Everything Happens for a Reason: But Probably Not the One You Think!

Path Notes # 28

Events, dear boy, events!

British Prime Minister Harold McMillan’s alleged reply when asked about the greatest challenges he faced in his premiership.

Politics and the news are all about events. And we’re naturally drawn to them rather than attractors. Events are visible, nameable, and narratively satisfying. Attractors on the other hand are subtle, persistent, and often mistaken for ‘the way things are.’

But attractors - not events - do most of the causal work in complex systems.

In this post, I’m going to dig into causality. How do ‘things’ affect each other in complex systems? How can we understand – let alone predict – what unfolds from their relationships? And how do we intervene with greater skill and precision when we’re trying to influence the world around us…especially when things are so polarized? And what might consciousness and worldview have to do with any of that?

As systems thinkers, we still tend to over-emphasize linear causality.

At the same time, we under-estimate the way that path dependence, latent patterns of coherence and attractors, adjacent possibility, incentive landscapes and downward causality shape reality. I’m going to take look at them, how they interact and what all that might mean for aspiring co-evolutionary regenerative practitioners!

It’s not really a light read. These are path notes where I try to think aloud. But if you’re seriously tenacious about bringing a complexity lens to your change work, you may find some value - or at least some generative provocation - here.

I hope it’s useful!

A Fine Line

If something is linear it means it progresses along a straight line. And few things are more satisfying – or misleading – than a good old straight line showing how one thing is connected to - or causes - another. It’s probably telling that the term we use in English to describe the majority of causal relationships in the universe is a negative!

Non-linear.

There’s obviously an implicit assumption that linear ought to be the default setting.

But it ain’t!

A great challenge for the systems-curious is our tendency to ascribe linearity where it doesn’t exist. Those lines look great on a systems map but they seldom translate to the real world.

Of course in relatively simple or tightly bounded systems with few variables, causality can usefully be modelled as linear and one-directional. A driver puts their foot on the gas pedal and the car accelerates. But in the systems we are trying to study and influence there will be dozens – or more likely thousands – of such dimensions all impacting each other…not randomly, but through chains of interaction that are far too diffuse or delayed to trace cleanly.

Now we enter the realm of complex causality.

The driver presses the gas pedal and three months later 30% of the red cars in a different city start accelerating!

In complex contexts, cause and effect are separated by time and space and the variables are multi-directional, multi-dimensional and often exponential. Large actions can end up having no significant or lasting effect. Conversely, tiny actions replicated across networks can lead to fundamental change over time.

Systems leaders are often trying to influence fields with multiple, ‘non-obvious’ patterns of causation and inter-dependence that they have insufficient data or bandwidth (psychological, cognitive, imaginative, functional) to effectively represent. Compounding this challenge is our tendency – psychologically, culturally…even linguistically – to over-attribute causality to a single driver within the system. Such attribution errors make us vulnerable to the alluring power of a totalizing causal plot.

A too-simple story which can be pointed to in the face of uncertainty.

Heroes and villains. A wrathful deity. The devil. A corrosive ideology. Outsiders and scapegoats. Trauma. The deep state. The Illuminati. Satanic paedophile alien lizards. Our desire for clear linear causality forms the basis for animating but inaccurate stories.

It’s why systems thinkers will often say that for every complex problem there is a solution that is clear, simple….and completely wrong!

If you can point to a definitive root cause of the issue you’re working on, I invite you to at least consider the possibility that you’re caught in a too-simple story!

Everything happens for a reason, right?

Often that reason is some stupid thing we did last week.

And sometimes it’s some stupid thing somebody else did two thousand years ago!

Our choices are made within the boundary constraints established by those who went before us. The decisions and actions of our ancestors. Or other people’s ancestors! Initial conditions are prophetic and in tightly bounded systems can even be deterministic.

One of the most common systems change errors is under-estimating the power of path dependency - or lacking strategies adequate to it. The efforts to adopt renewable energy technologies at scale offers a good example of this. Despite the combination of workable technologies, viable cost structures, public support and political will, the transition movement has often been constrained by physical, urban and regional infrastructures, knowledge systems, sunk costs, economic feedback loops, and cultural assumptions that not only create directional momentum but generate powerful immune responses to change.

