 Welcome to Complexity Live. This is a Human Current and Complexity Labs collaboration. This will be a one-hour live discussion with those of us on the camera and with our special guests who I'm gonna introduce here in a moment. But first, we'll take a moment to introduce who we have. We have Joss, who's the host of Complexity Live. I'm Angie, I'm your moderator. I'm with the Human Current. And Haley is also with the Human Current co-host and she will be moderating the chat and social media that's going on at the same time. So if you are joining us, please feel free to chime in with the chat and Haley will be monitoring that. Before we get started, I'd love to just give a little background to Complexity Labs and the Human Current. And for that, Joss, would you like to share a little bit about Complexity Labs? We can't hear you, Joss. Have you got that one? There we go. Complexity Labs, online platform or website for Complexity Systems and Systems Thinking. We've got lots of educational material, articles, videos, blog posts, media, and lots more on Complexity Systems and Systems Thinking, Complexity Theory. Yep, and Human Current, let's hear a bit about you guys. All right, Haley. The Human Current is the Complexity Podcast. We have casual conversations about the systems that shape our world with experts, practitioners, and scientists in the field. And we're releasing a new episode next week with Tanuja Prasad, who we met at the International Conference on Complex Systems. And we'll be sharing another one at the end of January on the 31st with Lynn Fisher, who we hope to join the discussion. Yeah, hopefully he'll be able to jump in having some technical issues. So we are discussing, for this next hour, we're discussing the topic of WUCA, it's an acronym, which describes a situation or environments that engender high levels of velocity or volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. So we've got our expert panelists with us to join in the conversation. First we have Diego Espinoso. He writes on complex systems, networks, and blockchain. He has launched three blockchain-based ventures, including Web 3.0, Data Sharing Protocol. Diego is also a former guest on the Human Current Podcast. If you'd like to hear his episode, it is episode six and seven. We also, Diego, you wanna give a little wave? Hi, everybody. Hi. Diego, we also have Dion Cluta. I hope I said that right. You're great. Dion is an organizational development specialist, Systems Change Entrepreneur, leadership consultant, and teacher. His current research and practice explores the re-imagining of change agents' practice for systems innovation and systems change. Next we have... Hi, everybody. Hi. Next we have Benjamin Taylor. I wanna give a little wave there, Benjamin. Hello, everybody. Hi. Benjamin is a business evolutionary systems thinker and avid learner. He is a managing partner at Red Quadrant. Benjamin is also a former guest on the Human Current Podcast. If you'd like to listen to that episode, it is episode 038. Lastly, we have Len Fisher, who has not made it yet. Hopefully he will. When he pops in, just to have a little background, he's a scientist, writer, and broadcaster who has worked to share how scientists think about problems in everyday life. He's also won an ignoble prize and more recently has become increasingly concerned with the risks that the world now faces. And we are releasing his episode on January 31st. Yep, so stay tuned for that. So welcome, our guests of Expert Panelists and to our viewers that are coming in on the chat. For our guests, we're gonna mute our lines on this end while we're not talking. And as the moderator, I'm just gonna throw out a question and have you respond. For this first question, I'll have all of you respond and I'll start first with Dion. Dion, to get us started, we'd like to hear an overview of your work as it relates to VOCA, again, which is the acronym that describes the situations or environments that engender high levels. I don't know how many times I can say this today. Of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. So Dion, you wanna jump in with that? Get us started. Yes, thank you very much. So VOCA is a popular term used in management generally for trying to describe this new world of the Cold War and trying to explain all the dynamics involved in not understanding this post-model world and where we're going towards. And my work basically explores how complexity and the complexity perspective can interpret this new world in a different way if we look at the nature of reality being complex and transitioning from the previous world where we viewed things as stable and mechanistic and in a very stuck way and transitioning towards an alternative world and living in the reality of the complexity and the complexity paradigm. So in short, it's a transitioning from the paradigm of simplification to the paradigm of complexity where we start embracing alternatives, understandings of what this new world might look like. And my work reimagines the roles of change agents in generally in management of organizations to try and find innovative responses to how we can look differently at this and to form system change approaches that actually work in practice. Great, great way to kick us off. Benjamin, how would you like to jump in and talk a little bit, follow Dion with your work and how it relates to VOCA and anything else in that topic? Great, well, I work in public services and all of our work is really predicated on this idea that most of the things that are worth doing have to be done in an interdisciplinary way and they're probably truly complex social challenges, sometimes truly wicked problems. And so I think it's that the key challenge of organization is marrying complex open systems with sustainable indeed viable potentially closed systems or at least maintaining islands of stability. And you spread out from organizations into true kind of systems change which becomes even more complex. I do wanna just put in a pointer and I'm happy to come back to this. I think we should be a little bit skeptical about the narrative that we all tend to accept these days that everything's just getting more faster, more complex and changing. After all, we went into the Second World War basically with kites and we came out with jet planes. So we should be just a little cautious about assuming that we're in the fastest and most complex and most changeable world ever. Ooh, yeah, good point. We might just come back to that. I hope we have time. I'd love to explore that a little more. And Diego, how would you like to jump in and add to the