A Seat in the Cockpit of the?Future

We’re standing at a crossroads — one that is going to define how we tackle some of the most complex challenges of our time. You feel it in your industries, in your boardrooms, and even in the day-to-day decision-making that impacts your teams. We’re still largely operating from a mindset built for a different era — an era of machines. But here’s the hard truth: our companies, institutions, and even our lives are not machines. They are systems. And if we want to thrive in a world defined by complexity, it’s time we start thinking and acting like systems leaders.

We have to move from the mechanistic to the systemic.

For generations, we’ve organized our businesses, governments, and economies around mechanistic thinking. It was born out of the Enlightenment, shaped by Newton, Descartes, and other great thinkers who saw the world as a machine to be understood, mastered, and optimized. In the mechanistic worldview, every part of an organization could be broken down, analyzed, and improved individually.

Imagine a bicycle. It’s a product of mechanistic thinking — designed and optimized to move efficiently, where each gear, wheel, and chain plays a role in taking us from point A to point B. Now, for the longest time, we’ve built our world — our corporations, our institutions, even our economies — like bicycles. They are machines, created piece by piece, functioning by clear and simple rules. We tweak one part, and the machine works better. Need speed? Add more gears. Need stability? Adjust the frame.

For a long time, this worked. We could optimize our industries the way we might tinker with a bike — adjust the gears, oil the chain, add better brakes.

We ran our corporations like machines, tweaking individual departments, squeezing out efficiency, and expecting smooth, linear progress. It was the age of “just-in-time” thinking, of supply chains built for speed and predictability. We built everything from this mindset — our companies, our institutions, even our global economies.

But here’s the problem: the world we live in today is not a straight path where optimizing a few parts will fix the system. It’s more like driving that bicycle through a city filled with unpredictable turns, shifting weather patterns, and constant disruptions. The old mechanistic model of thinking simply doesn’t hold up. Our challenges have evolved — they’re now complex, interconnected, and ever-changing. And yet, too many of us are still trying to tweak the gears on a machine when what we need is to understand the system as a whole.

Enter Quantum Thinking

Let’s pivot to the solution: quantum thinking.

Giles Hutchins, an expert in systems design, coined this idea by distinguishing between the mechanistic worldview and the Quantum Complexity. Where the mechanistic worldview sees isolated parts, quantum thinking recognizes the interdependence of everything — just like in a system.

Take your company. If you’re running a department, you’re not just managing a machine of isolated functions — each team, each decision, each outcome affects the whole. The way your marketing department communicates influences product development. The way operations run impacts customer service. Your company is an orchestra, not a machine, where the emergent properties — the synergy, innovation, and growth — are greater than the sum of their parts.

Think of an orchestra. You don’t just swap out a violin for a flute and expect the same harmony. Every part, every note, every tempo shift affects the whole. In fact, the magic of the orchestra is the emergent property — the symphony — that is greater than the sum of its parts.

The same is true for the football team, where the brilliance of play emerges not just from individual talent, but from the interplay of those talents as a system.

Remember Brazil’s crushing 7–1 loss to Germany in the 2014 World Cup semi-final? It wasn’t just the absence of Neymar that caused Brazil to fall apart — it was the exposure of a mechanistic approach that couldn’t handle the complexity of a high-functioning system. Brazil had built their game around individual talent, and when Neymar was out, their structure collapsed. The Germans, meanwhile, weren’t relying on one star. They played as a system, each part interdependent, seamlessly working together. The result? Complete domination.

This is exactly what we need to learn in today’s business world. Success doesn’t come from optimizing one element; it comes from understanding the system as a whole. Just like Germany that night, companies that embrace systemic thinking will outmaneuver those still stuck in the mechanistic mindset.

Quantum thinking invites us to look at the world differently, to see our companies, industries, and societies not as static entities to be optimized, but as dynamic systems to be navigated. Systems that are interdependent, filled with feedback loops, and driven by resilience, not efficiency.

And let’s be clear, the change is already happening.

The Three Horizons Framework

Think of the three horizons: Horizon One is where most of us are today — running on a legacy system that was built for a more predictable, mechanistic world. But complexity is rising, and it’s pushing that old system to its limits.

Horizon Two is where the disruptions live — the technological breakthroughs, the shifts in policy, the new finance instruments, artificial intelligence, and beyond.

