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 […]
“The problem for nature is the foundation of societies which are structured with high complexity and at the same time unspecialised.” — Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality There are moments when language must change before anything else can. The way we speak about the Great Barrier Reef, […]
An anthropologist learns early to resist the lure of the “now” as the only reality worth studying. Cultures carry their past within them. Patterns of thought, the metaphors that shape our stories, the values that determine what we ignore and what we celebrate. These change far more slowly than market conditions. The same is true in organisations. Beneath the fresh branding and the new strategic frameworks, much of the underlying thinking is amazingly persistent. What changes most is the language in which it is dressed.
Every enterprise faces risks. Managing them is like doing homework we often try to skip in favour of more exciting pursuits. Managers know they must deal with risk. But many prefer to focus on innovation, growth, or strategy. And yet, nothing truly exciting in business can happen without […]
The long-standing assumption that complexity arises from simplicity is intuitive, but possibly incorrect. Our tendency to see simple components giving rise to complex systems is shaped not by reality itself, but by the limits of our observation. A seed becomes a tree. Molecules form proteins. Words form languages. All of these give the appearance of complexity emerging from simplicity. But this is not necessarily how complexity works.
This piece proposes that complexity thinking is not just a methodology. It’s a moral and epistemic stance. It begins with the unsettling truth that we are not neutral observers of a system, but implicated participants. It asks us to let go of managerial comfort, inherited roles, and stakeholder entitlements and to dwell in ambiguity as a source of real possibility.
There is a great deal of talk these days about systems thinking. Whole libraries are dedicated to it, workshops branded in its name, consultants selling it as the next evolution in leadership or strategy. It is, at first glance, an attractive proposition. After all, who wouldn’t want to […]
Climate models offer valuable scenarios, but they are still bounded by known variables and assumptions. When these scenarios are treated as definitive futures rather than possibilities, adaptation strategies risk becoming rigid and obsolete as new emergent conditions unfold. This fosters a tendency toward reactive planning, where strategies prepare for specific anticipated futures rather than a range of possible, unknowable futures.
.ROADMENDER 