conversation? So I guess I'll start by seconding what Benjamin just said. I think it's overhyped that we're more complex. We've always been in complex environments and so I do a lot of work trying to understand how humans basically adapt to complexity and how they have through time and how that's struck through evolution and how our social activity is basically at our adaptations or set of adaptations to complexity. So I came at this from the investing side where initially I was focused on more kind of the uncertainty and volatility part of the equation. And that led to trying to determine what we can do about that and what kind of patterns we can spot in this volatility and uncertainty so that they can help us make decisions in the investment realm and then later on in the design of decentralized cooperation which is really what blockchain's all about. So what I try to do in my work is basically identify patterns that exist in complexity and harness them as much as possible or even create them so it's kind of designed emergence. So I'm curious, we use this acronym all together, this V-U-C-A all together and for my next question I will start with Benjamin. I'd love for you to explore if you think this acronym, these words all live together and do they have to or do we need to separate them? Volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. Do we need to keep those all together or do we see times where those are separate? That's an interesting question. Yeah, I mean, I'll start off by saying that again, I'm a philosophy undergraduate so I always question the premise. We should be really aware of where this came from. All of the things online tend to point to the United States Army War College. Some of them describe conditions from the Cold War some from the breakdown of the Cold War some from Afghanistan and Iraq where I think initially when this was allegedly coined in 1991 they didn't believe that the conditions were volatile and certain complex and ambiguous which is an interesting insight an interesting case study in itself but we shouldn't swallow that contextualization. This is a war metaphor. This is about maneuvering and winning a war so it has a certain use and application in business but not always and it's not always appropriate every time. Rafael Ramirez Oxford has, I don't know whether it's just because he wants his own thing but I would trust him to be coherent about what he does. The phrase tuner, which I think is nicer in some ways turbulent, uncertain, novel and ambiguous. And I think that you can definitely have complexity without volatility. You can definitely have uncertainty without some of those other things. So they do come as separate what they're trying to point to in this VUCA agglomeration is a situation in which you find yourself unable to observe and orient before the environment or your enemy in this case has observed, oriented, decided and acted to use that OODA model also from warfare. So I think we should bear that in mind and usually VUCA is just used as this buzzword from people who have something to sell including no doubt many of us. So I'm not proud to have stood up and done VUCA training for people who wanted it and tried to give them something useful. But it's trying to point to a circumstance where the world is changing faster than you can take it in. And of course, as has already been pointed out the world is always changing faster than you can take it in. So I think it's important to say they can be separated. They don't always all come as an agglomeration but when they do it's really about you having a very clear strategic intent but having to reorientate yourself faster than you can act if that makes sense. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Thank you for chiming in on that. And just to recap, you said Tuna. What is that acronym again? Sorry, turbulent, uncertain, novel and ambiguous. It sounds less dominating than VUCA and comes from a different place, comes from future studies, comes from trying to, but I mean what we're all pulling out of it, I suspect and we'll see as we go through is the need to think and orient ourselves in different ways that don't make assumptions about basic stability. Right, yes, absolutely. And thanks for that little tune I hadn't heard of Tuna before so that was great. Dion, do you wanna chime in on this? Yes, the popularity of the world, the world in management and the use of it is obviously we need to ask why and why this acronym has become so popular and in my view, it's a way that people in business is trying to make sense of like I described before, this complexity worldview that we need to embrace coming from a period where as scholars point to the Newtonian worldview has been quite dominant in our understanding of our world, how we create knowledge, how we see reality and how we actually interpret the ways we go about things. So for me though, the Booker acronym is just a handy notebook or a way to try and link to people in a popular type of language. But I think we need to transition towards the bigger concept here for me is the complexity concept and the complexity paradigm or mindset that's underlying the need that's out there for finding new ways to navigate the older purchase just does not make sense anymore and finding, keeping one foot in that world while at the same time having another foot in the world where we're starting to learn new ways of thinking, new ways of being and new ways of doing that really changes our situation and how we do systems. And I think if we try and use the acronym in a very generic and simplified way, we lose the larger context of complexity and the complexity worldview that is there so much to learn from. Yeah, that's a great perspective. Thank you. I want to bring it back to examples, especially for those that might be listening in on the chat to really wrap our heads around, where do we see Voca? Where is the showing up in our world and what's an example that we can wrap our head around? And so Diego, I'd like to pass it over to you. Can you give some examples or hone in on one example where we really see Voca or where we could be applying the concepts of Voca? Yeah, so I think just to tell what people just said which we're reaching a consensus that Voca is actually not that useful an acronym. But basically it's because basically everything, most of the things in the social world are complex. They're networked. There's interdependence and so therefore, this dichotomy between things that are simple and complex is really an artificial dichotomy that comes from this kind of Newtonian worldview. So I totally agree that actually almost