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The Architecture of Complexity
Simon's 1962 paper introducing <em>near-decomposability</em> as the universal structural principle of complex systems buildable by bounded minds — and the founding document of modern systems thinking about organizational design.
'The Architecture of Complexity' is the 1962 paper in which Simon articulated the structural principle he had been developing across decades of work on organizations, biological systems, and computation. The paper argues that complex systems in both nature and human artifice tend to be nearly decomposable — organized as hierarchies of sub-assemblies whose internal interactions dominate their external ones. The parable of the two watchmakers, Hora and Tempus, serves as its central illustration: Hora, who builds hierarchically, completes watches efficiently despite interruptions; Tempus, who builds sequentially, fails to complete any. The paper establishes that near-decomposability is not an aesthetic preference or organizational convenience but a structural necessity — the only architecture under which bounded minds can construct and maintain complex systems. Its implications span biology, software engineering, organizational theory, and — as this volume argues — the design of interaction structures between human beings and AI systems.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The paper appeared in the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society and