👋 Hello friends,

Thank you for joining this week's edition of Brainwaves. I'm Drew Jackson, and today we're exploring:

Complex, Interconnected, Interdependent Systems That Form Our World

Key Question: How do the systems that form our world fundamentally work?

Thesis: By curating an in-depth understanding of the basics of our world, we can build a new foundation for how we think about the world—given its inherent complexities, connections, and dependencies.

Credit Discover Magazine

Before we begin: Brainwaves arrives in your inbox every other Wednesday, exploring venture capital, economics, space, energy, intellectual property, philosophy, and beyond. I write as a curious explorer rather than an expert, and I value your insights and perspectives on each subject.

Time to Read: 36 minutes.

Let’s dive in!

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“If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow: and without trees, we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist. If the cloud is not here, the sheet of paper cannot be here either."

- Thich Nhat Hanh, Vietnamese monk and peace activist

The future actively shapes our lives. Historically, the way humans have thought about and approached the future has been flawed. Futures Thinking is a modern approach to the future, rethinking how humans think about and approach the future.

Rather than trying to predict specific future events, Futures Thinking encourages a shift in how we conceptualize the future itself—drawing on diverse cultural perspectives, foundational world characteristics, deep modern literature reviews, and recognizing that our present actions and narratives significantly influence future outcomes. Since most major life decisions are essentially bets on the future, adopting this framework could transform how we approach education, careers, relationships, and other essential aspects of life.

Today, our discussion revolves around how our world is set up and how these underlying characteristics shape everything that goes on in the world, specifically focusing on Futures Thinking Tenet #1: The future is shaped by interdependent systems rather than isolated factors.

Credit Westin Store

HOW TO TEACH YOUR KIDS ABOUT THE WORLD - A CONCISE EXPLANATION OF THE DIVISION OF LABOR - REMINISCING ON GORGEOUS WEATHER ANOMALIES

This semester in school I’ve been taking a class that emphasizes mindfulness, thoughtfulness, proactively embracing silence, dissecting the positives of introversion, and learning more about what it means to “just be”.

In doing so, and throughout my past experiences in this realm, I was reminded of a Secular Buddhism Podcast discussing the properties of our world, specifically how Noah, the podcast host, has been teaching his children about the world.

As of releasing this podcast, he had a six-year-old, a three-year-old, and a four-month-old. Of the many topics he discusses in the episode, including meditation, awareness, impermanence, perspective, and more, I want to highlight his example of interdependence.

Similarly, every business student and a good portion of college students will have read or heard about Adam Smith’s writings on the division of labor in 1776.

Credit Adam Smith Works

Smith explains his idea through the allegory of the pin-maker. By himself, the pin-maker could only make one pin a day.

By dividing the labor into several branches, Smith writes, you can vastly increase efficiency as workers can specialize in their particular jobs. And with the implementation of technology, this process can become vastly efficient.

One man draws out the wire, another straights it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head; to make the head requires three distinct operations; to put it on is a peculiar business, to whiten the pins is another; it is even a trade by itself to put them into the paper.

As Smith puts it, this division of labor process for a simple pin involves around 18 different people, producing up to 48,000 pins in a day (averages to 4,800 pins per person).

All this for a simple pin.

From a more philosophical lens, a book I was reading for my class, Looking at Mindfulness: Twenty-Five Paintings to Change the Way You Live, by Christophe Andre, discussed the property of emptiness in Buddhism.

Emptiness is the second of these great Buddhist concepts, and perhaps gives rise to the greatest number of misunderstandings. The "emptiness of everything" does not mean that nothing really exists. It simply means that what we see has no concrete solid existence. We can use a rainbow to illustrate this idea. The rainbow's existence depends on my position, that of the sun, and the assistance of passing clouds. It exists for me, but not for other human beings in different places.

Everyone has seen a rainbow.

I’ve been special enough to see a few double rainbows and even a triple rainbow once.

As a kid, you hear the tale of the Leprechaun waiting at the end of the rainbow with a pot of gold. I can’t tell you how many times I tried to convince my parents to chase after a rainbow to find the treasure.

