James Glattfelder

It sounds paradoxical, but today it appears that we understand more about the universe than our society. We have created systems that have outgrown our capacity to genuinely understand and control them. Just think about the ongoing financial crisis. But recent advancements in the study of complex systems are able to offer new insights into the workings of many real-world systems.

While our traditional ways of thinking and problem solving have been strongly shaped by the success of the reductionist approach taken in science, the new science of complexity focuses on interconnection and co-dependence. It is a paradigmatic shift away from analyzing the nature of “things” to uncovering and understanding the network of interdependence lying behind and influencing the “things” themselves.