Complexity & Resilience

The Challenge

Systems Cannot Be "Solved"

Climate change, inequality, and housing are treated as puzzles solvable with the right policy lever. But these are complex adaptive systems, more like forests than machines, unpredictable and constantly evolving.

Linear Thinking Fails: Traditional planning optimizes for efficiency and stability, creating brittleness that leads to collapse in volatile conditions.
The Polycrisis: Interconnected global crises demand systems thinking rather than siloed interventions.
Optimizing for the Wrong Things: Focusing on short-term metrics misses emergent properties and long-term resilience.

The challenge: how do we steward uncertainty rather than fear it, designing for adaptation and resilience instead of rigid control?

Our Approach

Anticipatory Governance & Emergence

We apply principles from complexity science and indigenous ecology to steward systems through change:

Three Horizons Framework

Mapping transitions from declining status quo (H1) to emerging future (H3), identifying bridge innovations (H2) that enable transformation rather than incremental change.

Agent-Based Modeling

Simulating how small changes in rules or incentives lead to large-scale system shifts, testing interventions in virtual environments before real-world deployment.

Ecosystemic Resilience

Designing systems with redundancy and diversity that absorb shocks and adapt, like healthy immune systems rather than optimized machines.

Indigenous Time Perspectives

Drawing on frameworks like the Haudenosaunee Seventh Generation Principle to design for deep time scales and intergenerational well-being.

Interventions

Tools & Initiatives

7GenCities
Reimagining urban infrastructure through the Seventh Generation Principle, designing for deep time scales and intergenerational equity.
Three Horizons Futuring
Strategic methodology distinguishing between sustaining innovation (keeping old systems alive) and transformative innovation (birthing new possibilities).
Systems Mapping & Network Analysis
Revealing relationship dynamics, feedback loops, and leverage points within complex systems to identify where small interventions create large effects.
Scenario Planning & Stress Testing
Developing multiple futures to prepare for uncertainty, testing solutions against various scenarios to build adaptive capacity.

Complexity

Navigating Emergence

Working with complexity requires embracing uncertainty and managing inherent tensions:

Prediction Limits: Complex systems are fundamentally unpredictable. We focus on sensing, adapting, and building resilience rather than trying to control outcomes.
Balancing Analysis & Action: Too much analysis creates paralysis; too little creates chaos. We use rapid prototyping and feedback loops to learn by doing.
Avoiding Reductionism: Resisting the urge to simplify too much while making insights actionable. Maintaining nuance without overwhelming stakeholders.
Managing Emergence: Creating conditions for positive emergence while preventing harmful patterns from taking hold through continuous monitoring and gentle intervention.

We treat complexity work as an ongoing practice of stewardship, constantly learning from what emerges and adjusting our approach.

Learning

What We're Learning

Translating Complexity: How to communicate complexity science insights to decision-makers without losing essential nuance. What mental models help people think systemically?
Timing Interventions: When to intervene in complex systems versus when to observe. How to recognize windows of opportunity where small actions have outsized impact.
Measuring Resilience: Developing indicators beyond efficiency metrics, tracking diversity, redundancy, modularity, and adaptive capacity within systems.
Indigenous & Western Integration: Finding genuine synthesis between complexity science and indigenous systems thinking rather than superficial borrowing.
Scaling Wisdom: Whether complexity approaches that work at small scales maintain their integrity when applied to large systems.