A second common error would be ignoring or misreading latent patterns of coherence. These are the patterns of order or viable attractors within a given phase space.

A phase space?

It sounds like something from an old Star Trek episode.

We’re entering the phase space Captain!

In complexity terms, a phase space represents all the possible configurations of a system given its constraints (material, energetic, cognitive, cultural, institutional).

Latent patterns of coherence are attractors that already exist in that space but are not currently occupied.

They are “viable” in the sense that they are dynamically stable if the system’s state wanders into their basin of attraction. Usually under conditions of shock, overload, or the unravelling of a dominant attractor’s holding power. This is why collapse so often produces regressions rather than breakthroughs: the system doesn’t search the entire phase space. It simply falls into the nearest deep basin that offers some functional coherence.

This is where adjacent possibility comes in.

Again, it’s easy to misunderstand this concept. The adjacent possible isn’t all the ways we could imagine or wish that reality was different – no matter how compelling or visionary.

It’s not a set of John Lennon lyrics turned into a landscape map!

It describes the next-step configurations that are actually reachable from our current state without violating the system’s constraints. Leonardo Da Vinci could envision and draw a helicopter. But his capacity to build one was severely constrained. It would be centuries before material science and power generation technologies made it possible.

So-called reformers often get critiqued by so-called radicals for the compromises (betrayals!) that are invariably required to work within the field of adjacent possibility.

A recent example would be the bandwagon of ‘progressives’ faintly praising Mark Carney’s Davos speech before giving it a righteous kicking for its underlying complicity with a fundamentally dysfunctional and unjust hegemonic order!

Viewed through an in-group lens, they were engaged in some good old courageous online truth-telling.

From a complexity lens it could be argued that they are seeing and advocating for an attractor that lives at least one step removed from the adjacent possible.

And from a strategic lens, they were unintentionally but disproportionately weighting yet another potent horseshoe spectrum.

We’ve watched this gather steam for years now. The extreme views on either side of an issue end up unified by their critique of, contempt for, or oppression by the messy middle.

The attractors at the ends of the spectrum are often far older and deeper than the middle which…in a multi-polar world…invariably requires a far more fragile set of stabilizers. Nuanced compromise. Multi-stakeholder agreements and treaties. Fact-checked mainstream media. Technocratic governance and institutional expertise.

Front-brain territory.

And destabilization benefits both extremes even though they’d hate each other’s endgame!

But when destabilization reshapes the phase space (e.g. by lowering barriers, erasing constraints or breaking feedback loops) previously non-adjacent attractors can suddenly become adjacent. What looks like sudden social reversion (e.g. from elected government to clan-based warlords) is often a profoundly destabilized system snapping back into a pre-existing attractor that has the capacity to re-stabilize in locally accessible ways.

And some social or technical innovations are game changers precisely because they build viable bridges to currently non-adjacent possibilities.

The adjacent possible defines which attractors can actually be reached from here, given the system’s present constraints. Systems modelling techniques such as cross-impact balance analysis or scenario planning are essentially trying to map the adjacent possible by exploring probable outcomes when a few key variables either stay the same or change in some defined way.

Modernity believed it could engineer progress by building better systems. Post-modernity believed it could achieve liberation by dismantling oppressive ones. But I think both of them missed the critical insight offered by a complexity lens:

In the absence of coherent alternatives, systems are consistently pulled into the gravitational field of the deepest available attractors.

The Russian and Iranian revolutions, the Arab Spring, Glasnost, the Afghan conflict…all succeeded in toppling oppressive hierarchies only to see them replaced by even more crushing patterns of domination. Unless new attractors are actively cultivated and made adjacent before collapse, systems will reliably fall back into the most energetically cheap, culturally familiar, and strongest patterns available.

Incentives

Incentives are a critical - and usually under-recognized - mechanism of causality in complex systems. They are the patterned pressures that shape what actions are easier or harder, safer or riskier, rewarded or punished, intelligible or unthinkable within a given system. All systems have explicit rewards or policies. But incentives function as part of the substrate. Nobody usually tells you about them because they’re mostly invisible! They form an understory of energetic, social, and institutional contours and force fields that modulate and channel behaviour over time.