Yet, even something as simple as a rainbow, a pillow, or a pin can teach us a valuable lesson about the world.

Our world is a series of interconnected, interdependent systems.

EARTH AS A PALE BLUE DOT - PUSHING THE BOUNDARIES OF HUMAN KNOWLEDGE - MOVING AWAY FROM ISOLATIONISM

Many of you will have heard of Carl Sagan’s novel Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, based on the famous photograph of the Earth (pictured above - Earth is almost in the very center) taken February 14th, 1990 by NASA’s Voyager 1 probe (at around 3.7B miles from the Sun).

In his book, Sagan writes, “Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us.”

In writing my recent series of Space Commercialization articles, I found that many of the astronauts’ thoughts, once returning from landing on the Moon or being in orbit, echoed Carl’s thoughts.

Harrison Schmitt, the most recent living person to have walked on the moon, stated, “We were looking at things that human beings had never seen before or if they’d seen them, they weren’t thinking about them in terms of understanding our earth, and our solar system, and indeed the universe.”

And notably:

Alan Shepard, the first American to travel in space, wrote “I realized up there that our planet is not infinite. It’s fragile. That may not be obvious to a lot of folks, and it’s tough that people are fighting each other here on Earth instead of trying to get together and live on this planet. We look pretty vulnerable in the darkness of space.”

Zooming out this far, the universal perspective of Earth is simple—all we are is just one pale blue dot in the grand scheme of things.

However, when you begin to zoom in, even just to a continent or a country level, the complexities of Earth begin to emerge. Billions of thoughts and actions are happening every second. Airplanes rule the sky, dropping people off at remote destinations. Humongous container ships churn through the water, bringing the demands of constant commerce to import-heavy countries.

Back in the 1970s, scientists and astronomers alike were interested in capturing data from Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. What followed was one of the most ambitious, complex, and ultimately successful space exploration missions in human history.

The Voyager program was initiated by NASA in 1977, exemplifying a profound system of interconnected technological, scientific, and human elements. Far from being a simple mission, it represented a complex adaptive network where each component relied critically on others for survival and success.

Decision-making was spread across the globe, with teams contributing specialized knowledge critical to production, manufacturing, coding, photography, aerodynamics, and more. Given this mission was the first of its kind, continuous adaptation was required to meet unexpected challenges, driven by flexible, responsive management—guiding the project over the following decades.

To note, the Voyager probes are not just machines exploring space, but living examples of how complex interdependent systems can achieve seemingly impossible goals through collaborative adaptation.

Returning to the present and the struggles and experiences humans have now, zooming further in on our world to shine the spotlight just on yourself, the world can start to seem simple again—you go to work, you go home, you sleep, you shop, you eat, generally you’re doing only a couple things at a time.

Yet even on the individual level, the world’s interconnectedness and complexities still shine. Referring back to Noah’s example of the pillow above, almost all of the objects you interact with will be derived from the globalized, complex world of commerce.

Your beliefs may be driven by religions that have traveled across cities, countries, and even continents over thousands of years, developing a layer of complexity and depth that some are incredibly drawn to.

Even you are a complex system of interconnected trillions of cells, microorganisms, bacteria, blood vessels, etc. The network of atoms, molecules, and biological factors is curated in such a way that when you have the thought to move your arm upward, your arm subsequently moves upward.

Before the Voyager program and the world being known as a “Pale Blue Dot”, before humans walked on the Earth, and even before the age of the dinosaurs, the foundations of modern-day Earth were formed—specifically the beginnings of the complex, interdependent system that makes up the world today.

Credit Discovering Beauty Everywhere

OFTEN OVERLOOKED LESSONS FROM MOTHER NATURE - HUMAN TENDENCIES MIRRORING NATURAL PHENOMENON - INTRODUCTION TO FRAGILITY AND CASCADING EFFECTS

Looking back on my elementary and junior high experiences, I think I undervalued my science education. Granted, nothing beats the iconic Bill Nye intro jingle, but besides that, I didn’t fully appreciate what was in front of me.

I can’t tell you how many National Geographic documentaries I’ve glazed over.