everything or let's say everything except like real mechanistic systems like engines have complexity in them. And so most of what we look at in the economic world does, right? So as an example of things that have Voca, but that's because they're basically networks, markets are networks, so financial markets are networks. And so we see periods of stability and periods of instability, but really it's the behavior of a network system and that behavior is continuous in time. It doesn't have like, it doesn't know simple versus complex. It's always complex. It's just that sometimes it's more stable than others. And so I'm trying to understand how those spaceships happen and how there's different attractors between a more stable behavior of the market and a really unstable behavior of the market is something that is really important and fruitful to be looking at. And it's not just kind of financial markets. It's really almost every part of the economy where we can benefit from this kind of analysis which is really around, A, understanding that this concept of Voca is like a continuous feature of a network system. And can appear and disappear with different intervals. And then B, trying to understand what is it, why is it that the system behaves in this way and what kind of patterns repeat themselves over time so that we can begin to spot them. And I think that's a really fruitful area that people are just starting to get into in financial markets. And I think that, so it's just beginning basically. Is there any of our other guests that would like to chime into with another example? And to your point Diego around it, it really just showing up and that this is a fairly new thing. I mean, maybe there's, we think about patterns. Maybe there's some other examples that we can look back in history and go, oh wait, there was actually, this is an example. We just maybe didn't have the language. Benjamin, do you have anything you'd like to add to that? I can't resist saying, although it brings forth so many emotions that right those of us in the UK right now are living through a terrible example of Voca or Tuna, which is the response to the decision, the recommendation in the advisory recommend them to refer them to leave the European Union. And I'm not sure what I have to say about this is creating all of those conditions in the UK for markets, for people, for society, for those of us who've come from the European Union and so on. And so you couldn't ask for a better example and what is interesting from a perspective of complexity and discontinuity is that I want to make the point that I think complexity in Voca is all perspective dependent and all context dependent, all depends on how you look at things, but there's certainly a very strong narrative that you can say that this Voca condition of the response to the EU referendum, et cetera, is discontinuous from a long period of relative political stability probably in the UK more than anywhere in the rest of the Western world. So I think that's a pretty clear example. I wish I could apply my system theory to find ways to deal with that better. Can I interject on that? Because I think that that's a good example coming from markets as well of this kind of repeatable pattern where basically stability creates the seeds for instability. And so I think we see this in markets all the time. And so in the case of the EU, the kind of stability that was imposed over the Eurozone by the Euro has resulted in some dislocations that have accumulated and accumulated over time. And so we see the rise of populism as kind of a reaction against that. And so again, it's like trying to identify patterns within complexity of causing this volatility and uncertainty. And the key is if we can identify them, then we can do something about them. So how do we go about identifying them? I guess I'll do a quick one on that, which is Pear Back wrote a great book about kind of comparing the systems to sandpiles. And so the idea is that we're always kind of building up to sandpile to the point where it's a hypocritical state and then it's gonna slide. And so that means that anything that's kind of an attractor that's stable will just get eventually to the point where it's creating the seeds of its own instability. And so what we can do is kind of look for those things, right? And obviously in markets, it's the accumulation of risk in different areas. So for instance, with the Fed obsessively having to put on the markets and sort of guaranteeing that they're gonna come in and tap the market slide, then when that happens is people pile on more risk as a result. And then the risk of the market grows and grows and grows until the point at which the Fed no longer finds it politically feasible to intervene in the markets that way. And then we get a gigantic slide. And so this is kind of a repeatable behavior of the interaction between the Fed and markets. And trying to time that is difficult, I'm not saying any of this is easy, but at least we have some sense of what the pattern is basically. I'm a big fan of the sand example. It also makes me think of John Sternum's, I think it's John Sternum's with his theory of the bathtub and the slow drip of the bathtub. So yeah, that's a great example. And Benjamin also mentioned earlier, and there was a lot of head nodding around this narrative that everything is getting faster. And so Deanna, I wonder if you'd like to chime in on that. What are your thoughts on this idea that we have that everything is faster than it was and that we can't keep up? Yes, I think while at the same time that might be experienced in that way and new technologies come forth every day we have found so much more interconnected possibilities than we had many years ago. And the rise of various technologies have just given us the ability to communicate in different ways on multiple levels. It does give us the experience of that. It does not necessarily mean the world is more complex, but the way we interpret it might be feeling like that. The world has always been complex and social relations and all the examples given like economic environment or business environment has always been complex. The question is, we are becoming more aware and seeing this in our own lives and the lives we are embedded in. And for us to start navigating the space is really the question, how do we move into becoming aware of the book of all then or this complex world and how do we live differently and how do we think differently in this world? In my research I've basically identified four interesting ways in which you could navigate this world. And the first one would be to