I have been thinking about this for a while and I think the motivation behind it comes from a peculiar but persistent observation.  Whenever the conversation about complexity is raised with business clients, partners or colleagues, I notice that almost immediately the discourse begins to contain it. Complexity is spoken about as if it properly belongs inside the business domain, as if it were something one switches on at work and then switches off again when one leaves the office. 

It is treated like a professional capability, a cognitive tool, a competence one deploys between 9 and 5. And all the while I find myself wondering whether people really understand what it means to think complexly at all.  Because to think complexly in business, properly and genuinely, cannot be separated from how one thinks outside the business domain. The separation itself already signals a misunderstanding.

It is a little like saying one is a creative thinker in business but not in life in general. Or that one is a leader at work but not anywhere else. Or that one has integrity in business dealings but somehow suspends that integrity in private life. These distinctions may be convenient, but they are not coherent.

Complexity does not recognise these partitions.  Complexity is not “systems thinking”!

I should say, before going further, that I have never been particularly fond of the phrase systems thinking, at least not as it is commonly used. It has become loaded with a kind of marketing comfort, a suggestion that if we can just draw the right diagrams, connect the right boxes, and label the right feedback loops, then complexity will somehow submit to us.

What I am interested in is not systems as objects, but complex processes as lived reality. Complexity thinking, as I understand it, is not primarily about how things should look, but about how things actually unfold. Often in ways that are partial, entangled, opaque, and resistant to explanation. Life is complex. Human beings are complex. Societies are complex. The world is complex.

And many of the biggest questions we can ask about these things still have no real answers, nor should we expect them to (any time soon anyway).

Simplicity as a form of escape.  Alfred North Whitehead once remarked that the only simplicity one can trust is the simplicity found on the far side of complexity. That line has stayed with me, partly because it is so often misunderstood. What we commonly call simplicity today is not that kind of simplicity at all. It is not the clarity that comes after deep engagement. It is a misrecognition of the situation we are in.

When people insist that things are “actually very simple,” what they are often revealing, I suspect, is not insight, but a narrowing of the mind. Simplicity, in this sense, becomes a form of escape. A way of relieving ourselves from the discomfort of not knowing, not understanding, not being able to resolve things neatly. The science fiction writer Poul Anderson once observed that there has never been a problem so complicated that, when examined more closely, it did not turn out to be even more complicated. That feels less like a pessimistic remark and more like a faithful description of reality.

The problem is not that we don’t understand things. That, in itself, is manageable. The real problem is that we misunderstand them often because we feel compelled to explain them anyway. Explanation as a substitute for understanding.

Much of the modern world is built not on understanding, but on what we might call the best explanation available at the time. These explanations are usually provisional, partial, and deeply inadequate. But they are emotionally satisfying. And they give us a sense of closure. Which I guess is the point.

Rather than settling into the fact that many things are beyond our grasp, we reach for any explanation that will do, and then we build institutions, narratives, policies, and identities on top of it. Inevitably, these constructions generate new problems, which demand further explanations, and the cycle continues.

I would not call this ignorance. It’s more like overconfidence masquerading as clarity. One of the things that strikes me is that genuinely complex phenomena tend not to produce clean emotions. They produce bewilderment. Bewilderment is uncomfortable. It leaves us without orientation. It does not tell us what to feel or how to act.

And so, rather than staying with bewilderment and trying to make sense of it, we often narrow our understanding until we can generate an emotional response. Good versus evil. Right versus wrong. Heroes and villains. Once the emotion appears, it feels as though something has been resolved. But in many cases, the emotion is not the result of understanding; it is a substitute for it.

There are, of course, situations where emotions arise naturally and appropriately. If you encounter a tiger in the wild, fear is not something you reason your way into. It emerges as a direct response to danger. Grief, joy, sadness, relief, these are often immediate and honest reactions to lived experience.

Complex social and organisational phenomena are different. They rarely demand such immediate responses. What they demand instead is patience, restraint, and the capacity to hold ambiguity without rushing toward closure.

This brings me back to the original observation. When complexity thinking is confined to the business domain, it becomes performative. It turns into something we apply rather than something we live. And that is why it rarely goes very deep. Complexity is omnipresent. It does not clock off when our workday is over and we rush home.  Unless we maintain our capacity to think complexly in everyday life in relationships, in moral judgment, in how we make sense of the world, we will not suddenly become adept at it in the workplace.

You cannot meaningfully switch complexity thinking on and off.

If we cultivate it as a way of living, it will naturally move into the various compartments of life we like to keep separate. And if we fail to do that, then what we call complexity thinking at work is often little more than sophisticated simplification. Perhaps the real work, then, is not learning how to “apply” complexity, but learning how to remain with it without escaping into false simplicity, premature explanation, or manufactured emotion.

That, at least, is where my thinking has led me.