A 21^st Century View

In the first century, the Greek astronomer Ptolemy, devised an ingenious solution to the movement of the planets that explained the observation of retrograde movement – when the planets moved “backyards”  to each other. Because Ptolemy was a systems thinker way ahead of any other, he was able to put together a complex map of the variant and invariant epicycles of the planets and stars as they revolved around the earth. Of course, we all know the rest of this story. Ptolemy’s systemic genius notwithstanding, he was constrained because he was only able to imagine theview from the earth. A thousand years later, Copernicus re-imagined the heavens from a helio-centric view—which explained all the celestial movements observable at that time, in a simpler and much more elegant manner. What if this is true today – that the limitation of our view is responsible for the complexity of our situation? If this were true, then wouldn’t it be more helpful to work directly with understanding what is our view – what are the hidden assumptions, boundaries and constraints that are on the one hand, creating all this hyper-complexity around us,

and on the other hand, impeding our ability to “see” from a higher, more inclusive, more systematic yet more elegant vantage point?

And yet, at this level of complexity, the 21st Century Leader can no longer expect to be able to hold onto a static knowledge base from which to sustain an organization, act toward a resolution, convey a message, or design a strategy for real-world decision-making. Rather, leaders need to be able to view an enormous amount of complexity, in ways that are both conceptually aware to comprehend all the categories, structures, processes and systems that the world entails, as well as intentionally constructed in ways that are meaningful, relevant and useful. This process requires the vantage-point of being able to see the concept-based value stream embedded in all the salient features and objects of the system, as well as sufficient meta-design skills for building coherent and synergistic systems out of constructed hybrid objects. We may not be able to precisely state what that is before hand, but we are able to state some of the key elements in this new view which would be generative, meaningful, useful and relevant.

Generative: Acknowledge that the universe and biosphere ever-advance into the near adjacent possible as a fundamental truth.

Meaningful: Integrate human and non-human processes into a unified explanation of the apparent teleology that results from this fundamental truth in a way that neither privileges the subjective or objective aspect of the story.

Useful: Identify the processes underlying the patterns through which the future unfolds, rather than pre-stating future conditions.

Relevant: Create a comprehensive and elegant model that will be equally relevant to the general case as well as the particular.