Every human collective is shaped by such incentives and you’d better figure out what they are if you’re trying to change it!

You remember that old axiom that every system is perfectly designed to keep getting the results it keeps getting? It’s usually more accurate to say ‘configured’ rather than ‘designed’ given how we typically understand design. But whether some architect has done it or it’s doing it to itself, the system is seamlessly set up to keep getting the results it keeps getting.

The smartest and most idealistic people in your organization tend to grow bitter and leave after two years? The system is perfectly configured to keep getting that result. A thousand people a year dying from overdoses in your state/province/city? The system is perfectly configured to keep getting that result. Long healthcare waiting lists? Growing numbers of disenfranchised young men? Consistent patterns of poverty, incarceration, financial vulnerability, structural inequity or educational failure?

The system is perfectly configured to keep getting that result.

And that’s because its incentive structures actively reward and reinforce the choices and behavioural interactions that produce those outcomes.

We often misunderstand incentives by reducing them to formal levers…carrots and sticks…rather than recognizing them as pervasive force fields embedded in relationships, power dynamics, status hierarchies, career progressions, reputational drivers, shared stories and informal norms. And they operate regardless of our mission and values statements or our conscious intentions.

And when incentives are aligned with a current systems attractor, they are like the body’s own immune system. Perfectly configured to neutralize disruptive changes, keep your temperature within ±2°of 37℃ and help the whole system maintain its coherence!

If you want to make big changes in a system, the incentive landscape is both your greatest ally and your most formidable opponent!

Emergent Fictions with Teeth

But there’s more!

Because what goes up, must also come down.

Welcome to downward causality!

Even experienced systems practitioners are used to thinking that causation flows upward. Individual actions and components generate emergent patterns. Micro-level interactions generate macro-level structures. And it’s true. Systems mapping often involves working back down the system to find causal culprits and possible leverage points. But in complex systems, those same emerging patterns or higher-level structures also constrain, enable, bias or otherwise influence the behavior of the lower-level components and relationships from which they emerged in the first place.

The whole starts determining the behavior of its parts!

Downward causality is how incentives do their work in complex systems. It reshapes the landscape of what actions are likely, imaginable, or rewarded.

Let’s say two people start hanging out together. Things go well, and a pattern – the relationship – emerges. Likely there are a set of explicit and implicit rules and expectations associated with it. And this emergent pattern quickly begins to influence the individuals from which it emerged. It constrains some of their decisions and choices while enabling others.

It probably shapes what they can even imagine doing.

The relationship becomes an attractor - a stable pattern that pulls behavior back toward itself even when perturbed. Add a child or two and the attractor will deepen and shape behavioural choices and pathways even more definitively. All kinds of stabilizing structures (rules, norms, material conditions), narratives and dynamics exert downward constraint. They make certain things possible or more likely (enabling constraints) while foreclosing or massively increasing the costs of other options (governing constraints). And that’s true across your relationships – from intimate partnerships and organizations to entire societies and cultures.

Another way to see downward causality at work is through religion. We could say that religion is an emergent property of a social collective. Any given religion weaves together shared stories, rituals, norms, symbols, taboos, and values that coalesce over time out of countless local interactions to form a coherent whole.

From this perspective, deities are no longer the external architects of social orders and phenomenal realities. They’re more like emergent archetypes arising from a collective’s attempts to be in relationship with uncertainty, suffering, power, nature, and one another.

The Creator as an emergent property of creation!

And once they emerge – like Athena bursting forth fully formed from Zeus’s head - the gods are no less real in their causal effects than armies, currencies, or laws. They begin to shape behavior, constrain imagination, legitimize authority, organize time, and encode values. They influence who may speak, who must obey, what is sacred, what is forbidden, and what futures are imaginable.

This is why religion, along with mythic and symbolic work matters so much in human systems. Stories, rituals, shared meanings - these create attractor patterns with enormous downward causal power over collective behaviour. They aren’t peripheral; they’re often the primary machinery of downward causation. And conversely, changing actual practices and relationships creates the upward causal forces that can eventually destabilize old myths and enable new ones to emerge.