These disruptions will either cause chaos or serve as the bridge to Horizon Three — the future where companies, ecosystems, and societies are operating as interdependent systems.

This is not science fiction. We are already seeing it in action. Look at how supply chains are evolving. They’re becoming more resilient, diversified, and decentralized. The same goes for talent management, where cross-functional teams now work in dynamic, fluid structures rather than siloed departments.

Horizon Three is the world of systems, and the companies that thrive will be those that understand how to manage, navigate, and thrive within these complex ecosystems.

Take the global logistics nightmare triggered by COVID-19. Before the pandemic, most companies operated on a mechanistic, “just-in-time” supply chain model — focused on efficiency, minimizing costs, and reducing inventory. It worked well in a stable world. But when COVID-19 hit, the entire system was thrown into chaos. A Horizon Two disruption. Factories shut down, shipping routes were disrupted, and demand for certain goods skyrocketed while others plummeted.

The mechanistic mindset couldn’t keep up because it treated each disruption as an isolated event — a factory closure here, a delayed shipment there — without seeing the complex, interconnected web of consequences.

Quantum thinking, however, enables us to see this from a systemic perspective. The pandemic didn’t just affect individual businesses; it revealed how tightly interconnected our global systems truly are. Every delay in production rippled through supply chains, affecting industries across the board. It was a real-time lesson in complexity, where the old mechanistic playbook failed. What we needed — and still need — is a quantum approach that embraces complexity, adapts to the unpredictability, and builds resilience into our systems. COVID-19 was the wake-up call: in a world this interconnected, we need to think in systems, not machines.

Why This Matters Now

The clock is ticking. As CEOs, senior managers, and industry leaders, you are in the cockpit of this transition. We’re moving from a world defined by linear thinking and predictability to one dominated by complexity and uncertainty.

As we grapple with the polycrisis — the interconnected challenges of climate, economy, and geopolitics — we must recognize that the adjacent possible hovers just on the edges of our current reality.

The adjacent possible is the shadow future, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself.

The polycrisis — a word now common in boardrooms and strategy discussions — it’s essential to rethink how we approach it. We’ve been treating these crises — climate, economic instability, geopolitical tensions — as separate, isolated events, like desegregated files in a reductionist, mechanistic framework. But the truth is, they are interconnected. It’s not enough to just react to a wildfire or a market crash; we have to ask what made the forest flammable, or the system vulnerable, in the first place. Until we adopt a systemic view that recognizes how these crises feed into one another, we’ll keep missing the bigger picture — and the solutions.

This isn’t just theoretical; it’s playing out in real time, within a single human psychological developmental timeframe.

Change is happening at a pace that’s no longer generational but personal, inside our own lives. We’re witnessing — and living through — the rapid evolution of systems, where quantum leaps in thinking open up entirely new pathways for leadership, innovation, and sustainability.

Understanding the adjacent possible isn’t just about anticipating change; it’s about shaping it.

The good news? We have a roadmap.

Quantum thinking — understanding how everything is interconnected — has an offspring: regenerative design.

Regenerative design offers a way forward, not just by recognizing the interdependence of systems but by actively enhancing their resilience. It’s about designing for continuous renewal, building organizations that don’t just withstand disruption but evolve and thrive in response to it.

In this model, we stop chasing efficiency at the cost of long-term viability and instead build regenerative systems that create value, adapt, and replenish themselves, much like natural ecosystems. This approach is not just a strategy for survival — it’s a fundamental shift in how we think about leadership, innovation, and sustainability. This shift isn’t just a buzzword. It’s a revolution in how we approach the future of business and growth.

We need to design our organizations to thrive within complexity, to understand how every decision ripples across the system, and to create the kind of emergent properties — whether it’s innovation, culture, or growth — that can’t be achieved through mechanistic tinkering.

So, if you’re still trying to fix the bicycle by tweaking the gears, it’s time to rethink the entire system. Quantum thinking is about recognizing the whole and embracing the complex, dynamic world we now live in.

This is the great leadership challenge of our time.

Will we rise to meet it?

A personal note: if you know a leader might be open to asking the question: is a bicycle what you really need? encourage them to ask it and id you are willing to go further, please tag her or him to this post

Thanks for your support!