Complexity and systems

Start with these

1. Making Complexity Visible: You Cannot Simplify the Ocean, Only Chart It

   When a system is hard to see, decisions migrate to whoever holds the context. You cannot simplify the ocean, only chart it: why a live view of a system widens the circle of people who can think about it.

2. Complexence

   Complexity is the condition of the world. Complexence is the quality you bring to it: the capability of standing inside a system larger than yourself, seeing it whole, and still choosing. A word for the thing all my work has been about.

3. How to Live Coherently Inside Complex Systems

   Coherent complexity is what you get when a complex system is made legible without being made simple. You do not reduce it. You map it, until you can move through it on purpose. A field guide to the practice, and the idea behind everything else I build.

4. Domain Cartography

   Domain cartography is the practice of charting a complex domain you have to live and act inside, until it is legible enough to navigate. Not making it simple. Making it readable. Here is the field, the method, and the six layers every map needs.

5. How to Map a Domain: The Six Layers

   The hardest part of mapping a complex domain is the blank page. Here are the six layers I run every domain through, from primitives to levels, with the question each one answers, how to actually do it, and the failure mode that shows up when you skip it.

Series

• Loops and Legibility 8 parts
• Reading the Cybernetics Canon 4 parts

Where it leads

• Cybernetics: a reading path, with audio primers
• The Atlas: every page and how it links

Everything in Complexity and systems (20)