Adaptive Cycle
Description
Daniel Christian Wahl:
"The adaptive cycle is a model of natural patterns of change in ecosystems and eco-social systems. It consists of four distinct phases: ‘growth or exploitation’ (r); ‘conservation’ (K) of established patterns and resource distribution; ‘collapse or release’ (Ω); and reorganization (α). The adaptive cycle is often drawn like an infinity symbol or Möbius loop that joins these four phases.
The journey from exploitation (growth in the diagram above) to conservation is referred to as the ‘fore-loop’ (blue and green part of the loop). It describes the slow and often longer phase of growth and accumulation of resources in the system. Eventually, too much rigid structure, fixed connections and accumulation of resources in the system make it brittle and poised for release or collapse.
The transition from release to reorganization is referred to as the ‘back-loop’ of the adaptive cycle (red and orange part of the loop). This phase is often fast moving and relatively short. In this phase the opportunity for redesign, reorganization and renewal is high, due to the release of rigid structures, established patterns and the redistribution of resources throughout the system. In the adaptive cycle, the creative ‘edge of chaos’ is reached during the beginning of the ‘release’ phase and left at the end of the ‘reorganization’ phase.
During the α-phase the opportunities for and likelihood of creative change is highest. In the r-phase these opportunities for change are tested against each other and one or a few innovations begin to define the characteristics of the transformed system. This structure is conserved and then begins itself to rigidify during the K-phase, until the often rapid and sometimes catastrophic release (collapse) in the Ω-phase takes us back to the creative ‘edge of chaos’ conditions. This offers renewed opportunities for reorganization in a new α-phase and a new adaptive cycle."
Characteristics
The Phases of the Adaptive Cycle, by Alex Goodall:
1. The Growth Phase (also called Exploitation) of the Adaptive Cycle
"In the growth phase, the system expands by accumulating resources and creating connections. Success depends not on efficiency, but on adaptability to changing environments.
Resources are readily available; constraints and restrictions are loose; connections are relatively few and weak, and they enable growth. This provides the ideal flexible environment for innovation and novelty to blossom. The key internal influence on the system is the drive to grow. There are, of course, external influences.
For societal systems the growth phase is a period of entrepreneurship, of the founding of institutions, of technological innovation and of social experimentation. For example: new technologies come into being, new industry sectors emerge, start-ups get formed, political parties and institutions are created, and new cultural movements evolve.
During growth: Potential starts low but rises rapidly as resources are captured and accumulated: the number of future options grows. Connectedness is low and the system is sensitive to external variability. Resilience is high; weak internal regulation (connectedness) means the costs of failure are low and experiments can be absorbed.
Over time, as resources accumulate and connections increase and strengthen, the next phase emerges.
2. The Conservation Phase of the Adaptive Cycle
In the conservation phase, the system stabilises. Success now depends not on adaptability but on efficiency, which requires connectedness and mutually reinforcing relationships.
Resources continue to accumulate; the number of connections increases and they become stronger and more strongly regulated. Innovations are standardised, codified and scaled. With less innovation and change, the future seems ever more certain and predetermined, and the system adapts to that perspective by increasing stability. Innovation slows down, and the capacity to innovate is reduced.
For societal systems this looks like increasing bureaucracy and regulation; professionalism and institutionalism; increased scaling; optimisation within the stable status quo. This results in great stability which, along with the scaling and optimisation, usually creates remarkable prosperity, albeit frequently accompanied by growing inequality.
This gives rise to very strong incentives to preserve the stability, which means investing in maintaining the existing structures, the resources and the connections. Inevitably, maintaining that stability means the system becomes rigid and inflexible: it loses its resilience and becomes much less able to adapt to changing circumstances, disruptions and shocks - whether internally or externally generated.
During conservation: Potential reaches its peak. Connectedness is also at its highest, making the system able to withstand external variability. Resilience is at its lowest because of the high connectedness; the system is at its most vulnerable to an external shock that exceeds the control of connectedness, or bypasses it because of its novelty.
When a strong or novel enough disruption occurs, the next phase gets triggered.
