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There is a difference between designing a highway system and designing fewer accidents.

The highway system is designable. You can specify it, model it, hand it to engineers, and what emerges will closely resemble what you drew. You can point to the blueprint and say: that is what we are building. The materials are known, the steps are known, the o…

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Should’s are the output of a complicated system.

The standards, the jigs and the protocols that come before the scaffolding of efficiency. The straight lines that hope to contain the circles of human thinking and creativity.

“Nature is wiggly. Everything wiggles ... we say well let’s get things straightened out, let’s get this ironed out, let’s get…

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Interconnected overrules design: complex systems are not designable

Emergence (‘it just happens…’ as one student informally articulated) is the opposite of design.

There is no navigating complexity without self-leadership.

Confusion is creativity. Creativity exists before language; anything else is production.

Being and doing, person and persona, complicated and complex are all proxies of the same tension.

Only by articulating dichotomies can we initiate the micro-movements necessary to change our world (/with integration in mind).

System is as complex as we need it to be: we can exercise reduction if the situation allows, and seek extra details (context) when the solution slides off the problem.

Complex systems are open-ended (beyond n-dimensions), hence a machine can never be intelligent.

Complicated systems–like a car, computer program, or highway system–are an elaborate stacking of known constructs.

Plans are always complicated, execution is always complex.

We can model the difference between complex and complicated as the difference between designing a highway system and designing fewer accidents.