Although many of the documentaries end in some tragic way (the lizard gets eaten by the snake), a large portion of the documentaries highlight symbiosis.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the concept, it denotes interactions of two different organisms (two different species) that live near each other and can have a mutualistic, communalistic, or parasitic relationship.

Mutualistic relationships are one of the most common relationships in nature and what modern capitalistic sales processes, bartering, and exchange are based on—the premise: each party benefits.

As witnessed in Finding Nemo, Clownfish often form a mutualistic relationship with nearby Anemones. The United Kingdom Natural History Museum describes it as the following:

Credit Treehugger

Commensalistic relationships are when only one of the organisms benefits from the other without harming it.

The Remora (pictured above), often called the suckerfish or a sharksucker, can form commensal relationships with local sharks, where the Remora fish use the disk on their heads to attach to the larger animals. When the larger animal feeds, the Remora detaches itself to eat the extra food.

Even humans can form symbiotic relationships. Bruce Wilson in Psychology Today discusses this possibility:

Many of you will have seen that couple in high school that was a bit too “symbiotic.” However, there are healthy versions of this in real life. Most people probably want their marriages to be symbiotic, even roommates could experience these characteristics.

I like the quote Bruce uses from William Irwin Thompson, “A World is not an ideology nor a scientific institution, nor is it a system of ideologies; rather, it is a structure of unconscious relations and symbiotic processes.”

Besides symbiotic relationships, Mother Nature can teach us way more about the interconnected, complex factors this world is built on.

Jenny Odell, in How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, writes:

This echoes the conservationist Aldo Leopold’s observation that “you cannot love game and hate predators; you cannot conserve waters and waste the ranges; you cannot build the forest and mine the farm. The land is one organism.” Even if you cared only about human survival, you’d still have to acknowledge that this survival is beholden not to efficient exploitation but to the maintenance of a delicate web of relationships.

Nature’s interconnectedness is one of its most fascinating aspects. Every ecosystem represents a complex web of relationships where each organism affects countless others.

At the foundation of these connections are energy flows and nutrient cycles. Plants capture solar energy through photosynthesis, transforming it into forms that fuel virtually all life. As organisms consume one another, this energy transfers through food webs.

Alongside energy flows, nutrient cycles move essential elements like carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus through living and non-living components of ecosystems. Decomposers, such as worms, play a crucial role in breaking down organic matter and returning nutrients to soil or water where they become available again to primary producers.

These connections create feedback loops that help regulate systems. For example, the predator-prey relationship prevents any single species from dominating (from being the “king of the jungle”). In a more tame way, plants regulate atmospheric composition through photosynthesis and respiration, while microbial communities in soil determine nutrient availability and plant health.

In his book referenced above, Carl Sagan describes the evolution of life here on Earth, highlighting the interconnectedness of all living organisms (similar to what we’ve discussed above in this section).

Later, he emphasizes the fragility of our planet and the urgent need for environmental conservation, warning against the potential catastrophic consequences of human-induced climate change.

The complexity of nature becomes even more apparent when we consider that these systems operate across multiple scales simultaneously, from microscopic soil interactions to global climate patterns. Disruptions at one level can cascade unpredictably through others, which is why environmental changes often have unexpected consequences (more on this in the discussion of Tenet #2).

Remarkably, these intricate systems weren’t explicitly designed—they emerged through evolutionary processes over billions of years, with each species adapting to fill specific niches and forming relationships with others through natural selection.

Credit Carl Alexander

A TREND TOWARD RAPID COMPLEXITY - BRAND’S SIMPLE YET EFFECTIVE THEORY - INTERPLAY OF SLOW AND FAST CYCLES

The complexity of interdependent systems has exponentially grown over time. I asked Claude to estimate the level of world complexity from year 0 to year 2020. It produced the data below:

As you can see, the world majorly remained around the same level of complexity and interdependence over time, then began growing exponentially as key events took place. A summary of the individual events and data points is below:

Starting even before 0 AD in prehistoric times, society majorly progressed when a few key events took place. For instance, in early hunter-gatherer societies, humans had complex ecological knowledge, social structures, and sophisticated tool-making traditions. However, they had a relatively limited scale of human systems compared to more modern societies.

