Operating in a World of Entangled Complexity: Three Modes of Action
In a world defined by accelerating entanglement, complexity is no longer a feature of certain systems—it is the substrate of reality. With every action producing a web of second- and third-order effects, our responses have likewise evolved. Yet, how we choose to see and act within this complexity fundamentally shapes the systems we build and the futures we unlock.
Historically, we have defaulted to two dominant modes of navigating complexity:
1. Linear Optimization: The Local, Predictable Agent
This mode operates from a standpoint of presumed clarity. It assumes boundedness, predictability, and legibility. Rooted in industrial logic and single-point optimization, this view simplifies the world into control systems—companies, contracts, policies—with narrow scopes of care and responsibility. It enables scale by reducing complexity into solvable parts, but fails in the face of deeply entangled systems where effects are distributed and deferred.
2. The Portfolio: Universal Perception and Distributed Allocation
With the rise of computational capacity, financial instrumentation, and data-driven foresight, a second mode has emerged: the godlike allocator. Here, the response to complexity is not simplification, but abstraction. From a systemic, top-down vantage point, one identifies portfolios of risk and opportunity, allocating resources across a ladder of interventions—across time, space, and typology. This view treats complexity probabilistically, aiming to navigate uncertainty through diversification, feedback loops, and adaptive investment. It is far more capable than the linear model, but still presumes a kind of externalism—a disembodied comprehension of the system from above.
But we may be entering a third, still coalescing worldview—one that responds not by controlling or comprehending complexity from a distance, but by inhabiting it more fully.
3. The Tender Agentic: Acting Within and With Complexity
This mode begins from a radically different premise: that the world is increasingly agentic. Not just humans, but non-human systems, ecologies, infrastructures, and artificial intelligences now exhibit forms of agency—interdependent, responsive, and evolving. In such a landscape, the idea of universal perception becomes insufficient, even delusional. Instead, we must develop a praxis of:
Tentativeness: Acting provisionally, with humility, aware of our partial views.
Tenderness: Relating through care, reciprocity, and expanded empathy.
Dialogics: Engaging as participants in a web of conversation, rather than observers or controllers.
Distributed Learning: Building capacity not just to know, but to grow knowing—through co-sensing and co-evolving with the system.
This worldview does not deny the utility of the other two—it relativizes them. It holds that no single view can be totalizing. Instead, it recognizes that we must move fluidly between all three:
A New Trinitarian Logic of Action
To operate meaningfully in a world of entangled complexity, we must learn to navigate between three modes of sensemaking and response:
Predictive Agency – acting with confidence in bounded domains of clarity.
Portfolio Stewardship – allocating adaptively across uncertainty from a universalist perspective.
Dialogic Co-Agency – engaging with emergence through care, humility, and ongoing co-becoming.
The institutional economy of the past century has been heavily tilted toward the first. The financial and computational revolutions of the last 40 years have enabled the second. But it is the third—still emergent—that may prove essential for the futures we must now steward into being.
Toward Agentic Pluralism
We do not need to choose a single mode. Rather, the work is to build architectures—of governance, finance, design, and coordination—that can hold the tension between these modes. To recognize when to act decisively, when to allocate adaptively, and when to listen, pause, and care.
This is not just a shift in strategy—it is a shift in ontology. From “what should I do to control this system?” to “how do I participate in its unfolding?” From godlike power to agentic relationality.
It is a recalibration of what it means to be responsible in the face of complexity.
I think i would argue that complexity was always a substrate of reality,: perhaps part of what you are articulating is how can we be deeply at home in that reality?
Thank you for this clearly articulated description of world views. It’s very helpful. They will all exist simultaneously, however my hope is to reduce 1 and 2 and increase 3 but this may or may not be possible. I often find myself in existential arguments with family and find it difficult to articulate my position/vision of what I’m working for whilst acknowledging that other worlds will continue to exist regardless.