I’ve been getting increasingly sucked into the systems thinking wormhole in recent months, and this piece brings together a lot of the reasons why in a wonderfully readable bit of weekend lean-back longform food for thought – on the pandemic, society, science, economics, politics, and everything in between.
The concepts of information flux, robustness mechanisms, Sauron’s bias and monkey fights are definitely ones I can see myself obsessing over and trying to work into future strategy decks…
(Also, one of the co-authors of which has the truly awesome job title “Professor of Complexity”, giving me a whole new career aspiration.)
A teaser:
As the mathematician John Allen Paulos remarked about complex systems: ‘Uncertainty is the only certainty there is. And knowing how to live with insecurity is the only security.’ Instead of prioritising outcomes based on the last bad thing that happened – applying laser focus to terrorism or inequality, or putting vast resources into healthcare – we might take inspiration from complex systems in nature and design processes that foster adaptability and robustness for a range of scenarios that could come to pass.
This approach has been called emergent engineering. It’s profoundly different from traditional engineering, which is dominated by forecasting, trying to control the behaviour of a system and designing it to achieve specific outcomes. By contrast, emergent engineering embraces uncertainty as a fact of life that’s potentially constructive.
When applied to society-wide challenges, emergent engineering yields a different kind of problem-solving.