The Danger of Defining the World Through Industrialized Approaches
Recently, I wrote an article on the concept of frameworks. On the surface this may seem like an obscure topic, or something you would find in the Academic Journal of Myopic Subjects Meant Only for Those Who Care. The reason I wrote that article was three-fold: frameworks are multiplying like rabbits in our world of increasingly uncertain territories, this uncertainty allows for the proliferation of manifestos to disguise themselves as frameworks, and it’s easy to fall into the trap of building frameworks that mollify those who want to return to what they consider to be “normality.” However, one of the most important ideas in the article was the necessity of avoiding the use of reductive frameworks that sterilize, devolve and disempower our world of complex and transformative beauty. Specifically, using frameworks that divide our world and experiences into siloed categories or operating conditions — “These processes are straightforward”; “These operations have become convoluted”; “We are working in a manifold environment”; “We have entered an anarchic situation” — only makes sense in industrialized, centralized and non-natural systems, and leaves us fighting against the adoption of much more natural, systemic and dynamic ways of thinking or acting.
Presently, our organizations, institutions and societies are learning this the hard way, trying desperately to solidify what they believe to be straightforward operations and conditions, but all the while actually fighting against needed change and shifts that are attempting to pull us into the future. (Hint: “straightforward” never really existed, it’s just humanity’s attempt to have top-down control over a situation instead of co-creating with more dynamic path forward.) It’s easy to think that we’ve simply shifted from straightforward to convoluted, manifold or anarchic conditions in our systems, and managerial science has dictated that we must take different actions in the present to stabilize or “make sense” of our situation as defined by the rules set in a previous era. This is what some might refer to as “putting new wine into old wineskins.” This siloed reductionism betrays the evolutionary cooperative mindset needed to live in a world birthed upon beautiful complexity. Any boxed categorization of our world fails us, because it promotes the idea that we can control our environment through mechanical rules rather than collectively growing alongside evolutionary ecosystems.
Ask any organization today if the once sacred playbook that they could depend upon like clockwork for just about any situation of condition is as simple or effective as it once seemed to be. “Straightforward” conditions only means that we have gotten away with applying the same operations for a period of time before our processes completely collapse in the face of maturing complexity. “Convoluted” is something we do to ourselves to fight against the natural change prompted by complexity. “Anarchic” means that we don’t understand (or refuse to recognize) the emergence and novelty being presented by complex systems (i.e. natural growth), refuse to change, and have moved well past convoluted conditions that we felt provided us any bulwark against change. “Manifold” is the natural order of the universe, a canvas of complexity on which we can co-create — with all of life — a beautiful masterpiece of ever-unfolding opportunities, capabilities, and next-order realities. Yes, complexity has become a buzzword organizations use to describe conditions that they want to overcome, master and simplify, but in reality it is a way of thinking, acting and living that centers a matrix of creativity. Building boxed-rule frameworks belies our need to adopt this dynamic mindset for every condition we find ourselves in. As a foresight professional, it is my hope that organizations, governments and societies will understand this matrix of “complexity thinking” so that we can recognize emergence, novelty, change, transformation and creativity, and lead humanity into futures of cooperative vitality.