From there, the introduction of deliberate cultivation and animal domestication progressed society’s complexity, as hunter-gatherers began to form permanent settlements, developed specialized roles (forefathers of Adam Smith), and began early trade networks.

Early civilizations (between 3000 - 500 BCE) began to experience multi-layered governance structures, engineering, and architecture (pyramids), the beginning of writing systems and mathematics, longer-distance trade networks, and the development of urban centers.

From there, the development of sophisticated philosophical and scientific traditions continued, humans began to develop complex legal and administrative systems, intercontinental trade was initiated, and advances in technological innovations dramatically increased the complexity of the world.

From the beginning of the Industrial Revolution (the 1800s) to now, the world’s complexity has hit the exponential “J-curve”, with each development coming quicker than the last (more on this in Tenet #3).

Packy McCormick over at Not Boring recently discussed this phenomenon through Stewart Brand’s Pace Layers, describing “how complex systems learn and keep learning,” pictured in the graphic below:

Credit Not Boring

The concept of Pace Layers is quite simple, yet the ramifications and extrapolations extend into the outer depths of our world’s organization.

Steward Brand frames Pace Layers as the following:

Consider the differently paced components [in a system] to be layers. Each layer is functionally different from the others and operates somewhat independently, but each layer influences and responds to the layers closest to it in a way that makes the whole system resilient.

That probably doesn’t make any bit of sense. Here’s an example Brand uses:

Take a coniferous forest. The hierarchy in the scale of pine needle, tree crown, patch, stand, whole forest, and biome is also a time hierarchy. The needle changes within a year, the crown over several years, the patch over many decades, the stand over a couple of centuries, the forest over a thousand years, and the biome over ten thousand years. The range of what the needle may do is constrained by the crown, which is constrained by the patch and stand, which are controlled by the forest, which is controlled by the biome. Nevertheless, innovation percolates throughout the system via evolutionary competition among lineages of individual trees dealing with the stresses of crowding, parasites, predation, and weather. Occasionally, large shocks such as fire, disease, or human predation can suddenly upset the whole system, sometimes all the way down to the biome level.

Similar to the discussion above of symbiotes and natural ecology, Brand also chooses to showcase his ideas through examples from the natural world (what he considers the base Pace Layer).

To formalize his theory, Brand proposes the following significant levels of pace in the working structure of a robust and adaptable civilization, denoted from fast to slow: fashion/art, commerce, infrastructure, governance, culture, nature (i.e. infrastructure moves faster than governance which moves faster than culture, etc.). See the picture above for the visualization of these Pace Layers.

Some parts of the system move fast, some move slow, and some barely creep along—and that’s good.

Fashion, in 2025 characterized by the new-age term “fast fashion”, moves on the scale of months, weeks, days, or even hours. Nature, on the other hand, moves the most slowly, on the timeline of millennia, if not millions of years.

Each outer layer moves a little faster than the one below it, held in check by the one below it. In addition, each layer is sped up by the one above it, forming a complex interplay between layers.

Brand writes:

As Packy writes, “The beauty of pace layers is that they can describe so many systems – from buildings to forests to technology to civilizations… The core concept – that things have different layers which move at different paces – scales up and down beautifully.”

The reason why I’m calling out Pace Layers here, instead of any other complex system organization methodology, is that I think it’s a very simple way to describe the true complexities of how our vast world is set up and how, throughout history, people, systems, and the world as a whole has changed and adapted to these complexities.

In my handwritten notes while I was going through each article, I wrote, “The idea that drops out of all of this: each layer is independent, yet interdependent on other layers. If one fails, the entire system suffers.”

That’s the beauty of Pace Layers.

If one layer, one part of our society is going to speed up, then other layers/parts will need to slow down to keep the balance.

Relating to the discussion above, Pace Layers help describe how our systems have continued to increase in complexity and interdependence over time—or in Pace Layer language, “how complex systems learn and keep learning.”

Bringing us into the 21st century (characterized by rapid, daily increases in complexity), I believe the following quote from the book, Looking at Mindfulness: Twenty-Five Paintings to Change the Way You Live, by Christophe Andre, characterizes our present state of affairs quite well:

These times of ours can be criticized for many things, but we must acknowledge that they have one great quality: they are exciting and astoundingly rich—full of change, speed, and interconnections that provide us with pleasures and possibilities that were never available to the generations that preceded us.

