The Overview Effect, A Catalyst For Systems Change (Part III)

One of the phenomena that often arises in a complex world is a complexity gap.
This emerges from the mismatch between the complexity of our problems and our ability to manage them effectively. We often see this in how traditional institutions are overwhelmed by 21st-century adversities stemming from an exponential rise in interconnectivity, such as climate change, AI governance, global poverty, social inequalities, and more.12

This discrepancy can be explained by how the default paradigms driving our behavior have not yet caught up with the complexity of our planetary challenges. While our environments are non-linear and emergent, our ways of thinking are often linear and reductive. Our past mental models built for less complex environments no longer manage well in novel settings steeped with new orders of magnitude of interconnection.

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