And let’s not leave this section without a nod to retrocausality - the idea that the future can affect the past!

It sounds like a Terminator movie plot but it’s garnered serious interest from quantum researchers in recent years. And I think it offers a provocative way for complexity leaders to think about how they work with stories about the future which are intended to shape the present. It’s something like what Otto Scharmer and his colleagues call leading from the emerging future. It’s not about imposing our preferred stories onto the present, but sensing and actualizing future possibilities that are trying to emerge through our collective action. Because in human systems, the future shapes the present not so much through physics, but through imagination.

Shared images of what could or must come next exert real causal pressure on present-day behaviour.

In-The-Box Thinking

Let’s try and bring all this together with a practical example.

In 1956 American trucking entrepreneur Malcom McLean invented the modern standardized shipping container and it dramatically lowered the transaction costs for moving goods. The same box worked on ships, trucks and trains without reloading and shipping costs plummeted 90%.

Shipping containers reconfigured both the phase space and the adjacent possible for the entire global economy. Suddenly globally distributed supply chains became energetically cheaper than vertically integrated local production (the very thing people are often trying to get back to with bioregional or local regenerative food security movements).

This new attractor required new governance infrastructure in the form of trade agreements and trans-local institutions in order to stabilize. The WTO emerged (from its predecessor GATT) to reduce tariffs, manage trade disputes and enforce rules. And downward causality kicked in as these emergent trans-national entities started to shape what national governments could and couldn’t do with trade policy.

The Trade Gods!

And of course, people being what they are, the WTO’s ostensibly fair, rules-based international trade framework was shaped less by universal principles than by the negotiating power of wealthy nations, the lobbying muscle of multinational corporations, and the institutional capacity of key players to translate their existing economic dominance into permanent structural advantage!

All of this began to shift the incentive landscape.

Corporations optimized for containerized global logistics. Ships, trains, ports, highways, regulations all started to align with the attractor which in turn deepened path dependency. Entire regions started to specialize and capital flowed toward new manufacturing and export zones. Meanwhile domestic manufacturing atrophied in developed economies and place-based communities built around local production lost their viability with profound social and ecological consequences.

Now the unintended (we’ll let that one pass for now!) consequences of the global supply chain attractor started to kick in. Manufacturing jobs in rust-belt regions disappeared. Rural communities were hollowed out. Entire regions became dependent on remittances from family members working in other countries or ‘up north’. All kinds of environmental ‘externalities’ were amplified. There was downward pressure on wages and labour conditions along with a massive increase in economic migration. Local regions and entire countries lost economic sovereignty. And all kinds of critical vulnerabilities were revealed (canals, shipping routes, trade disputes, pandemics etc.)

And the oppositional horseshoe spectrum that I mentioned earlier began to coalesce.

For the ‘left’ the whole thing was basically corporate colonialism and the emasculation of labour dressed up as free trade with rules written by and for multinational capital. For the ‘right’ it was supra-national governance undermining national sovereignty and traditional value sets. And both would probably suggest that it was engineered to primarily benefit corrupt elites and opaque investment funds.

And as things heated up, post-modern activists advocating for disenfranchised communities in the Global South trying to maintain Indigenous land rights and seed sovereignty suddenly found themselves in the same protest movement as white nationalists railing against immigration, globalism and the erosion of national sovereignty.

Radically different values and visions.

But when it came to destabilizing the neo-liberal trade consensus, practically soulmates.

Systems agents pulled into the same patterns of behaviour by the same incentive landscape.

And now here we are watching the unravelling of the so-called post WWII consensus in real time.

Malcom’s box – eight feet wide and forty feet long – didn’t directly cause all of that.

But it’s unquestionably a significant part of the causal chain.

It made certain futures vastly more likely than others. And it’s connected to virtually every alarming and polarizing event in today’s news. Actually, most of the news this century. A simple enabling constraint helped to reshape an entire civilizational landscape in ways its inventor never imagined. He’s had arguably one of the most significant impacts on the world of any individual in the 20th century.

