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We discuss the impact of complexity science on the design and management of health care organizations over the past decade. We provide an overview of complexity science issues and their impact on thinking about health care systems, particularly with the rising importance of information systems. We also present a complexity science perspective on current issues in today’s health care organizations and suggest ways that this perspective might help in approaching these issues.

We review selected research, focusing on work in which we participated, to identify specific examples of applications of complexity science. We then take a look at information systems in health care organizations from a complexity viewpoint.

Complexity science is a fundamentally different way of understanding nature and has influenced the thinking of scholars and practitioners as they have attempted to understand health care organizations. Many scholars study health care organizations as complex adaptive systems and through this perspective develop new management strategies. Most important, perhaps, is the understanding that attention to relationships and interdependencies is critical for developing effective management strategies.

Increased understanding of complexity science can enhance the ability of researchers and practitioners to develop new ways of understanding and improving health care organizations.

This analysis opens new vistas for scholars and practitioners attempting to understand health care organizations as complex adaptive systems. The analysis holds value for those already familiar with this approach as well as those who may not be as familiar.

In this commentary, I highlight a few of the assertions made by McDaniel et al. (2013) about the importance of complexity science guided management practices, and extend these ideas specifically to how we might think about reducing seemingly intractable problems in health care such as patient safety, patient falls, hospital acquired infection, and the rise of chronic illness and obesity. I suggest that such changes will require managers and providers to view health care organizations and patients as complex adaptive systems and include patients as full participants in co-producing their health care.

Alongside the ubiquitous computer games apparently the marketing success of the 1992 toy season was a series of 25 year old puppets who had featured in a repeat showing of the orginal ITV series on BBC — Thunderbirds — more than 70 franchises have been sold to sell goods marked with the International Rescue logo and it is alleged that these products are even bigger than the previous smash marketing hit the Teenage Mutant Ninja turtles, saving thousands of jobs and making substantial profits for the British toy industry. The characters are licensed for right‐owners ITC (originally the international marketing arm of ATV, the ITV company which put out the programme, and now an independent company, ATV having long since lost its ITV franchise) by Copyright Promotions, Europe's largest licensing company (‘Thunderbirds are go to save the toy industry’ Sunday Telegraph 15/11/92).

In 1993, US Congress launched the Urban Revitalization Demonstration program, later to become known as HOPE VI, a national plan whose declared aim was to transform public housing stock into "bridges of opportunities".

In the following decade, Hope VI has awarded grants to demolish public housing projects and replace them with "attractive developments that not only blend with but enhance the surrounding community while providing housing for families of all incomes" (HUD, 1999). In 1995, Congress repealed the one-for-one replacement requirement and de facto Hope VI was turned primarily into a demolition program.

In 2003, the American Dream Downpayment Act re-authorised the Hope VI program throughout the fiscal year 2006. It now seems that the federal government has no intention to continue its financing.

Despite the extensive debate on the program, a comprehensive analysis of the social, economic and political process underlying the transformation of all the specific sites and a systematic overview of the stories behind these projects, from the first decision to build to the decision to raze are not available.

An atlas with a description of the sites, based on qualitative secondary sources (planning and architecture magazines, urban history and geographic history journals, local authorities reports), and three maps for each of them - before and after the public housing project and after Hope VI, could prove to be very useful. Such a tool would indeed provide the context for an interdisciplinary reflection of how the city affects and is affected by a multitude of variables with particular emphasis on the political controversies on location, and the role of different players - city council, public housing authorities, developers, community residents, unions, the media. At the end, city is "history condensed".

Being impossible for a single researcher to complete such a body of work, this paper intends to make a contribution to the existing literature and focus on the projects built between 1933 and 1949, now demolished or in the way to be demolished in 58 cities, "thanks" to Hope VI (1).

“Music is Rhythm, Rhythm is Life.” This maxim, uttered by former Motown drummer Bill “Sticks” Nicks to my class and me a few years back, opens a portal to what being human involves. Most accounts of what it means to be human make cognitive capacities, language and reflective thinking, the be-all and end-all of human distinction. But think about it: how many animals do you know who beat rhythm for aesthetic enjoyment and social communion?

In this essay I reflect upon moments from musical experiences, primarily from blues music, to illustrate the place of the spontaneous gesture and ensemble improvisation in interaction, in and out of the music.