start embrace the complexity rather than pushing it away and seek for overly calling things and trying to simplify things again to the level of dumbing things down. We need to maintain the level of complexity without losing ourselves in the process. So embracing complexity is the first point. The second one is navigating this ambiguity and incongruence that we feel in ourselves and with regards to the world we're experiencing around us. So the various ambiguous, like I said earlier, with one foot in a mechanistic system and then another foot in our thoughts and our thinking where we realize there's so much more that can be done. And this ambiguous type of navigational way this is part of the process. And then navigating also the incongruence of realizing that the new thoughts and thinking is part of us. So thinking is actually something that you can learn but you need to also unlearn, like we had mentioned before, the mechanistic world and the mechanistic assumptions behind a lot of what we already do. And then the third point I'd like to make is to start becoming aware of how we are relationally connected to each other and our wider world and that we are inherent relational beings and that the patterns and the networks we are embedded in is always interconnected. And the final one is due to as a practical point, the fourth one would be that we need to find ways that we could co-create resilient juristics or contextually appropriate ways of finding practices that help us navigate this book our world in such a way that it stays resilient no matter what and how the context changes constantly fast moving system or slow moving system or stable or unstable we have found resilient juristics or continually developed ones that actually help us navigate the space and help us act in ways that are congruent to the complexity. I feel like each of those areas that you described if we have time we could probably even dive in a little deeper into each of those and how we navigate that. So hopefully we have time to come back to that to you Dion and then also to hear from others on how do we go, where do we go from here? What do we do? I know that Joss, I'm curious what you'd like to add to the conversation at this point. Yeah, I just wanted to, what Diego said that was very interesting about the Sampa model because it captures kind of how in complex systems you have these periods of kind of stable linear growth and then you get kind of exponential non-linear phase transitions and that's kind of the Sampa model. You have like the dropping of sand and it builds up in a linear fashion and then you get a collapse, it all builds up and you get exponential change, you get feedback loop and you get exponential change. And I think VUCA in many ways kind of comes from it's what you experience when you're in one of those non-linear process of change when in a kind of systemic, I would say it really comes from systemic change rather than traditional linear change. So normal change, as we understand it, kind of linear change is when the structure of the system stays the same that the component parts in the system are changing, right? That's kind of linear change. And then those exponential systemic changes when the whole structure of the system changes. And I think that's kind of what VUCA is about. That's what you experience as a person in an organization and you're looking at the environment there whether it's the market or the political environment or whatever, and it's changing in a systemic way. And that's what you experience. I think ambiguity is a good kind of illustration of that. So ambiguity is the idea that things are open to more than one interpretation. And if you think about it in kind of a normal environment in a kind of, if you go back maybe 50 years or so, and we kind of had a paradigm, that kind of Newtonian industrial age paradigm and we sense the meaning to things, you know? And then when you move into kind of the post-modern world that we're in today and kind of down in many ways and we're kind of in systemic change and we don't really know how to properly contextualize things and things then become open to ambiguity, right? We don't understand the context within which things happen and they become ambiguous. And I think the kind of response to that, I think Dion was hinting to it there is systems thinking, right? You have to kind of look at the bigger, you have to find a new kind of context or look at the bigger picture to help you kind of recontextualize what those events really mean, you know? Because you've kind of lost the context at that stage to a certain extent. So I think, actually, I think the whole of VUCA really comes from complexity, I think, or kind of a recognition of complexity. So the question as to whether the world become more complex or not, I'm not sure that's so important. I think it's more of a subjective thing of whether we're open to looking at the world in a kind of complex way, you know? And I think that's one good thing about VUCA it kind of does introduce to people the idea that the world is complex and that we have to change our organizational paradigm, our paradigm about how we structure organizations, how we manage them. Dion was saying that, if we're going to respond to that, like if you accept VUCA, those ideas of VUCA, then straight away you look at your organization and you see what it's not designed for that sort of environment at all, right? You have to straight away say, oh, well, we need a different sort of organization. We need something that's agile, something that's networks and it's collaborative and so on. So I think that's the real value of the term. I mean, I'm not sure about the term itself, like it's kind of just a composition of different words really, but it does help us kind of introduce the capability of complexity and the need for organizational change and the need for a kind of change in paradigm. So I think that's the real benefit of it. To question whether it's a really coherent, well, just really getting greatly more complex or whatever, I'm not sure that's the real value on it. I think it's more that it really kind of introduces us to the ideas of complexity and the need for change in response to that. If I can jump in there, I think Joss really put his finger on something very interesting there and what I was hearing as you were talking, Joss, is that VUCA is an experience, not a condition of the world and something about the subjectivity of systems is really important here. It's really difficult to discuss it without getting into that real dichotomy of simple and complex, but I think organizationally, which is