The complexity at the heart of the polycrisis: What does it mean for emerging leaders?

This blog mini-series explores the design process behind the Cohort 2040 leadership initiative. In this first blog Daniel Jonusas, our design assistant, explores how a better understanding of complex systems can help emerging leaders face a difficult future.

The global response to the climate crisis is mired in disagreement and plagued by uncertainty. 

No set of priorities seem to match the scale of the problem. Political dynamics change at a moment’s notice: the USA spends years in the wilderness, only to drive escalating international policy ambition with the passing of the Inflation Reduction Act. Economic models have consistently underestimated the speed of cost reductions and the growth potential of key renewable and energy storage technologies.

Carbon Brief recently demonstrated the disparity between IEA projected outlooks and the actual growth of solar capacity

The word to describe all of this? Complexity.

Preparing emerging leaders to work with instead of against complexity is at the core of our design for a pilot Cohort 2040 leadership development initiative. 

So the problem is complex. What difference does it make?

It’s an overused word. But we use complexity to describe something specific. Complexity science is all about how systems interact to bring about change. Since these interacting components are nested into each other, the science of complexity can be applied to the dynamics of global trade right down to an organism’s genetic makeup. 

We’re concerned with how complexity reveals the invisible barriers to transformative climate action - and how it identifies the most effective leverage points for change.

Supporting leaders to handle complexity is crucial to realising a decisive transition. Complexity thinking can be used to understand the systems a leader operates in: not only why resistance to change occurs, but how to facilitate working relationships to nurture emerging solutions. 

A complex systems approach shows a crisis not as an isolated event, but a fluctuation in the movement of systems which can be prevented, absorbed or even harnessed to advance change. 

Taking a complexity lens to the problems of the climate crisis also guarantees a focus on root causes, recognising that whole systems can’t be shifted by tweaking at the margins.

What makes a system complex in the first place?

Working with complexity is a way of seeing the same system in a new light. Be it a community group, political party or the global economy, a complex system is one in which everything is connected. The more interconnected, the more complex things become. 

This was evident in the building pressure of global climate activism, especially among younger generations, on the back of the Paris Agreement. This period of dynamic growth was accelerated by the global connections fostered between movements across social media platforms.

Growing interconnection causes systems to start behaving in non-linear ways. A small nudge in one area of the system can trigger a disproportionately large reaction from a completely different area of the system.

School students took self-organising strike action worldwide in response to the 2018 Fridays for Future campaign

These non-linear connections mean there’s no traditional hierarchy in the system, so when change happens it’s largely self-organising. Complexity thinking recognises that, while there is a place for conventional authority figures, change is a direction of travel, not a top-down agenda.

In the case of climate activism, that nudge came in 2018 with the sudden explosion of non-linear dynamics across the globe. Media coverage spiked over record temperatures in Europe; Greta Thunberg’s Fridays for Future campaign gained global attention; millions of protesters self-organised into strikes and demonstrations; Extinction Rebellion launched the largest popular demonstration in London for decades.

Depending on your perspective, this cascading chain of interactions can look increasingly messy or instead like the assembling of order.

Either way, what rises out of this spiral of activity is called emergence. The idea is that a complex system never settles back to how things were. Instead, it is always in a state of flux toward something new. 

After 2018, the political framing of the climate crisis was transformed. Isolated agendas morphed into a network of narrative threads running through seemingly unrelated issues. These threads proliferate through parallel crises: the economic aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic was pitched in terms of a green recovery, while ongoing strategies around Russia’s invasion of Ukraine are understood through the power dynamics of fossil fuel and renewable energy resources.

Rescue teams evacuate patients and medical workers from the flooded Fuwai Central China Cardiovascular Hospital after torrential rains in Zhengzhou, Henan Province, China, 22 July 2021. Photo: Copyright © Wang Fuxiao/VCG/Getty Images

Understanding the past is important, but it doesn’t necessarily help when planning the best way forward. Once a complex system starts to move in a certain direction, these reinforcing patterns make it increasingly difficult to reverse or change course. This path dependence helps to identify positive tipping points: places where systems intersect, where it’s possible to leverage huge, cascading changes in response to a handful of coordinated actions.

The solution lies in the problem

The core characteristics of complex systems sound a lot like the trickier aspects of the climate crisis, and for good reason. Every person and organisation involved is inherently connected and has their own agenda: a step in one direction risks closing a door to another. 

The most constructive cooperation at the COPs now seems to bypass political choke points outside the bubble of negotiations. Meanwhile, every aspect of our daily lives feels so dependent on fossil fuels that the weight of the status quo often seems impossible to shift. Not to mention the tipping points in the Earth’s systems, which threaten to trigger a cascade of non-linear environmental changes once global heating passes certain thresholds. 

After all, ignoring the complexity of Earth’s systems is the crux of the problem. The negative impacts of extracting natural resources and destroying living ecosystems were always going to be reflected in the interconnected, non-linear activity of these systems eventually.

We are now witnessing growing destabilisation in both social and environmental systems on a regular basis. This demonstrates that, when it’s mishandled, complexity can easily pitch into crisis. 

Complexity in Cohort 2040

Our design process is looking at how to cultivate in emerging leaders the ability to drive the just transition even as the turbulence increases, understanding that disasters are not discrete: they are crests on the waves of complexity. 

The next generation of leaders face an uncertain and unforgiving future. In fact, it’s already here. We want to better prepare them to navigate their way, handling crises with their eyes on the horizon. 

To achieve this, the Cohort 2040 research team has been conducting in-depth interviews with an international set of leading practitioners in fields ranging from leadership development to managing global complex risks. 

The next post in this mini-series will explore the key lessons from this process and what complexity leadership means in practice.