Today, as individuals and as a society, we are faced with highly complex challenges. When we don't solve them correctly they rapidly become crises. This book explains how we can use complex systems research to solve complex problems in: * healthcare * education * military conflict * ethnic violence and terrorism * international development. Highly complex problems cannot be solved by any one individual. Traditional organizations, traditional forms of control and planning are not effective. Making Things Work draws on insights from complex systems research about emergence, complexity, patterns, networks and evolution. It explains how effective organizations form through cooperation and competition, and how to make non-hierarchical distributed organizational structures effective at their tasks.