what I'm interested in, the tool for dealing with complexity, as Stafford Beer said in 1975, is organization. You need sufficient variety to deal with what the environment is throwing at you and if there's one more thing you need, it's the agility and speed to respond in an appropriate way at the appropriate time and if there's one more thing you need, it's the ability to understand what's happening and make sense of what's happening in the environment. Dion was very much talking about sense-making, matching the response to the context and that's where it's really important. One of these startups, one of these days, will reinvent a factory. Well, Elon Musk, I guess, is trying to do it. All of the old forms will come back again because we had to invent them for a purpose and they're appropriate in certain contexts, if you see what I mean. And if you need one more, it's the ability to manage signals from the outside world, the attenuation and amplification and if you need one more and this is the important one but the final one you'll be pleased to hear, it's coordination because as we build this capacity to respond to sense, to make sense, to respond with appropriate variety, agility and speed, we're actually in sandpile style, creating conditions inside our own organization of complexity, do you see what I mean? So then you get into the conversation that's already been raised, that the ability to shift paradigms and the need to be able to change our identity to respond to in the world is probably the biggest thing of all in response to complexity and VUCA as a whole. There's just some great takeaways too for one more thing. Thank you for that, Benjamin. Yeah, and I'll be, I wanna pass it over to Hailey here in a second and see what's going on in the chat and if there's any questions there and then definitely come back to continuing the conversation on some takeaways that we could be doing and also curious of whether VUCA is necessarily a bad thing or a good thing and so we're gonna come back to that, but right now I'd like to see what's going on in chat, Hailey. Yeah, there's a really interesting question about what you may have touched on this, Benjamin, Hailey, just this concept of dynamic stability, so maybe the other side of what we're talking about here, those were some great points of kind of how to get us on track with dealing with complexity, embracing it and how do we manage relationships and organizations and society, so not sure who would be interested in jumping in on this one, but maybe that other side of the coin with dynamic stability. Who would like to jump in on that? So the question is how to maintain kind of stability given a dynamic environment, is that the question? Very open, yeah. It's just kind of touching on the concept in any way we can, so what does that look like or how does it show up? Diego, you wanna jump in on that? Yeah, so I think what we've done is create these hierarchical systems, most companies are that way, that deal pretty well with a certain kind of engineered stability, right? Product market fit and then we're just driving execution of delivering that product to that market and so we organize hierarchically because that's a relatively stable thing to be doing and so most of our economic interaction is of that kind of like artificial stability basis and so I think the key thing I think to understand or one of the realizations I had is that when we organize in a decentralized fashion as kind of hunter-gatherers, we were living in a completely Bucca world, like the notion of Bucca would be completely foreign to hunter-gatherers because that's like, that's all they live in, right? And they don't have this kind of artificially manufactured stability that we have in our economy. So if we want to deal with the artifacts of complexity, very often we could benefit from approaching it in a decentralized fashion because decentralization allows us to be more flexible and adaptive and cooperative in the way that we deal with complex systems and so this is essentially the project of blockchain right now, but what the whole project is, is not about the technology of blockchain, it's about blockchain being an enabler of decentralized cooperation at scale. It's basically returning to our hunter-gatherer roots where we're basically operating as a network of independent nodes and trying to cooperate to get stuff done, which is very different than a hierarchical model. So I think in terms of this kind of like dynamic stability and how it's changing, I think we're headed into different forms of organization that are better at enabling us to not only just deal with volatility, but also to kind of harness new patterns of complexity and achieve new patterns of cooperation. So that's something I'm very excited about and spend a lot of my time. Yeah, and if I could also just jump in there, I think with regards to the question on the stability dynamic issue, that's always the question of moving towards, I like Diego mentioned the decentralized system, but it is also should you react to your environment. And as I mentioned before, those four points I mentioned that the part of the process when you are in a very stable environment, but you realize that you need to become open to the dynamics of complexity and the reality of complexity is that you need to transition. And the transitioning phase can include many things which can include not only jumping necessarily directly into the decentralized system, but also finding some ways in navigating towards something like that, which might be appropriate or inappropriate to what you are doing and the context of the purpose of the organization. But to just point to the last point I made previously in those four points, the principle was to co-create resilient juristics and finding those means you need to embrace complexity, you need to navigate the ambiguity of the space and then you need to also realize how relationally embedded you are to enable you to co-create resilient juristics. And the question is really when you are doing that, how can you become more resilient and how can you become more open to the dynamics of the system? Oh, I'm so glad you added on to that, Dionne, thank you. Curious Benjamin, we haven't heard from you in a little bit. Do you have anything in respond to that or anything that you wanted to come back before we move forward? I think this ability is a really exciting one. And since Jungian archetypes are back in fashion at the moment in the eternal recurrence of ideas, there's this comparison between nature as wild and chaotic and the indoors as managed and safe, which is a really