ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the qualitative approach, in the belief that future work in social networks, communication channels and other modelling of social systems will provide a quantitative validation of our analysis. Solutions that take many years to produce results—and in the case of systemic social challenges, is nearly always the case—are often seen as intractable by both Congress and US federal agencies. Good designs can be applied repeatedly in very different geographic, social and environmental situations. The federal agency employee can also remind the group than an entrepreneurial, public outreach-oriented component is important for a fully functioning social movement. In the face of such complexity, it is impossible for federal agencies to engineer a single, standard approach to societal issues. The traditional mechanistic model of federal agency intervention assumes top-down control and direction by the lead agency. In the complex adaptive system model, the basic perspective of the federal agency would be one of adaptation and co-evolution with its environment.
