Complexity – Integration and Implementation Insights

Understanding and responding to a chaotic world

February 10, 2026January 27, 2026

By Jamais Cascio.

Is it helpful to conceive the world as Brittle, Anxious, Nonlinear, and Incomprehensible or BANI? What do these terms mean and what mental models can help us survive in a BANI world?

I created BANI as an acronym in 2018 to better describe an increasingly chaotic world. BANI is a sense-making framework that recognises recurring themes in disruptions that make it increasingly difficult to understand the big picture and to make decisions. BANI is not saying something about the world, but rather about how we perceive it. It comes from a human inability to fully understand what to do when pattern-seeking and familiar explanations no longer work. It involves seeing the world as it is and letting go of illusions of system strength, control, predictability and certainty. BANI sets out to illuminate systems, but operates at a human level in a visceral and experiential way.

The Möbius strip of knowledge: Rethinking the boundaries of knowing / Le ruban de Möbius du savoir : repenser les frontières de la connaissance

January 20, 2026January 13, 2026

By Frédéric Darbellay.

A French version of this post is available

frederic-darbellay_2023 — Frédéric Darbellay (biography)

How can we move beyond current definitions of disciplinarity, multidisciplinarity, interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity, which reproduce a logic inherited from classificatory and cumulative thinking that rests on the principles of classical logic – identity, non-contradiction, and the excluded third? Instead how can we think about knowledge as mutually transforming, traversing, and reinventing itself in line with research processes that do not follow a linear progression but unfold through movements of torsion, resonance, and tension? How can we think about the dynamics of knowledge less as a trajectory than a living space in continuous transformation?

Insights into the science of complexity

January 9, 2026October 29, 2024

By Jean Boulton

What are the key ideas that define the science of complexity? How do they help us better understand our world so that we can engage more effectively?

The science of complexity conveys a view of the world as dynamic, richly interdependent and full of variety.

“A world – organic and emergent, shaped by history and context – naturally patterned, yet always in process” (Boulton 2024: 39).

Ilya Prigogine asked why classical physics and evolutionary biology seem to contradict each other. The word that brought these two sciences together and shaped the development of complexity theory, was ‘open’ (Prigogine 1977).

Situations that are open to their environments display emerging order in the form of patterns of relationships.

Managing complexity with human learning systems

March 3, 2026January 10, 2023

By Toby Lowe

How can those in public service – be they researchers, policy makers or workers in government agencies, private businesses managers, or voluntary and community organisation leaders – think more effectively about improving people’s lives, when they understand that each person’s life is a unique complex system?

A good starting point is understanding that real outcomes in people’s lives aren’t “delivered” by organisations (or by projects, partnerships or programmes, etc). Outcomes are created by the hundreds of different factors in the unique complex system that is each person’s life.

In other words, an outcome is the product of hundreds of different people, organisations, and factors in the world all coming together in a unique and ever-changing combination in a particular person’s life. Very little of what influences the outcome is under the control or influence of those who undertake public service.

Can foresight and complexity play together?

January 9, 2026February 16, 2021

By James E. Burke

author_james-burke — James E. Burke (biography)

What is foresight and how does it differ from prediction? What role can complexity play in foresight? Does Cynefin® offer a possible framework to begin integrating foresight and complexity?

In this blog post, I describe how:

Foresight identifies clues for the future and integrates them into forecasts
Complexity theory offers ways to understand how the future emerges
Cynefin® gives us a framework of domains that allows us to better understand trends and forecasts.

Three complexity principles for convergence research

January 9, 2026February 4, 2021

By Gemma Jiang

author_gemma-jiang — Gemma Jiang (biography)

How can principles adapted from complexity thinking be applied to convergence research? How can such principles help integrate knowledge, methods, and expertise from different disciplines to form novel frameworks that catalyze scientific discovery and innovation?

I present three principles from the complexity paradigm that are highly relevant to convergence research. I then describe three types of transformative containers that I have developed to create enabling conditions for applying complexity principles to convergence.

1. Ecosystem consciousness: An inversion of perspectives

Ecosystem consciousness is necessary because in complex systems the whole (ecosystem) is bigger than the sum of its parts; the wellbeing of the whole and the parts are interdependent and mutually reinforcing.