An international journal making sense of a complex world through systems thinking.
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This is an article in defence of free thought and Christian values. I greatly admired Charlie Kirk. Today would have been his thirty-third birthday. I liked Charlie Kirk when he was alive, very much enjoyed following him and naturally warmed to him.
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Complex systems theory uses the concept of the attractor to describe configurations towards which a system tends to converge. These are neither goals nor intentional forces. An attractor makes some trajectories more likely than others, selectively more efficient.
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This is the conformism of our times: it demands that we regard the West as the supreme evil, the most wicked civilisation of all, and that we be ashamed of it. Naturally, of all this too, because it is part of Western culture.
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Truth is not a fact but an event. Truth behaves like the inverse of electrons: the moment it is observed, it determines the state of the observer.
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There is an argument that often crops up when we talk about the future of technology. Unfortunately, it is wrong
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I do not remember the exact words, but the idea was this: a soldier’s family is an integral part of his capacity to serve.
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Multiculturalism: what are the conditions for coexistence?
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“The adults are talking here, off you go and play” “It’s none of your business, you can’t have your say” This is “grown-up talk”, how often have you heard it? You’re no welcome guest in their discussions.
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Some companies are genuine corporations; others merely play the part. The former have tens of thousands of employees, offices in many countries, inevitably complex processes and a genuine need to translate what happens into numbers that can be understood from afar.
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There is a figure that, to my mind, captures Europe’s problem perfectly, and no, it is not about immigration, but rather something much more deep-rooted that is causing us to destroy ourselves.
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In the cartoon Heidi, most of us remember the character: Clara Sesemann is the girl in the wheelchair. She is frail and pale, and lives in Frankfurt in an enormous house, with a terrifying governess and a father who is often away.
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What is a company really measuring when it says it is measuring value? On 26 August 2026, Meta reached a $17 billion settlement. Among other things, the agreement provides for a daily two-hour limit on Facebook and Instagram for users aged 13 to 17 (adjustable only by parents), a default night-time block, a ban on displaying like counts to under-18s, and the option for minors to enable a feed without algorithmic recommendations.
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What is culture? It seems a trivial question, but it is anything but. Culture is commonly defined as ‘the body of knowledge, values, beliefs and behaviours that an individual acquires through study or that a social group shares and passes down over time’. A definition so thoroughly normalised that it seems neutral and complete; a pity it is neither.
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We created AI to save time, and in many organisations that saved time is turning into a stream of content that no one can keep up with in full.
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The internet has accustomed us to thinking that having influence means having an audience. The more people follow you, the more authoritative you seem. This is the audience model: one person at the centre and many people around them listening. But for those who produce knowledge, it may not be the right model.
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The prevailing narrative goes like this: young people are not having children because they have no money.
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Every age produces its own keywords. Some finally make visible phenomena that already existed but did not yet have a shared name. In the world of work, few words in recent years have enjoyed the success of the adjective "toxic".
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The Catholic Church has an assimilation problem. Except that it concerns ordained priests, who are within the Church but no longer assimilated.
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Why suppressing them does not work, ruminating makes things worse, and the only useful thing is to ask them what they are trying to say
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Explanations that hold up in a meeting almost never describe what is happening
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Every model of reality contains a greater or lesser portion of reality. Error is the point at which reality exceeds the model. This is why a culture that seeks to eliminate error risks also losing the principal mechanism through which it discovers the limits of its own representations.
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When emergencies become a competitive advantage The most effective organisations do not eliminate the unexpected. They learn to turn it into knowledge.
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When too many texts published online, in newspapers or on social media are written, sometimes even thought up, by AI, something happens to the language we all share. The innocent and largely unacknowledged victim is the richness of the language through which we understand, describe and discuss reality.
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The epistemic responsibility of medical communication on social media. What can an American philosopher in love with Hollywood comedy teach us about the surgeon who posts photographs of their work on Instagram?
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Every act of help distributes incentives that determine how social systems evolve.
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Some words begin as descriptions of a phenomenon and end up preventing us from understanding it in all its complexity.
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Various studies show how humour activates attention, memory and engagement, turning a presentation into an experience the brain genuinely remembers.
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The human mind, as we now know, is lazy and works through heuristics. Faced with a choice whose outcome is uncertain, we are inclined to take shortcuts
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Companies should hire philosophers, because philosophers create concepts. Companies are complex structures fuelled by meaning. They need to be understood by those who work in them and by the market, but they also need to understand the market, their competitors, the changes taking place around them and even their own identity.
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What we lose when we stop putting effort into what we produce.
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Business leaders are accustomed to engaging with people – on the board, among consultants or with colleagues – in meetings where meaning and value emerge from the interplay of different experiences and perspectives. Today, however, leaders are discovering a new interlocutor: generative artificial intelligence. Not as a collaborator to whom they can delegate the drafting of texts or reports, but as a cognitive partner, capable of opening up spaces for strategic reflection and helping to create new meaning for the organisation.
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Why some organisational conflicts are produced by structures rather than people. Most failures of collaboration do not arise from major conflicts.
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To begin, education must be defined as a category in the strong sense. Without a strong definition, education is reduced to morality, custom, policy or social adaptation.
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The most insidious errors arise from explanations convincing enough to bring the search for alternatives to a halt.
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You get that far and it seems as though the landscape you are looking at could stay that way for ever, pleasantly placid, with a few bends, a few rises and falls and the odd unexpected hairpin turn, because the panoramas granted to human beings are never arranged according to criteria of perfection and stasis. For a long time you imagine that your future will have the same colours as the past, the same shades, the same flourishes.
