In the previous post I used a picture of myself leaving the medina of Fes, Morocco through the gate. For me, this old city is a great illustration of human complexity.
When discussing abstract concepts like networks of humans, complex adaptive systems and their fractal nature (a society is a large organization, an organization is a large group of people etc …) you sometimes can loose the link to reality. What is the picture you have in your mind when dealing with these concepts? While we are discussing the fish pond as metaphor, I want to share with you the image of the medina of Fes, Morocco.
Last year I had the opportunity to travel to this beautiful country. What truly amazed me was the medina (the old city) of Fes. Standing on top of a hill you have a great overview of the entire medina. It really consists of thousands and thousands of streets, but from above you just see one massive, silent brown and green landscape.
When entering the medina you get proper feel of how big and busy this maze actually is. People are crawling through every possible opening. These openings are called streets, but actually that is not the correct expression. A more appropriate description is space between houses. From the hilltop you have no idea what is going on in this enormous network of spaces between houses.
The city itself contains complete small eco-systems between houses. Out of sight from the street level, but visible from the roof gardens of surrounding buildings is this part of town dedicated to making leather from skin. It is a specialized small city within the larger medina.
These small specialized parts are not the only hidden secrets. All houses within the medina look very dull from the outside. Almost no way to look inside from the small streets. But when entering such a riad one has to be amazed by the size of the internal gardens that make up the center of these large houses.
When I left the medina of Fes, its complexity left me astonished. Level upon level of human interactions. It should be clear why I love to put this picture next to posts on managing projects. Can you feel that mental scrollbar zoom in and out? 
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[...] To Get Free Project Management Education! « Coordination Without Central Control. Huh? Management And The Medina » February 24th, 2008 by Bas de [...]
[...] 20. Analogies go a long way in thinking things through and the comparisons make you appreciate the complexity of life itself. Think about a big city, and try to associate different parts of town with your organization. Your client views your work from a distance, a detached figure just concerned with the output of the city, the numbers and digits. The project manager, on the other hand, has to zoom in and out to know what is happening. As you zoom in, the complexity of each task and the teams performing the task at a personal and at a team level becomes clear. You have to keep zooming out from time to time as well, just to make sure that one area you were looking at fits the whole picture perfectly. It is the whole that makes the city produce what it does, that’s what the client is interested in, but disruption in one area might affect the whole situation. [more] [...]