Ok crash course in complexity thinking. There are some major drivers of complexity, they are: Scale - the more connected agents and systems, the greater complexity becomes. Information passing between agents increases the system wide connections. Interdependence - if one agent, or system changes, it affects many other agents in the system. We’re now in a world where a Trump tweet can change millions of lives. Not only are we interdependent we’re hyper interdependent. Our global system is centralised around hyper agents that can instantaneously change the whole system in seconds. Diversity - the more different each agent or system is, the greater the complexity. Diversity is actually a strength because complexity isn’t always bad, but it means you get the outcomes of complexity more obviously. High interaction variety is perhaps the biggest driver of complexity. Incongruent systems create conflict and unforeseen events. Dynamics - speed of change. The greater the pace of change in the system the more rapidly complexity manifests. Everything is changing fast. And this is not just the new normal it is ACCELERATING. Opacity - the more one area of the complex system changes and the rest of the connected systems don’t see it, the more likely you are operating under radical uncertainty. Eventually information is revealed and massively disruptive outcomes happen at scale because the change happening was shielded from the wider system. We have seen a massive unprecedented ramp in all of these drivers in an incredibly short space of time. This means we get non-linearity, far from equilibrium dynamics, which means unpredictability, black swans, overnight changes, unforeseen events again and again. In complex systems we get radical emergence, sometimes good sometimes very bad, but whatever it is you don’t see it coming. This is why every system which is still operating on a governance paradigm created before the radical complexity ramp is collapsing. We simply don’t have the ability to operate under uncertainty at this scale. So every decision is bad. This is why governance everywhere needs to be upgraded and quick.