The Ecosystem Hypothesis

The biggest and most-discussed problems of our era — the current pandemic, climate change, political and ideological polarization, racial and income inequality, global supply chains, among others — can only be understood and engaged with as systems of interrelated phenomena and actions.

As long as the broader we continue to see things as inherently, essentially distinct, systems thinking will remain a primarily academic or specialist practice — a set of tools rather than a paradigm-shifting force.

we are now deep into an era in which the unintended consequences — the so-called externalities — of all the world-changing human creations that have resulted from our focus on the discrete, have become so pervasive and encompassing that it’s fair to wonder whether this historical focus on the discrete might be fundamentally problematic, inherently ... See more

From the vantage point of the present moment, the past hundred years emerges as the era of human awakening into connectedness as a through-line, a deep-structural theme of our collective awareness.

We’ve treated humans as separate groups for historically well-known reasons — all the instincts of tribes and tribalism — and yet we now can see clearly that thinking of ourselves as “humanity” — as all of us — is critical to solving the global problems we now face.

Consider this for a moment: The ecosystem is the fundamental unit, the atomic building block of everything in our world. Each of us is an ecosystem, we are made up of ecosystems, and we are participants in ecosystems.

All of this is arising inside the long-established paradigm of distinction, of relating to the world as made up of discrete objects — of which each of us is one.

We are trained from infancy in this paradigm; our parents point to things and people and name them, they repeat and insist and take great pains to ensure we see these things as distinct fro... See more

Framing is decisive. At every moment, we live and operate and relate to the world from inside our framing of it, our mental model of it. Relating to the world as made up of ecosystems will result in very different outcomes than relating to the world as made up of individuals, of discrete things that can be treated distinctly.

Some of these conclusions are useful in the micro, in the moment — but we are learning that measuring and treating discrete phenomena in isolation leads to misunderstanding, mis-treatment, and unintended consequences that can sometimes be severe.

systems thinking has arisen in response to our dawning realization of interconnectedness, our discovery that working with things in isolation is increasingly ineffective and even counterproductive.