You’ll notice the time lag. Forty years from inventing the container to the creation of the WTO. Another twenty plus until Brexit and tariffs. Powerful events emerging from changes in attractor fields made decades before.

Another important takeaway for me is that ideologies and culture wars are often the downstream emergents of more structural attractors. Ideological polarization often emerges as a result of structural changes rather than being a cause of them.

Shipping containers didn’t persuade anyone to become nationalist, protectionist, anti-globalist or anti-capitalist. What they did was undermine local economic viability in some regions and concentrate benefits elsewhere, while hollowing out social contracts that were tied to particular places, labour forces and identities. And those material shifts created shared experiences of loss, destabilization, precarity and disempowerment across wildly different cultural, geographic and moral communities.

Ideology entered later as a way to make meaning, assign blame and coordinate the resistance!

It’s worth taking a moment to separate ideologies from paradigms here.

Ideologies are belief systems. Sets of ideas, values and narratives that we consciously hold and argue about. Paradigms are the soil ideologies take root and grow in. They’re the largely pre-conscious frameworks that shape what we can perceive, what questions we can ask, and what solutions are even thinkable. Paradigms are embodied stances toward reality itself…the water those poor fish still don’t know they’re swimming in!

The distinction is important for many reasons but here’s one for us as systems thinkers.

The paradigms that Donella Meadows identified as the deepest leverage points for systems change, often get conflated with ideology. And that can lead to an assumption that changing minds through better arguments offers a way forward. But paradigms aren’t changed through persuasion! They shift and evolve through embodied experience, structural reconfiguration, and the shattering (or emergence) of attractors that make our old assumptions unworkable. Mezirow’s good old disorienting dilemmas!

From a complexity perspective, ideologies often function less as initial causes and more as stabilizing narratives that then exert downward causality in their own right! They help us organize our loyalties and identities. They determine who is an insider and who is an outsider. They offer legitimization for particular actions or policy choices.

And, all too often, they narrow the adjacent possible by making compromise taboo.

So when radically different ideologies converge on the same opposition, it’s probably a pretty strong signal that something structural - not ideological - is doing the real causal work!

I think we’ve tended to misdiagnose polarization as being primarily ideological and concentrated our interventions on things like better arguments, values education, awareness trainings or dialogue across difference.

I’m not saying those things are without value.

But if we understand polarization as a kind of proxy battleground - the cultural surface of much deeper attractor conflicts¹ then our interventions should shift towards reshaping incentive landscapes, rebuilding place-based economic viability, strengthening local adaptive capacity and redesigning governance structures at a scale where people can feel real agency.

All while continuing to cultivate a felt-sense of ourselves as a single global species with deeply shared interests and a noble collective purpose.

Above all, it’s yet another reason why shaping platform technologies early - before attractors and institutions consolidate - is one of the most potent forms of systems intervention available to us. It’s both when and where intervention has the most impact. Otherwise you’ll simply be playing catch up and reacting to distant second and third order effects like most every other social movement since the Industrial Revolution.

That might sound abstract.

But the reality is that platform technologies - whether they’re shipping containers, religions, internet protocols, machine learning systems or large language models - are where attractors tend to form the fastest and lock in the hardest.

It’s Not All in Your Head!

I often write about the importance of consciousness and worldview.

We’ve used the placeholder term complexity consciousness - a lived orientation of deep connectedness to self, to one another, and to the living world - and it still feels to me like the only durable foundation for planetary flourishing.

But I try to be merciless with myself in stress-testing my own theories of causality and change. For one thing, I’ve watched a lot of people undergo profound shifts in consciousness and worldview over the years and I’d love to believe there was some kind of threshold number of transformed consciousnesses we might reach where suddenly the whole system tips into some utopian state.

But it’s not going to happen like that.

Because in complex systems, worldview and consciousness are not causal in any simple or linear way. Nor are they cleanly “interior” phenomena that sit upstream of incentives, attractors, or institutions, issuing instructions that reality then follows!

Worldview² is not merely a set of beliefs or values we hold; it is a deeply embodied, enacted orientation to the world. It’s a way of sensing, relating, and moving that is continuously shaped by the social, material, and symbolic environments we inhabit.