3. The Release Phase of the Adaptive Cycle
The release phase occurs when the system is subjected to a disruption which overcomes its capacity for resilience. This results in breakdown or collapse. The cause of the collapse can often be attributed not to the disruption itself, but to the system’s insufficient resilience and ability to adapt.
The rigid connections can cause the disruptive effects to rapidly spread across the whole system, often with amplification. Something that was changing slowly during conservation can reach a tipping point that triggers the disruption. The collapse can then happen in a heartbeat. This results in the closely-coupled resources being released - meaning they may be destroyed, degraded, or simply decoupled from the structures that previously organised them. This can happen through cascading failure (where disruptions trigger other disruptions) and synchronous failure (where there are multiple disruptions at the same time).
For societal systems, the panarchy authors identify what happens here as Schumpeter’s “creative destruction”: the tightly bound resources - equipment, money, skills, knowledge - are released, and in being released they become the raw material for reorganisation.
The collapse can be a mixture of economics, politics, technology or culture. For example: a prolonged credit expansion followed by a financial crisis; a long period of authoritarian rule followed by a political revolution; the disruption of a whole industry by the introduction of a new technology (e.g. the vinyl and cassette industries were disrupted by CDs; that industry was disrupted by MP3 players; that industry was displaced by streaming services).
Examples of loss of resources include financial capital, legitimacy (trust), infrastructure, control over land, social bonds, and many forms of memory.
During release: Potential may drop rapidly or remain high. Connectedness collapses. Resilience begins to expand again.
Although the disruption of the release phase creates instability, uncertainty, concern and social pain, it dismantles the constraints that previously suppressed change and adaptability. This creates the conditions for the next phase.
4. The Reorganisation Phase of the Adaptive Cycle
This phase is the most consequential: it may lead to a repetition of the previous cycle, to the emergence of something truly novel, or to a collapse into a degraded state.
The reorganisation phase is characterised by uncertainty: in particular, the uncertainty of what happens next. The rules that governed the earlier phases no longer apply. The resources that were tightly coupled during conservation have had their coupling loosened by release. They are now available to be reorganised in new ways by new actors. Along the way, small, chance events can have disproportionately large impacts with unpredictable outcomes.
I like the choice of the term ‘reorganisation’ to name this phase because it’s neutral. A reorganisation can be good, bad or indifferent: a transformation, a simplification or just ‘different’.
For societal systems, this phase can be deeply consequential politically, socially and culturally. Or not. The reorganisation may lead to renewal - where growth restarts, potentially with novel configurations - or to collapse into a degraded state - where recovery is delayed indefinitely or the system stabilises at a much lower level of ‘complexity’. The path taken depends on several factors: the degree to which various forms of memory are preserved; the availability of novelty (new actors, ideas, or combinations); and the chance events that occur during this uniquely uncertain phase.
During reorganisation: Potential depends on what happened during release. Connectedness is low and resilience is high - setting the stage for a new growth phase.
The growth and the conservation phases are called the Front Loop, and this is where the majority of time is spent during a complete panarchy cycle. The release and reorganisation phases are called the Back Loop. Much less time is spent here. As I indicated above, release can be triggered in a heartbeat and can be completed very quickly; and reorganisation is a setup phase to kick off a new cycle with growth."
(https://alexgoodall.substack.com/p/humanitys-transition-explained-using)
Example
Nafeez Ahmed:
“The “adaptive cycle” framework is one such way. Developed by the late ecologist C.S. Holling, it provides powerful insights when applied to the rise and fall of human social systems. Systems tend to grow, decline, and renew themselves over four phases: growth—defining the 200 or so years of rapid industrial growth since the 19th century; conservation—encompassing a period of consolidation in which the system stabilizes; release—a period of uncertainty and chaos as the system begins to weaken and decline; and finally reorganization, when the system undergoes a fundamental re-ordering which can pave the way for a new systemic life cycle.
