Collapse - the Christmas Tree Syndrome

Clive Akerman

Certain social systems disintegrate under their own weight. The Roman Empire for certain; the Spanish Empire perhaps - its disintegration was aided and abetted by a certain Corsican! - the British Empire perhaps for other reasons; with the Soviet Empire as the most recent example of a similar collapse. In each case the disintegration is unwillingly and unwittingly aided and abetted by the bureaucracies of the empire, fighting to maintain an unsustainable status quo ante. Perturbations and mutations arise throughout the empire, and it all falls apart.

This collapse is also true of many other systems. I call it the 'Christmas Tree Syndrome', and a simple example is provided by the typical computer application. It begins simple, elegant and economical. Then users come along and say 'very nice, but...' and request enhancements. So new bits are bolted on, like decorations on a Christmas Tree. These too attract comments of the 'very nice, but...' genre, so more decorations are tacked on. After a time the application becomes unmaintainable and, in effect, collapses under its own weight and complexity. The system engineers then redesign the system, putting back the elegance and apparent simplicity of the original, but on a bigger and more sophisticated scale. The process continues to iterate until the application is no longer needed.

'New bits are bolted on, like decorations on a Christmas Tree. After a time the application becomes unmaintainable and, in effect, collapses under its own weight and complexity'

I suspect that similar processes are repeated in many human (and possibly other natural) enterprises.

We have seen, for example, the regulations relating to social security payments grow in complexity over the years until the system began to fall apart - not, in my view, due to the evil intentions of the government of the time, merely due to intrinsic complexity brought on by well-intentioned tinkering by generations of well-intentioned people. Now it is being rethought and simplified.

The bureaucratic structures of the EC and the overly complicated regulatory structures of the London financial markets are other examples of over-burdened Christmas Trees which will, no doubt, at some time fall over.

Clive Akerman, 92 Sandbrook Road, London N16 OSP (tel 071 241 0866).

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