Credit Four Paws

THE MORAL OF THE STORY - A STRONG FOUNDATION SURVIVES ALL WEATHER - THE MEAT AND POTATOES PER SE

As a child, I remember flipping through the picturebook my family had of The Three Little Pigs. The story provides a helpful allegory for our discussion today. For those of you who haven’t had the pleasure of reading/listening to the story recently, here we go:

I feel like the story I read as a kid didn’t end with the little pigs boiling him and eating him for supper—maybe my parents didn’t want to include that for obvious reasons, but that’s beside the point.

Many morals or lessons can come from this story, such as preparedness, the importance of hard work, intelligence, and the one I want to highlight today: building a strong foundation.

Futures Thinking Tenet #1: The future is shaped by interdependent systems rather than isolated factors.

These interdependent, interconnected, complex systems have many deeper characteristics, which together form the world we live in today, the world that exists in memories and history books, and the world that we’ll live in tomorrow.

Understanding the foundational characteristics of the world we live in forms the basis for all of our future discussions, as each of these underlying factors subtly or overtly drives macro changes across the world—for good and for bad.

I’ve identified 10 core characteristics of interdependent, interconnected, complex systems:

1. Non-Linear Causality
2. Emergence
3. Decentralized Control
4. Feedback Loops
5. Adaptation & Evolution
6. Nested Hierarchies
7. Path Dependence
8. Resilience & Fragility
9. Tipping Points
10. Incomplete Information Flow

Fundamentally, these are the core characteristics that make up the individual systems we interact with daily and form the overall world system (as a whole—a system of individual systems).

These characteristics have been present in each example we’ve discussed thus far: pillows, symbiotes, Voyager probes, and even Pace Layers.

This nuanced complexity is difficult to understand without diving into each topic in depth. An introductory overview of each topic is below, with additional commentary on where I expect to cover each characteristic more in-depth in the future.

1) Non-Linear Causality: A discussion of the world’s cause-and-effect relationships and their unpredictability along with the discussion of network effects, to be covered in Tenet #2 and #3.

2) Emergence: A discussion of the properties and behaviors of our world, specifically that they cannot be predicted or understood by examining individual components alone, to be covered in Tenet #5.

3) Decentralized Control: A discussion of self-organization, the decentralization of control within a system, and these effects on system patterns, structures, influence, and overall agency, to be covered in Tenet #2.

4) Feedback Loops: A discussion on system-wide feedback mechanisms and the cascading effects within a system, to be covered in Tenet #2 and #12.

5) Adaptation & Evolution: A discussion on learnings, evolutions, and adaptations within a complex system over time, covered in this article and to be covered in Tenet #6.

6) Nested Hierarchies: A discussion of the different levels of organization within the larger system, specifically how complex systems are full of smaller systems embedded within larger ones, covered in this article and to be covered in Tenet #2.

7) Path Dependence: A discussion of the past, present, and future, specifically how the history and previous states of the system influence future possibilities and paths, to be covered in Tenet #11 and #12.

8) Resilience & Fragility: A discussion of the resilience of complex systems to certain types of disruptions and the diversity in systems, to be covered in Tenet #7 and #9.

9) Tipping Points: A discussion of the critical thresholds where systems rapidly transition to different states, to be discussed in Tenet #3 and #10

10) Incomplete Information Flow: A discussion of the incomplete information present in the system, to be discussed in Tenet #4 and #5.

These 10 core characteristics form the world we live in today. Without acknowledging them and integrating them into our viewpoints, our mindsets, and our perspectives on the past, present, and future, we are missing fundamental properties of the world—leading to inaccurate or inefficient outcomes.

Credit The Conversation

THE UNDERAPPRECIATED ART OF NAVIGATION - PROACTIVELY ADDRESSING YOUR THOUGHTS - RESERVATIONS & LIMITATIONS OF MY METHODOLOGY

Millions of years ago, early “humans” and human concentrations began in Africa. Yet, in 2025, humans manage to cover almost every single corner of the Earth possible.

