The Ecosystem Hypothesis

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.

This is less a statement about what is than a proposed framing or lens through which we view and relate to the world and everything in our experience.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.