Doug Garnett’s Complexity Blog

Continuing our exploration of knowledge amid complexity, I’ve turned the blog over to strategist JP Castlin for his thoughts on safe-to-fail experiments.

The first two posts in this series (Part 1, Part 2) have laid out the challenges involved with traditional learning as it attempts to understand a complex world.

The first post in this series introduced readers to the reality that research following the conventional scientific paradigm cannot—and will not—comprehend the complex realities of doing business.

Researching my upcoming book one critical issue became clear: The methods and practices used in study today are incapable, on their own, of comprehending the inherent complexity of doing business.

In three recent posts I laid out a Paradox of Systems Science (Part I , Part II. and Part III).

My prior two posts (Part I and Part II) introduced readers to what I called the Paradox of Systems Science: The whole of each business is, and always will be, a complex adaptive system containing, and interacting with, many other complex adaptive systems.

In my last post I set up the idea of a paradox of systems—where we must use at least some system reductions to take action yet those same reductions introduce significant errors.

My upcoming book about complexity science in business includes both complexity and systems science in the title—The Complexity Paradigm: Using Systems Science to Drive Business Success.

My upcoming book — The Complexity Paradigm: Using System Science to Drive Business Success — considers the effect of paradigms in business.

Available January 2027—pre-order today.

“Even in reasoning upon some subjects, it is a mistake to aim at an unattainable precision.

[A]lthough the past is never completely knowable, it is more knowable than the future.[1] …John Lewis Gaddis, Historian [T]he world’s most prominent specialists are rarely held accountable for their predictions, so we continue to rely on them even when th…