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‘Have you seen how much Giovannino has grown? If he carries on like this, by the time he’s twenty he’ll be at least three metres tall.’
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The significance of an action increases when the subject has a stake in its outcome. The incarnation is one of the most extraordinary and least understood facts of the Christian tradition. For almost two thousand years, Christians have affirmed that God enters history as a man who is born, grows up, and knows hunger, thirst, fatigue, physical pain, anguish and death.
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With the birth of formal mathematics, particularly in ancient Greece, and then with its modern systematisation, humanity begins to conceive of complex abstract thought. The world is reduced to numbers, proportions and ideal forms. Thought takes on a deductive, sequential structure.
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Learning means progressively changing how we observe, understand and interpret reality, rebuilding the learner from within rather than merely adding information.
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From the twentieth century onwards, with the crises in the foundations of mathematics, scientific revolutions and the emergence of the cognitive sciences, a decisive epistemological rift opens at the heart of thought: knowledge is no longer understood as a closed, self-sufficient and deductively complete system. Rather, it appears as an open, unstable, processual and constitutively interpretative field.
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If an AI makes a wrong decision, does responsibility concern only the final decision, or also the fact that this decision was among the possibilities the system had been designed to consider?
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No cognitive system, human or artificial, processes the world: it selects a small part of the world and makes it tractable. True intelligence, then, lies in being able to see what one’s own process of selection has excluded.
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The organisational paradox: why companies entrust process design to the wrong people
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Why AI fails to recognise the strategic exception and how this can put your business at risk
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To understand, you need to know the facts and their possible consequences. Your experience and the information you have acquired must be sufficient to reveal to you the workings of the world, of nature and society, and other people’s tendencies and motives. You have to think them through.
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The doctor does not take the patient’s desire as the basis for a treatment decision.
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The thesis of this article is not about justice or anyone’s superiority over anyone else, but about the exceptional nature of the West (precisely because it departs from the norm among societies), which has been capable of building institutions devoted to fallibility: science, peer review, the separation of powers, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, adversarial proceedings, philosophical criticism, the university, constitutional revision and so on.
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An alternative reading of abstention and the belief that every fall in turnout is a symptom of democratic crisis.
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Human beings deal with uncertainty by constructing compressed representations of the paths linking the present to possible futures, rather than modelling the full complexity of the situation.
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How real leadership emerges in organisations. At the bottom of every email you send, there is a line saying who you are and what you do: a name, a title, a department. It is the official version of your role, the one the company decided on, the one human resources recorded. Perhaps you agreed it with them; it is certainly the one that appears on the organisation chart.
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Complexity is managed not through individual expertise, but through the methodical comparison of mental models
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A manager who asks AI “what is the best option?” before establishing what “best” means has already surrendered the most important part of their role.
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A hand can heal perfectly and leave a patient dissatisfied. The problem often begins with the questions no one has asked.
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Our minds discard almost all the information they receive, selecting only what they consider relevant. Values, goals and beliefs act as the criteria for this selection. Understanding how the attentional filter works means understanding why some people see opportunities everywhere while others feel submerged in noise.
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If only all jobs were alike! Complex issues rarely admit simple solutions, and smart working belongs in this category. Public debate has gradually reduced the subject to a deadlocked confrontation: on one side, the idea that people are being brought back to the workplace to keep them under control; on the other, the belief that employees want to stay at home simply to avoid working. Both positions offensively trivialise the legitimate arguments on either side.
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when research means discovering value in what the organisation already has Innovation through exaptation arises when, through a new linguistic classification, meaning opens up an economic space that was previously invisible.
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Gregor’s Room An allegory of the capacity of environments to generate and classify the beings they contain. When Kafka’s Metamorphosis is discussed, all attention centres on Gregor Samsa. His transformation into an insect is analysed (Kafka wrote Verwandlung, not Metamorphose); his relationship with his family, his guilt, alienation and work are examined, leading ultimately to the question of what human condition all the events of the story might be a metaphor for.
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Many innovations can emerge from a new way of naming and using what we already have within the company. Many companies expect innovation to come from outside. New technologies, markets, talent, consultants or miracles. Much as football clubs do when they want to reverse a run of poor results by buying players from other leagues. It is understandable, and sometimes it works.
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In the language of management, few words enjoy a better reputation than efficiency. For over a century, organisations have sought to reduce waste, eliminate redundancies, simplify procedures and accelerate decision-making. The ideal business is often imagined as a perfectly designed machine, in which every component performs its function with the lowest possible consumption of resources.
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How AI is shifting the point at which responsibility stops within organisations
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Who will retain the capacity to challenge the system that produces the thinkable?
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Contemporary organisations have information to spare. They are increasingly connected and quicker to respond to familiar stimuli. But when the context shifts sideways, when signals do not come through the usual channels, and when needs are not incremental but discontinuous, some businesses find themselves in a state of structural fragility.
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Organisations grow because some individuals give interpretations as gifts. The sentence may seem unusual. We are accustomed to thinking that organisations grow thanks to capital, technology, processes or skills. All important elements. Yet none of them is sufficient to explain why some organisations develop an extraordinary ability to understand their environment while others, despite having similar resources, remain trapped in outdated readings of reality. The difference often lies in the production and circulation of meaning.
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Businesses fail because they observe the world through metrics, categories and models designed to optimise the core, not to interpret what is changing
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Why do the world’s largest and most sophisticated organisations hire philosophers, anthropologists, ethicists, cognitive scientists, linguists or historians of ideas?