Consciousness, too, is probably better understood ecologically rather than individually. It’s not something sealed inside our minds, but something that arises in relationship - with bodies, places, infrastructures, narratives, one another and the more than human world. Even for panpsychics who believe that consciousness or its potential saturates the universe, it remains true that consciousness never exists in some pure, disembodied state, separate from form, structure, or constraint.

Shiva still needs Shakti! The Word still needs some juicy Flesh!

And when we understand it this way, both consciousness and worldview are subject to downward causality.

Dominant attractors, institutional logics, and incentive landscapes actively train our perception, bias our attention, and help to normalize certain ways of being while exiling others. Consciousness matters not because it overrides these forces, but because it participates in their ongoing reproduction or redesign. It shapes what kinds of structures we attempt to build, what constraints we can tolerate, and which emergent patterns we are able to stabilize. And once stabilized, those patterns push back down again, recursively shaping consciousness and worldview in turn.

I’m holding a paradox here.

I’ve dedicated a lot of my life to supporting ‘inner work.’ I think the roots of our meta/poly/perma-crises are fundamentally developmental and a core part of the work that faces us as a species is supporting the emergence of mature patterns of consciousness at scale. I believe that awakening and developmental ripening are real and critical phenomena. And I’m inspired as I see more and more people advocating for and actively practicing the cultivation of ‘inner’ capabilities to work effectively in systems and complexity.

At the same time, I don’t think there’s any such thing as ‘inner’ in a definitive way!

The affordances that arise between an ecology, a context and a culture fundamentally shape your ways of knowing, being, acting and belonging. Culture does not emerge uni-directionally from consciousness. They exist in a relationship that is more like what the Buddhists might call dependent co-arising. Mutual causality.

I wish it were simpler!

Sometimes I think embodying a truly integral complexity-informed perspective is like trying to truly live the teachings of Jesus.

Really fucking hard.

It’s probably why almost nobody does either one.

It would be so much easier to just hate the Romans and blame the tax collectors!

Because while everything happens for a reason, it’s rarely the obvious one.

Sometimes it is of course. But more often, it’s the accumulated weight of past decisions, stabilized patterns, incentive landscapes, and stories with teeth quietly shaping what becomes possible long before any one of those pesky events ever occurs!

The deep work of change is less about forcing outcomes and more about reshaping the conditions under which different futures can reliably emerge. To make better and more coherent attractors adjacent before depressingly familiar old ones or dismal new ones claim us like a whirlpool.

Perhaps when we stop treating consciousness and worldviews as disembodied forces and start engaging them as ecological phenomena, we will become more adept at the co-evolutionary work of regenerating both minds and worlds at the same time.

No More Bets Folks!

We’re adrift in a ship of fools and down here in the casino cabin the roulette wheel of fortune is spinning my friends.

The ball is in motion and people are gathered around intently, their faces flushed with dopa-adrenal cocktails, as they gamble their fortunes and your future on preposterously unlikely outcomes!

But this is no game of pure chance.

And it doesn’t have to result in a few lucky but delusional winners celebrating wildly as the ship goes down. Because in complex systems, the odds are shaped long before the ball drops…by the attractors, incentives, and stories woven into the fabric of the table itself.

You may not control the spin, but you can help reshape the game.

Don’t waste your energy fighting ghosts and shadows. Resist the false choice between purity and complicity. And avoid getting too distracted by events! Tend the attractors you want to deepen and build viable bridges that can make regenerative futures adjacent before the degenerative ones claim us.

Shape platforms before they harden.

Act across generational time.

And don’t forget to use the Force!

Just not that old linear, forceful kind of force!!

Still fighting for the cause….

Julian

1. By attractor conflict I don’t mean competing ideas or values, but conflicts between different patterns of stability. Different ways a system tries to hold itself together.

2. Worldview, as I’m using it here, operates at a more fundamental level than paradigm or ideology. To use a building analogy, worldviews are the foundations. Paradigms are the load-bearing walls. Ideologies are the interior decoration and floor plans people argue about.