We keep saying the world is becoming more complex, more uncertain, more volatile. But is it? Or are we the ones stuck in ever more complicated systems, pursuing an abstract ideal of certainty and order?
When we put on a pair of sunglasses, the world does not objectively become darker. But if we all wore the same lenses – to the point of forgetting they were there – would we still be able to distinguish perception from reality? Could we still recognize ourselves in the stories of those who see the world with the naked eye?
Our lived environment is an ecosystem – it always has been. Life is complex, uncertain, volatile, intense. Yet part of us has been able to create providential bubbles of happiness by building ever more solid certainties: a cave, a hut, a stone house. An 828-metre, 163-storey skyscraper in the middle of the desert. We became so skilled at forging, bending, and managing matter that we started to believe we could forge, bend, and manage life itself as if it were matter.
We dream of linear megacities in the desert, worlds of virtual reality and life-less intelligences, while feeling a mix of awe and dread when a living system on a planetary scale begins to recognize us as a foreign element and reacts with an inflammatory response. In my view, this is the real reason we must realign cultural and technological processes with the complexity at the root of living systems. Not because we are living through a more volatile and unpredictable period, but because we have lost touch with the intimate nature of the system we inhabit. Not to manage and exploit an ever more complicated world (not complex), but to restore a genuine alliance with life – which otherwise will reorganize itself without us.
To build that alliance, we need to remove these lenses, even if we are tempted to put on even stronger ones. We will take them off gradually, so as not to be blinded – but we will take them off.
Even if the “new” reality we rediscover tends to confuse us: that is the price to pay. Moments of confusion during a major transition or a crisis are not only legitimate, but necessary. They signal that we are moving into a new phase, that the categories we are used to are no longer enough.
Anyone familiar with the Cynefin framework knows that confusion is an inevitable transitional domain and a key moment for generating grounded, organic innovation. Nor should this condition frighten us: it is already part of the cultural toolkit of many humanities disciplines and professions that work with complex systems and are used to turning uncertainty and confusion into shared value – from architecture to design, from philosophy to art.
Uncertainty, then, is something we can pass through – and we know how to do it.
For example, an effective – if counter-intuitive – strategy is to listen more, collect more lived experience (and less data), and multiply vantage points. By activating listening networks and distributed sense-making, we can build a map of the real conditions shaping our context and locate ourselves within it. And by scanning near- and long-term horizons, we can identify possible directions of development.
In large organizations, we can start by creating internal spaces for constructive debate and processes of attentive listening. Smaller organizations, by contrast, should open up and introduce community-building processes aligned with their mission.
The good news is that the market already offers professionals capable of triggering and embedding light-touch, non-confrontational facilitation and listening processes – approaches that allow shared meaning to emerge and create unexpected connections with networks and communities of practice. Tools such as SenseMaker complement this work, gathering thousands of micro-narratives directly from actors in the field and translating them into maps and low-energy pathways for change – easy to implement because they leverage the natural dynamics revealed by the stories collected.
Read through a design lens, the insights generated through internal dialogue and engagement with like-minded communities become valuable material for devising low-cost micro-experiments – an optimal approach for dissipating uncertainty and confusion, and for moving out of periods of crisis.
Two reflections on the concept of micro-experiments.
The first concerns their nature: experiments that are useful in a context of complexity emerge from work in the field, not from a laboratory or a manager’s office, and are ideally the result of spontaneous, bottom-up initiatives. They often take the form of small but meaningful variations in behavioral norms, roles, rhythms, rituals, processes, access to information, or relationships among colleagues. Seen from the perspective of a senior manager, they may appear insignificant, marginal, or even counterproductive changes – yet in reality they signal the need for contextual, organic innovation.
The second reflection concerns the ability to register and learn from the unintended consequences that any experiment will generate. A new solution may fail to deliver the desired impact, yet still point to new possibilities. We should not obsessively seek to prove that every tested solution has met predefined objectives in order to justify the resources invested. Instead, we should observe, learn, and respond. Experiments also serve to foster an institutional culture that values learning and adaptability rather than perfection and control.
One final piece completes the mosaic of an ecosystem-inspired approach to management – and it is a crucial one, because it prevents the slide from complexity into chaos. To reduce noise and maintain coherence across different experiments, it is essential to state upfront the reference values that give meaning to our actions and to remain consistent with them. This is perhaps the most important role of a manager in complex contexts. Declaring values, once again, does not mean defining them top-down, in advance, at a desk. It means articulating them and leaving space for shared experiences to fill them with meaning and concrete examples. It is about recognizing those values – or recognizing their absence – and understanding which strategy is best suited to replicating the experiences in which they are most vividly expressed.
If there were more space in this article, it would be interesting to compare this way of translating values into coherence with the diametrically opposed approaches adopted by marketing and branding – and, more recently, by behavioural economics. But let us leave that reflection hanging and take, instead, the New European Bauhaus as an example – a European Commission policy initiative to which I contributed in its early stages – which proposes beauty, sustainability, and inclusive collaboration as three reference values for imagining the places of the future. Three ambitious values, deliberately left open, in a context such as Europe’s, where they carry different meanings and are recognized through profoundly different experiences.
Beauty, in particular, was the value that raised the most doubts. Talking about beauty is uncomfortable – for some, irritating or elitist: “not everyone can afford beauty.” But in an ecosystem, beauty is widespread, and it is a powerful signal. Not only we are capable of recognizing it, we also form a regenerative bond with it – one that draws us back toward balance and harmony. And in truth, we would all be capable of creating moments of everyday beauty, for ourselves and for others, if only it were a little more in fashion.
By listening to and reading those who have already written and spoken about beauty – from Maria Montessori and Bruno Munari to Umberto Eco and Vito Mancuso – it becomes possible to sense that beauty resides not so much, or not only, in things themselves, but in the space between them. Beauty, understood as a relational quality and an emergent form of coherence – rather than as superficial aesthetics – could be a powerful catalyst for shared meaning, cutting across any field of activity.
Beauty could therefore represent an attempt to develop a form of intelligence that is open not only to coexisting but to co-evolving with natural and cultural ecosystems, through a balance between logic, intuition, matter, and consciousness.
In this sense, beauty should not be seen as an objective, but as an emergent quality that guides us toward a desirable destination. Translating beauty into a compass for navigating complexity means reinterpreting the stories and experiences we have gathered, as well as the experiments we have undertaken. It means recognizing and collectively energizing a form of beauty that can be shared and reproduced in small but frequent doses. For the New European Bauhaus, beauty translates not only into multiple new forms and materials for architecture and urban planning, but above all into bottom-up projects and initiatives: places that strengthen social cohesion; new business and usage models that support those most in need; and new forms of learning that bring theory and practice back together through experiments rooted in their local territories.
Exploring how beauty can be translated into every sphere of our activity could be a first experiment in changing the lenses we have grown accustomed to wearing. I suspect that such an exercise would help us replace bubbles of happiness built on stainless certainties with new ones designed for a world in constant transformation.
