Methods and Frameworks for Complexity
Most methods for understanding complex systems were built to predict, optimise, or control. Communities are none of these things. They are relational, adaptive, and stubbornly particular. They resist the models designed to capture them, and they outgrow the indicators designed to measure them. A method that takes complexity seriously must begin by accepting that the most important things happening in a community may be precisely the things that existing instruments were not built to see.
CCER develops diagnostic methods that work differently. Rather than measuring outcomes against predefined targets, our instruments ask structural questions. Where is the space for manoeuvre? What is compressing it? What would protect it? These questions can be asked of a farming community locked into unsustainable financial trajectories, of a youth-led initiative whose knowledge finds no institutional landing place, or of a democratic system whose formal indicators remain stable while its relational architecture erodes beneath them.
Our central methodological contribution is viability geometrics: a diagnostic framework grounded in Aubin's viability theory that analyses how institutional structures reshape the configuration space of actors and communities. It operates across levels of formalisation, from qualitative situated mapping through systematic case comparison to formal viability analysis, and it translates across disciplinary boundaries without imposing a single vocabulary. In some applications the language is geometric. In others it speaks of trajectory foreclosure, epistemic displacement, or configurational drift. The diagnostic logic is the same. The register adapts to the field.
Alongside the overarching framework, we develop practical instruments for specific contexts. The Knowledge Reception Scan reframes the question of hard-to-reach communities by diagnosing institutional capacity to receive knowledge that is already being produced. The Quintuple Helix Diagnostic makes visible how institutional silos fragment the same population across disconnected policy domains. These are not measurement tools. They are instruments for making structural conditions legible to the people who live within them.
We share our methods openly. Not because openness is a principle, but because diagnostic instruments only work if the communities they describe can recognise themselves in the diagnosis.
Recent work