fundamental one in the human brain. And of course, the balance between the two is the garden, which is nature tamed and constrained and managed. So there's a little bit here, just metaphorically speaking, about the need to bring a little bit of the chaos into the organization, into the order, in order to be able to cope. And that might be stakeholders leading the organization. It might be other kinds of input. Every organization is a combination of networks and hierarchies. And if one good thing comes out of this, it would be recognizing that. And don't forget that the late stage and maybe even the early hunter-gatherers absolutely manicured their world. They set scrub fires, they seeded the salmon in the rivers, they seeded the edible roots in the forest. So the early settlers in North America described it as parkland, not as wilderness. It was only after they killed off all of the people who knew how to manage the land that you got wilderness. So I think bring a little bit of the, bring a little bit of the wild into the order is the order of the day. It's interesting how language shows up in that, right? And how we create our narratives and whether that makes things okay or not okay or how they fit with us today or in the past. And I guess that goes as well to the patterns that we see or that we seek. And Diego, you mentioned patterns earlier. I'm curious to come back to that question of, so is Vuka really so, is it really bad or is it really great? When do we need to have some volatility, some uncertainty, some understanding of complexity? Like when do we need that? And how do we even perceive that, right? If language has such an impression on whether we determine whether it was good or not and the history and how that plays into that. What is your take on where Vuka shows up in terms of our perception, whether it's good or bad and when do we need that? When does that serve us? As good and not so good. And you're still, yeah, go ahead, Diego. Yeah, so I think Vuka is a bit misleading. It could mislead us, basically, because for two reasons. Number one is it kind of tells us that this is a special state or the exception to the rules opposed to part of the system. And the second way that it misleads us is I think that it tells us about how we should be reacting to unpleasant things. And I think the reason why that's misleading is because the benefit about learning about networks and complexity is that we can actually create things with it, right? So it's not just about like, oh my God, the world is coming, it's kind of like, we're in disaster mode, what do we do about it? It's really actually like, oh, we're facing these potential markets and we have these potential products, like how can we actually benefit from this and be creative and create new things? So Vuka doesn't leap, I don't think that much space for positivity. And so I think it's better to think in terms of networks and complexity and just say, given the complexity that's out there, given the interrelationship of things, what kinds of things could I be creating given the patterns that I spot? And I think that it would be better served by that paradigm that stokes that kind of thinking. Which leads us great. Yeah, go ahead, Dionne. Yeah, I would add to that in saying, yes, absolutely. It also introduces, Vuka introduces and complexity thinking then introduces the idea that things are not that good nor bad. It's just the way it is that it's the reality and embracing that reality. And then also moving into the idea that we need to develop about a type of thinking that does not think in rather all terms exclusively anymore. And that would invite us to explore in different ways and think in different ways and be more open to questioning our environment. And like you have mentioned, be creative with the same conditions and the radical openness of the world rather than just trying to find new ways to control things in ways that might constrain the diversity that's inherent in the system. Yeah, good point. Excellent. And Joss, do you have anything that we'd like to add to this too and then we're gonna shift into what's our takeaway? Where do we go from here as we wrap up? Sure. Well, I guess it's getting back to what I was kind of saying before to a certain extent about the term itself opens up thinking and introduces the vocabulary around complexity or make us look at kind of complexity and accept it to a certain extent. But I think what's interesting here is how much we're talking about kind of subjectivity, right? Rather than trying to think about this in an objective way. And that's interesting because it's a key part of complexity. I think it introduces into subjectivity. You think so much about the kind of Newtonian linear way of thinking is really an objectiveist paradigm. I think Dion talks a lot about this or knows a lot about this more than me, but it's really a conception that there's one kind of world out there and it's knowable and there's one kind of solution. There's one correct way of knowing it, you know? And that was very much the paradigm till recently and you can understand if you take that into the world of management and strategy, well, you're obviously gonna come up with the idea that there's kind of one right way of doing things. And then Vuka kind of flips that on its head and it says, well, that environment is so complex that you actually can't know it. You can't know what's really gonna happen in the future. Even ambiguity, you don't properly even understand the things that are out there. And straight away that introduces subjectivity, right? And it's just the idea that there's well, there's an objective world maybe out there, but we don't really know what it's like. And it's a lot down to our subjectivity of what that world's about. And as soon as you accept subjectivity, the idea that there's multiple different perspectives, each value and probably the best one is gonna be some kind of synthesis of those different perspectives, right? So that's a kind of approaching strategy and approaching management and so forth in the kind of traditional way where we have really intelligent people at the top or even the most intelligent person at the top and he kind of knows what to do, right? So I think that's one example of how the value of that term is really just in that it introduces to a new kind of, a new paradigm, a new paradigm of complexity. And I think that's probably the best way of thinking about it, of looking at it. Personally, I do think that the world is getting more complex, but I understand other people's perspective that maybe it's not, maybe it's always been complex. I