How did this happen?

I recently rewatched Moana 1, mostly for HeiHei, and I was reminded of the way early travelers used to navigate by the stars and subsequently spiraled into the realm of historical navigation.

Diving in, navigation is the process of deriving the shortest actionable route from one point to another.

In the very beginning, early travelers used fixed geographical objects like rivers, mountain ranges, big rocks, abnormal trees, and much more as landmarks to establish their current position.

To remember and transfer the knowledge of these points, people created maps: visual displays of the terrains on a two-dimensional plane, like a clay or wooden tablet, leather scraps, and eventually on parchment.

Ancient people had no idea how to properly keep track of time since there was no well-established understanding that time could be counted in interviews. This led to the invention and mass-popularization of sundials.

These technological advancements enabled lengthy land-based travel, the foundation of major continental exploration and colonization.

However, sea-based travel was much more difficult as maps, landmarks, and sundials didn’t work (sundials only worked during the day). Enter celestial navigation.

Celestial navigation, as you’ve probably seen, is the practice of using stars and other celestial bodies to determine your physical position accurately. In Moana, this is when she is holding her hand up to measure the difference between a celestial body (the Sun, the Moon, a planet, or a star) and the visible horizon (reference the picture above).

Some of the earliest maritime migrations, completed between 3000 and 1000 BC, were performed using star navigation (but also through the observation of birds and the use of waves and swells to detect nearby land).

Technology advances (for land and sea) continued to improve over the following millennium. Entering the early 1900s, people had sextants, radios (wireless telegraphs), and chronometers. From there, later developments included the placing of lighthouses and buoys close to shore to act as marine signposts, the first prototype radar system, and the first electronic air navigation system, which culminated in 1957 with the launch of Sputnik.

With Sputnik (and subsequent satellite launches), governments developed GPS (Global Positioning System), which provided incredibly accurate navigation all across the globe.

Besides being incredibly integral in our modern lives (Google Maps, Pokemon Go, Uber, Doordash, etc.), the history and development of navigation provides a close parallel to the world in general.

Navigation techniques have become more sophisticated, interconnected (think satellites), and complex over time—exponentially so.

As you’ve seen in all of my rambling above, the world is incredibly complex, full of integrated components that combine to form the environment we interact with every day.

Navigation has been a part of human history from almost the very beginning and seems like it will only increase in complexity and necessity in the years to come.

Similarly, understanding how the world works today and throughout history can help us navigate in the future. Our foundation of base knowledge and understanding of the world will be complemented as we discover new insights, new technologies, and new ways of directing ourselves in the future.

This core concept of Futures Thinking, Tenet #1, is all about building the foundation for what is to come—specifically, more in-depth discussion about the complexities of society, parameters for change, and analyses of human interactions with these factors.

However, this discussion isn’t without its challenges. You shouldn’t take everything in the above as a purely factual analysis of our world and how it works—test it, understand it, sit with it—only then will the truth appear.

Below, I’ll address the following 6 issues that you may be having with the above discussion, and their potential mitigations or lack thereof:

1. It’s All Super Complicated
2. Natural & Reinforced Preference Towards Simplicity
3. Limitations of Reductionist Thinking
4. Invisibility of Connections
5. Simultaneously An Extremely Broad, Yet Narrow Perspective
6. Lack of Clear Practical Applications

1) It’s all super complicated.

I get that. It’s still very complicated for me, and I’ve spent a month writing this article, I’ve consumed dozens of high-profile articles, read a couple of books, and still don’t fully grasp every facet of the above discussion.

Luckily there are a couple of ways it gets easier, and hopefully less complicated. The first way is to refer back to this article in the future—reread it, digest it, and take time to carefully annotate it. The first read-through doesn’t always fully encapsulate the entirety of the topic.

Additionally, throughout most (if not all) of the upcoming articles for the Futures Thinking series, I’ll continually be referring back to concepts portrayed here—elaborating and deepening the thought processes while interlayering them with other, more advanced topics (those 2-5+ layers deep).

