of "schema", or model, and acting in the real world on the basis of that schema."
"A Complex Adaptive System (CAS) is a dynamic network of many agents (which may represent cells, species, individuals, firms, nations) acting in parallel, constantly acting and reacting to what the other agents are doing. The control of a CAS tends to be highly dispersed and decentralized. If there is to be any coherent behavior in the system, it has to arise from competition and cooperation among the agents themselves. The overall behavior of the system is the result of a huge number of decisions made every moment by many individual agents."
"A complex adaptive system is composed of interacting agents following rules, exchanging influence with their local and global environments and altering the very environment they are responding to by virtue of their simple actions."