mean, there's definitely some truth to that. The world has always been complex, but I do think that, personally, I do think that if you're the CEO of a corporation and you're kind of, I'm trying to run a global corporation in today's worlds, I think you do experience kind of VUCA in a way that you didn't maybe 20, 30 years ago. And I think there is something objective, there's something subjective about that, but there's also something objective too. I think the complexity and the connectivity has proliferated and I think, and that's why this term has kind of risen to prominence I think you do, if you are kind of managing, if you are operating in that very complex, global kind of environment, then you do experience that. But yeah, I mean, just get back to summarize that. I think the value is in just opening up a kind of paradigm vocabulary to complex, then it's more about something subjective than objective. Joss, you actually nailed what I was thinking and I couldn't quite get my words together and what does this put my finger on? What is this thing, this subjective topic that we're talking about and how do we wrap our heads around it? And I'm thinking of people that we have listening and are involved in the chat right now, where are they at in the spectrum of understanding VUCA and their involvement with VUCA? And often we just need that language to wrap our head around different terms and paradigm shifts. And so in our last few minutes, I wanna shift a little and talk about where do we go from here? What do we do? We understand that it's subjective and we have different perspectives and we've approached or dealt with or navigated VUCA in different ways. And so where do our listeners go? What are some takeaways? What are some things that we could be doing personally? I know someone talked about it being really a systemic but that has to start also with us even when things are systemic. And so just I'd love to hear from everybody as one of our wrap-up questions. What's a takeaway? We've heard some already from you all. It's all right if you wanna repeat those and then allow some time for updates from each of us and to hear more about when the next complexity live is. And so with that, Diago, I'll pass it over to you. What is a takeaway? What do we do now? So for me, the main takeaway is basically to understand that the world is interdependent and interrelated and shows this kind of nonlinear behavior all the time. And when it's stable, it's just happens to be in a stable phase. And if we accept that the dynamics are always complex and at some level are gonna be complex actually in manifesting itself, then how we approach things really begins to change. And so for me, the main paradigm that I use to do that is networks, right? So I think networks are interdependent. Networks are behaving in these kinds of ways that Newtonian physics doesn't allow for. And so I think we're like the beginning of really the network era. I think we're finding out so much about networks going forward and that's gonna be our new paradigm going forward. It's not even gonna be necessarily complexity. I think it's going to be networks. And so so much of what we have to take advantage of in terms of opportunities ahead of us have to do with how we work in networks, how we design networks, and how we do new things with networks. And so that's a little bit abstract I realized for most people, but just as kind of like an appetizer into the whole thing because I think this is really where we're headed into a world where network science starts to matter much more than economics. And that's an exciting world to be in. Thanks Diego, Benjamin. Yeah, I mean, I'm very stimulated by what Joss and Diego both said. And I got a little bit of response and Joss mentioned something about the most intelligent person. Well, I'm still gonna say that the most intelligent person, they better be at the top. Where do you want them? So I think in response to Diego's thing, I think, yes networks, but still hierarchies. That's the point. What Diego said also made me remember a good slogan. Always remember that we're between the wars. Be grateful for where we are. But my takeaway is just that I learned a lot today. I'm really grateful to you and Joss and all the contributors. So is keep learning and keep questioning. Keep learning, keep questioning. Get a little curious, we like that. Dionne. Yes, thank you. I think the term VUCA does introduce and invite us to question more about this, the complexity worldview and the complexity paradigm. So for me, I think a takeaway would be for people to start thinking more about what system thinking and complexity thinking actually would mean and how does it influence their way of the personal thinking and their own lives and their working lives and how do they relate or congruent to what they would like to do in their work environment. Whether it constrains them and whether it enables them to create the conditions for change. I'd like to think in terms of management and team in terms of organizations that we should try and move away from the idea that we can actually make change and by just thinking differently that we should start thinking about the idea of curating change and systems of curation and creating conditions that enable us to look at the history, find the ways that we create spaces in the now that we could invite people to join into to create a collaborative future where we could think differently, do differently but also just develop ways of being together in new ways and invite the openness to the complexity and embracing the complex world. Great, thanks, Dion. Just as we wrap up and I will come back to everybody to do updates for the organization but Haley just wrapping up the chat is there anything else you'd like to add on what's going on with the chat? Well, since we have just a few minutes left I think that I'm just kind of processing what everything that's been said in this amazing conversation and then also taking into consideration kind of the chat and what people are asking. A couple of things, decentralization. I really feel like the localization movement is a big part of this as well as the blockchain movement. I'm really hopeful for the localization movement. We talked with Helena Norberg-Hodge, the co-founder of Local Futures and that's another great way for us to deal with Buka and to really kind of think of things in a different way. And then sense making, I thought of Dave Snowden. So we talked with Dave Snowden on the show as well and that's a great tool, his sense making work for organizations who are trying to figure out how to navigate situations. And