2) Natural & Reinforced Preference Towards Simplicity

The human brain naturally prefers simplicity. It doesn’t take as much energy and it’s much easier to comprehend simple things compared to incredibly complex things. We prefer linear relationships to exponential relationships, picture books to chapter books, reading stories to reading the dictionary, etc.

Holding multiple interconnected variables and thoughts in our minds simultaneously is mentally taxing, making it difficult to truly grasp the full complexity of interdependent systems.

This preference for simplicity has perforated into our education and media environments.

In our education systems, particularly in Western countries, we tend to separate knowledge into distinct subjects rather than teaching interconnections. This reinforces the misconception that knowledge exists in discrete, unrelated domains.

In the media, as most stories are presented as isolated events, this reinforces the tendency to see events as discrete rather than part of larger interconnected systems.

Furthermore, deep down, there’s often a psychological resistance to embracing complexity, as simpler explanations for events and happenings feel more comfortable and manageable. Accepting the complexities of our actions and systems can be unsettling to the core.

3) Limitations of Reductionist Thinking

Reductionist thinking is when complex systems are broken down into their most basic components to understand them (as we’ve done a bit in this article). This approach means you often focus on individual parts rather than the whole, missing many of the emergent properties.

Society often encourages reductionist thinking, however, this makes it challenging to shift to a systems-thinking mindset where relationships between components are as important as the components themselves.

The opposite of reductionism is holism, which emphasizes the importance of understanding systems as a whole, recognizing that the interactions between parts can create emergent properties that are not simply the sum of the individual parts.

In viewing the world, we should, if possible, simultaneously view it through reductionist and holistic viewpoints, that way we can see the minute factors and the global trends together.

4) Invisibility of Connections

As you’ve probably seen through the examples I’ve presented in the article, it’s often difficult to naturally see the true complexity and interconnectedness of the world. For instance, in the example of the pillow, how often do you think about some of those further steps that enabled that pillow to be there (growing the material for the threads, supply chains, etc.)?

Most of us aren’t programmed to see the world this way.

Almost all of the connections in the world probably go unnoticed, as it takes deliberate, careful reflection to notice and acknowledge these inner workings of the world.

In day-to-day life, it’s especially easy to take a naive view, missing the invisible connections all around us. So, when they get called out in an article like this, these connections and tendencies can seem foreign as we’re not used to looking this carefully at the world’s layers.

5) Simultaneously An Extremely Broad, Yet Narrow Perspective

As I touched on in the discussion of space above, the sheer scale of global interdependent systems makes them difficult to comprehend.

From the microscopic level (our bodies are composed of trillions of cells) to the global (climate change and other climate patterns) to beyond our world into the solar system and beyond, these vastly different scales operate simultaneously, making it hard to visualize the full picture.

Building on this—and not making it any easier to understand—besides what’s happening right here, right now, there is also a temporal dimension to this complexity.

Nicholas Teleb writes in The Black Swan,

A complex domain is characterized by the following: there is a great degree of interdependence between its elements, both temporal (a variable depends on its past changes), horizontal (variables depend on one another), and diagonal (variable A depends on the past history of variable B).

Especially when it comes to the discussion of Pace Layers, thinking across different timescales simultaneously can be difficult. Granted, this series is called “Futures Thinking” so this temporal dimension is built in from the start and only gets more difficult from here—get your time master caps on.

In the complex system that is our world, some elements move quickly while others move extremely slowly, making it difficult to perceive their interconnections without a broad temporal perspective.

A Note on Mitigation Strategies: In brainstorming potential mitigation strategies for the above challenges (2 through 5), a common theme emerged that I want to take a second to address. It’s not a perfect strategy by any means, but a clear way I see to help prevent and proactively address the above challenges (and any more you may have going forward) is a simple two-pronged approach.

For many of you, this will be the first time you’ve deeply read or thought about the world like this—it isn’t a common narrative taught in schools. As such, you’re going to be a novice going into the topic. Acknowledge that, appreciate that, but understand what that means for you. To not be a novice at something requires practice/repetitions. Here, that means practicing, thinking, dissecting, analyzing, and understanding through this lens.

