Jan 7, 2025
Welcome to the New Year. May the year ahead be nothing short of epic for you, your family and loved ones, and your business. Looking back at 2024, as well as looking forward to what 2025 may hold and bring, it feels to me that the word which describes the overall environment best is “involution” – the act of involving, entangling, or complicating something.
The staggering rise of AI throughout 2024 (just take a look at the sheer insane pace of new AI model releases), the wild changes in the geopolitical landscape globally, combined with the overall societal and environmental changes (did you know that Generation Beta is here already?), leads many of us on the path of involution. When the worlds feels complex, uncertain, and ambiguous, we have a tendency to respond in kind. We are fighting fire with fire.
And for good reason – each new AI model release, for example, doesn’t simply add to our capabilities; it multiplies the questions we must grapple with: ethical considerations, societal impacts, organizational adaptations, and personal relevance.
Just take a look at the cannon of newly released business books and articles – ever more complex “frameworks” promise to help us make sense of an ever more complex world. Which, in turn, makes things even more complex. We actively add to the “complexity debt” of our environment and systems.
Maybe a better reaction (and not just a coping mechanism) is to bring the essentials back into focus. Operate from first principles, hone in on what really matters, and cut out the fluff. Make decisions based on purpose, embrace simplicity by following Dieter Ram’s timeless mantra of “less, but better”, and put the human at the center of your decisions.
As we navigate 2025, the challenge isn’t to eliminate complexity – it’s inevitable and often necessary. Instead, the opportunity lies in developing what we might call “complexity wisdom” – the ability to engage with complexity without being consumed by it. While involution might be a defining characteristic of our time, it doesn’t have to define our response.
The real opportunity of 2025 might not be in mastering complexity, but in mastering our relationship with it.
@Pascal
