In a recent post (“Against Hidden Reductionism: Why Complexity Thinking Is Not Systems Thinking”), I proposed that what is often referred to as systems thinking may appear sophisticated, but in practice tends to function as a refined form of reductionism. By disassembling systems into their component parts and reassembling them in adjusted configurations, systems thinking reinforces the illusion that a system is no more than the sum of its parts. While it presents itself as holistic, its inquiries frequently remain trapped within the very boundaries of the system and the interests of those who already occupy privileged positions within it.

This thinking piece aims to deepen that critique and introduce the contours of what I refer to as complexity thinking. This is not merely a shift in tools or techniques. It is a shift in attitude. Where systems thinking tends to operate from a position of distance and presumed neutrality, complexity thinking calls for an ethical reorientation, beginning not with the system, but with our entanglement within it.

It may help to borrow Darwin’s metaphor of the environment as “an entangled bank.” We are not observers standing outside a system but integral to that very system. Complexity thinking begins with the uncomfortable truth that our vantage point is partial, invested, and often complicit. We are not the cartographers of a neutral terrain, we are implicated participants within it.

“To think complexly is to reflect not only on the system but on the nature of the thinking itself.”

Where systems thinking presumes an agent can stand outside the system, observing and optimising it with analytical detachment, complexity thinking insists on radical reflexivity. To think complexly is to reflect not only on the system but on the nature of the thinking itself. It asks that we interrupt our own habits of mind. It calls for a kind of epistemic and ethical detachment, not cold or mechanical, but self-disruptive, humble, and open-ended. We do not pull ourselves out of the system physically, but mentally and morally, so that we can see without immediately reinforcing our own embedded positions.

This is especially crucial when addressing wicked problems, those persistent issues, such as climate change, affordable housing, intergenerational poverty; that resist resolution through optimisation or reform. What makes wicked problems so intractable is not just their scale or complexity but the way stakeholders, including ourselves, come to the table already invested in certain narratives, roles, and outcomes. These are not neutral positions. Stakeholders are themselves a product of the very system they are attempting to reform. As someone once remarked, “You are not stuck in traffic; you are traffic.”

Too often, systems thinking approaches such problems by attempting to balance stakeholder interests or redesign existing processes to accommodate them. This tends to preserve the architecture of the system and maintain the legitimacy of its current occupants. It imagines fairness as a better configuration of existing parts. Complexity thinking, by contrast, challenges us to suspend the primacy of stakeholder interests altogether. It invites us to reimagine the system from a perspective where no current position, including our own, is automatically preserved.

This is not to say that stakeholders have no place, but rather that their current form and function should not be sacred. In a truly generative transformation, even the roles of “government,” “business,” or “community” may need to be fundamentally reimagined. It is entirely possible that a genuinely just outcome may not preserve the existing identity, function, or benefit of any current actor. Complexity thinking, in this sense, doesn’t just ask us to think outside the box; it asks us to question whether the box should exist at all.

Part of the challenge lies in how we are conditioned to think in terms of functionality. The dominant question becomes: does it work? But functionality is a loaded term. It begs the question: for whom does it work, and according to what criteria? Systems thinking, particularly in managerial or policy settings, often collapses ethical reflection into operational efficiency. Complexity thinking resists this conflation. It asks not merely whether something functions, but what is preserved in its functioning, what is excluded, and what deeper truths are being masked by the appearance of order.

This is why complexity thinking is more difficult, more dangerous, and ultimately more hopeful than systems thinking. It requires humility because no part of the system, not even our own role, is beyond interrogation. It requires courage because it asks us to relinquish not just control, but our comfort with inherited identities and patterns of thought. And it requires moral imagination, because we are asked to participate in the co-creation of a world we cannot yet fully name.

Complexity thinking is not a new lens; it is a new ethic. It is not a method to be applied when convenient.  Rather, it is a discipline; a sustained and uncomfortable commitment to see differently, to think beyond frames, to resist premature closure. It is about staying with ambiguity not as a failure of insight but as the necessary condition for true generativity.

As we face the immense challenges of our time there is a pressing need to move beyond the managerial comfort found in systems thinking and toward the more unsettling terrain of complexity thinking. For it is in this terrain, amidst the tangle and uncertainty, that genuinely new possibilities begin to emerge.