With practice, you’ll start to see these elements clearly in your own life. Similarly, the second prong to this approach is just this: being more aware of the things in your life and being more intentional about the world around you. What invisible connections are you missing? Where might you be choosing simplicity when complexity is what’s needed?

For better or worse, we weren’t programmed to think about or see the world this way. That’s the basis for the entirety of the Futures Thinking series: rethinking how we think. It takes some time to undo this conditioning, so we might as well start now.

6) Lack of Clear Practical Applications

What is the “so what” of all of this?

That’s the question I’ve been contemplating for the last month. Should I add a nice bow to the end of this article so everyone feels like they have achieved the entire story arc? Or does this topic not have an easy end, instead finalizing with a trickle into the next big body of water, a never-ending flow?

It’s easy to want a nice end. It would make it much easier to go into your day saying here’s the quick summary of this article, what it means for me, and here’s how I can apply it to my life.

However, I don’t think this article needs a polished ending. In fact, I think it’s just the beginning. Similar to our discussion of the Three Little Pigs, this topic is the foundation for many articles to come—in actuality, this article should be a two-part call to action:

1) Now that you’re at the “end” of the article (the words run out but the topic goes on forever), go back through and reread it from the beginning, adding the first layer of depth to the way you are thinking about the future—personally, I wouldn’t be surprised if this is the article I go back through and read the most this year; and 2) Keep following the Futures Thinking series as we continue to elaborate on the complexities of our world, our brains, and form a new basis for future thoughts.

In writing this article, and especially dwelling on the potential challenges section, I realized, as most do eventually in their lives, that I can’t do it all—there’s no way for me to write every last thing on how our world is set up and how the complexity, interconnectedness, and interdependence influence every single dimension of our lives.

As such, there are still many key areas that deserve to be highlighted, either by myself in future work or by others who choose to build on my discussion today.

Some areas for further study and analysis include:

• Expanding the Western-Centric Perspective - This article’s examples and foundation primarily draw on Western thought, with a limited inclusion of non-Western perspectives.
• Advancing Potential Practical Applications - The goal of this article isn’t to provide instant practical applications, however, that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a practical application for the topics discussed—in quick thinking: systems organization, political processes, discussions of societal organization and hierarchical structures, etc.
• Deepening of Historical Context - This article provides, in my opinion, adequate historical context for the delivery of key ideas, mainly relying on the current experiences of people in their daily lives to pave the way for learning, however, expanding the historical footprint would broaden the concrete basis and could help readers relate further to the ideas enclosed.
• Ethical Dimensions - This article does not touch on any main ethical implications of interdependent systems and how those may or may not be underlying many of the problems and solutions we currently see posed in the world.
• Power Dynamics - This article does not touch on any power structures and how they influence and are influenced by complex systems—specifically discussing how marginalized perspectives and issues are addressed and incorporated into this framework—making sure those with power don’t drive the entirety of the system’s underlying characteristics.
• Psychological Barriers and Depth - This article briefly discusses a handful of the major psychological barriers to systems thinking, however, a much more in-depth article could dive into the different biases that affect our ability to see the world’s complexities and easily understand them—bringing key physiological information into the discussion, which I am not an expert in.
• Using the Lens of Systems Thinking in Other Domains - This article doesn’t touch on the applications of systems thinking in any domain. For instance, how would systems thinking transform approaches to global crises like pandemics or climate change? Further domain-specific analysis and applications could broaden the topic and provide more practical applications for those within those domains.
• Methodologies for Measuring Complexity - This has been a qualitatively dominant article, with very few numbers or equations or the like. A way to analyze and measure the complexity of a system (or system of systems) could provide valuable insights as systems continue to grow and develop around the Universe, helping provide some tangibility to the concepts discussed here.

Congrats, we’ve made it through Tenet #1. Hope you enjoyed it. Please give me any feedback you have—happy to clarify or elaborate further on anything discussed.

In future articles, we’re going to dive deeper into the ramifications of these complex, interconnected systems, starting with Tenet #2:

In complex systems, small changes can cascade into disproportionate and often unforeseeable outcomes.

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That’s all for today. I’ll be back in your inbox on Saturday with The Saturday Morning Newsletter.

Thanks for reading,

Drew Jackson

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