Industrial civilization appears to have entered the last stages of its systemic life cycle long before the pandemic. While this “release” stage reveals the alarming results of previously entrenched social, political, economic, and cultural structures collapsing under the weight of their own incoherence, it also opens up unprecedented opportunities for radical change. At this point in a system’s life cycle, the weakening of top-down structures allows small perturbations to have wider re-ordering impacts across structures within the system.”
Discussion
Nafeez Ahmed:
"While ubiquitous in complex systems, most research on phase transitions is concentrated in the natural and physical sciences. A phase transition occurs when a system undergoes a fundamental change of state due to a “sharp transition” in the degree of organisation within the system due to changing external pressures. At the small scale of physical and biological systems, the “phase” of a system – its level of organisation – involves physical forces like temperature or magnetism. Yet phase transitions are also visible in large-scale complex ecological systems, including population dynamics (Heffern et al., 2021), where change is driven by multiple, simultaneous phase transitions within its constitutive sub systems.
Despite extensive theoretical modelling of phase transitions in traffic flow, crowd behaviour, financial markets, cultural dynamics and social collapse, empirical research validating these models is limited (Braha, 2024).
One of the most empirically robust approaches to understanding how phase transitions work in biological and ecological systems is the adaptive cycle framework developed by Crawford Holling and Lance Gunderson, derived from the study of a wide range of ecosystems including forests, predator-prey relations and population dynamics.
An adaptive cycle is an evolutionary process encompassing the whole life-cycle of a particular system, whose behaviour is defined by an evolving set of rules and properties equivalent to its organisational “phase”. It moves through four stages which characterise the behavioural features of how the system grows, adopts a defined complex structure and then declines before reorganising (Allen and Holling, 2010).
Figure 1 provides a visualisation of the four interlinked stages of the adaptive cycle moving through exploitation, conservation, release and reorganisation. The adaptive cycle begins with the rapid growth (r) of a living system as it exploits available resources based on available information about its environmental conditions. This phase transition involves new points of connection, interconnection and relationship, which form the overarching structure or phase of the entire system. As linkages within the system proliferate, it moves into a slower-growing state of conservation (K) where the form of the system becomes increasingly stable within and highly adapted to a limited number of immediate environmental conditions. Trading resilience for efficiency, the system tends to reuse existing structures to increase connectivity making it vulnerable to environmental disruptions that alter the landscape to which the system is adapted. The system collapses to a simpler state as previously accumulated materials and energy are released (X). This release creates an opening for renewal and uncertainty that did not previously exist, allowing a fourth and final phase of eorganisation (a) to emerge. The system can mobilise new information about environmental conditions to pursue new material adaptions. If successful, this provides the groundwork for a whole new life cycle.
These stages can be seen as two interconnected “loops” of movement, a “front loop” from growth to stabilisation and a “back loop” involving release and reorganisation. The “back loop” heralds the potential for a new life-cycle as the old structure enters a state of decline and indeterminacy, creating space for the emergence of a new system defined by a new organisational phase. The adaptive cycle occurs at all scales, with larger-scale “loops” consisting of phase transitions across constitutive systems. Holling described this nested Web of adaptive cycles as a “panarchy”.
The adaptive cycle explains a wide range of phenomena across complex systems in human societies, including technology, organisations, the global economy and human civilisation, (Fath et al., 2015) and is quantifiable according to thermodynamic indicators (Sundstrom and Allen, 2019; Rogers, 2017). Figure 2 represents this movement of the adaptive cycle chronologically as a socio-metabolic process with applicability to a wide range of societal and civilisational systems.
It has been used to explain the behaviours of hunter-gatherer communities (Thompson and Turck, 2009); pre-Neolithic societies in Western central Europe (Gronenborn et al., 2014); Maya civilisation (Dunning et al., 2012); tropical civilisations in Southeast Asia (Faulseit, 2016); polities in Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi and Tennessee in the USA (Hally and Chamblee, 2019); and the evolution of human civilisation as a whole. (Rosen and Rivera- Collazo, 2012).
Despite this, there is relatively little exploration of how applying the adaptive cycle for foresight methodologies can support planetary scale decision-making."