Why does the U.S. continue to lost 50,000-100,000 people each year to medical errors despite rigorous physician training and advance technology? How could the U.S. government have spent over $3 billion in a project to redesign the Air Traffic control System without even replacing a single part? Why do billions of dollars in assistance fail to promote development in third-world countries? Why is the U.S. military challenged by a handful of terrorists? Why are we so unhappy with our education system? More importantly: how can we fix these problems? "Making Things Work" describes how the concepts of complex systems can help in solving the complex problems facing us today. In easy to understand language, this book explains how effectively organizing people can solve complex problems in: healthcare, education, military conflict, ethnic violence and terrorism, and third world development. When a problem is highly complex one person cannot solve it alone, but organizations of people can, if they know how to work together. "Making Things Work" explains why traditional organizations and traditional forms of control and planning are not effective for addressing these tasks. It draws on basic insights from complex systems research-emergence, complexity, patterns, networks and evolution to explain how effective teams form through cooperation and competition, and how to make non-hierarchical organizations effective at their tasks. Everyone can take away something from the practical and instructive problem-solving approach described in this book.

Overview: making things work / Part I. Concepts. Parts, wholes, and relationships -- Patterns -- Networks and collective memory -- Possibilities -- Complexity and scale in organizations -- Evolution -- Competition and cooperation / Part II. Solving problems. Solving real world problems -- Military warfare and conflict -- Health care I: the health care system -- Health care II: medical errors -- Education I: complexity of learning -- Education II: the education system -- International development -- Enlightened evolutionary engineering -- Global control, ethnic violence and terrorism -- Conclusion.