then there was a question in the chat that was about basically like early warning signals and how do you find those in these situations and figure out if you're at a phase transition or a tipping point. And we recently spoke with Francesco Filia and I thought of him because his work in the financial industry really, it brings complexity science into this world and how he identifies early warning signals so you can check out his work. And we'll be airing his episode in February. So he'll be on the show next month, I believe. And then his work is Fast and Error Capital. So he has some great complexity science research that he brings into the financial field and that kind of tells you how we can look at early warning signals as well. All of that being said, this has been an amazing conversation and we do have some updates for the human currents. We have a Patreon page now. So if you would like to be a contributor of the show, we encourage you to do so. And there's a link on our website for where you can go to help us out. Yes, yes. And any other updates for, and we have our upcoming episodes that are also being rolled out. So we continue to move forward even though our funding is coming to an end so we definitely are relying on the support of our audience. We still have lots in the hopper to come out. And so other updates, any other things that you would like to share before we wrap up? Diego. You know, on my end, just that I will be trying to work in the blockchain world to implement some of these ideas about complexity and I think it's a really good fit. So that's what I'm about for the foreseeable future. And also just to say, thank you to Helene and Angie for hosting this great conversation and everyone awesome talk. Thank you. Yeah, Dionne. Yeah, I think a great resource for exploring complexity is of course complexity labs and all the wonderful videos they've been doing on YouTube and informative research they've been doing. So thumbs up there for complexity labs. I like the work they do as well as the various resources on the internet that has been done and the research done by the Center for Complex Systems in Transition where I'm involved in that has a specific view of complexity from a philosophy of complexity perspective and also then the practical implications for this wonderful books on this post-modernism and complexity written by Kulthulia and also critical complexity and its application to real-world examples. Oh, great. Yeah, we love some good resources to check out too and that's excellent for the listeners. Benjamin, any updates? Anything you'd like to share? I'll plug three websites if I may, Systems and Complexity in Organizations, the Systems Practitioner Organization, scio.org.uk, the Systems Community of Inquiry, syscoi.com, which is a much less well-curated resource than complexity labs, but of interest. And if you're interested in public services and the application of this stuff there, publicservicetransformation.org, and this is the Public Service Transformation Academy. We're running our second annual conference on the 23rd of May in London. Get in touch if you'd like to speak or if you'd like to attend. Fantastic, thank you so much. I am gonna pass it over to Joss to do a final wrap up in some closing words. As a moderator, I'd just like to thank all of our guests and all the people that joined us on our live discussion and to my co-host Haley for moderating that discussion. It has been a really rich discussion and of course, again, I feel like we could have gone on and I have a million more questions doing. So thank you all for sharing your time, your wisdom and your energy. And Joss, with that, I'll pass it over to you. Yeah, thank you very much. I guess we should really do one on complexity management. That should probably be the next one, right? Because this is kind of, VUCA is all about what's happening out there in the environment. And you really need to kind of trace that through to the question then is like, what sort of organizational structure are you gonna build to actually respond to the environment? But we didn't really have time to talk, Dion talked a bit about that, but that's a big part of it. You've got to build something, that changing in the context and looking at the environments, straight away, like I said, it makes you question the kind of structures that you're using in your organization and then kind of reflect whether they're appropriate for that environment, whether the hierarchy is appropriate. And obviously you need something to deal with that environment. You need something that's more agile, more flexible and so forth and more distributed. It's better able to sense the environment locally. It doesn't have to centralize information all the time and kind of wait for response and so forth. There's kind of slow response times in a kind of centralized system, but it's more decentralized and it's better able to sense its environment. And that's obviously why blockchain comes in with what Diego is saying there. I'm a big fan of that mix between complexity theory and blockchain technology and decentralized organizations and how that technology enables us to really create much more sophisticated decentralized systems at a large scale. And going forward, that's gonna be a huge thing, I think, or it's gonna be one way for us to respond to these very kind of dynamic environments that we're operating in. So yeah, I think the next one, complexity management, we need to talk about that, kind of new organizational structures and how we can build decentralized organizations because that's a big part of this. Also, I agree with Benjamin, the world, might not be fully decentralized. The next 30 years is gonna be a transition period with hierarchies, with decentralized systems, and that's a lot of the kind of complexity in the world today, right? We're kind of in two basins of attraction, aren't we, between the hierarchy and between decentralized systems and kind of in a big transition for the next 30 years or whatever. So that's a part of it. And that's just to wrap up on that topic. In terms of what's coming up, we've got our conference in March, like two months away or something, very exciting. Benjamin's gonna be there, Deon's gonna be there. Diego, I'm not sure. Maybe I'll give you a free ticket, hopefully you'll join us, and hopefully the human current will join us and everyone else viewing. But we're just compiling the details at the moment. We'll put out a video and more info soon. So keep an eye out for that. And let's wrap it up here. It was a great conversation, guys, and we'll talk again. Thanks, everybody.