Risks of linear thinking in a complex world
What can go wrong if decision makers neglect that systemic problems need systemic solutions?
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The ongoing wildfires in California have once again highlighted the devastating impact of extreme weather conditions exacerbated (also) by climate change. What’s going on in California is a disaster, and it is hard — yet a useless exercise at this stage — to point the finger against a single actor.
I have several friends and collaborators in the LA area and it’s heartbreaking to see the images from the news, that I do not want to reshare here. I think of them and their families, as well as to hundreds of thousands of residents evacuated.
The fires have been intensified by prolonged drought, high winds, and dry brushland, reflecting the complex interplay between environmental, infrastructural and social factors driving such disasters. That’s why our political leaders should take care instead of publicly releasing false causality relationships (or lack of). This brings us to how leadership perceptions shape responses to complex crises.
Decision makers and linear thinking
Trump has just blamed California Governor Gavin Newsom for the wildfire crisis, accusing him of neglecting water management policies. Trump falsely claimed that Newsom refused to sign a “water restoration declaration” that would have redirected water to southern California for firefighting. However, no such document exists, and experts confirm that water distribution policies protecting Northern California ecosystems have no connection to firefighting water availability in Southern California. These statements reflect a linear cause-and-effect reasoning that oversimplifies the multifaceted nature of wildfire management and environmental conservation.
Interconnected problems demand systemic solutions
Insights from the latest World Economic Forum (WEF) Global Risks Report emphasize the interconnectedness of global risks. Climate change, biodiversity loss, and infrastructure vulnerabilities are tightly coupled, creating feedback loops that exacerbate crises.
The landscape of global risks is in fact a network of interdependencies.
Some risks are more severe than others, but this severity is a function of time: it changes and evolves according to our response and the reconfiguration of the other systems. According to a WEF report published in 2024, in the next 2 years the most relevant risks are disinformation, extreme weather events and societal polarization.
It is concerning to see how those three risks, together with a few others, are reported as pressing by a diverse pool of stakeholders, from the private sector to the government.
For instance, disinformation links to erosion of human rights, conflicts, polarization and adverse outcomes of AI technologies.
Deforestation and poor land management increase wildfire risks, while wildfires further degrade ecosystems and release massive amounts of carbon dioxide, accelerating climate change. Tipping elements worldwide are connected:
Those interconnections, regulated by a complex interplay of climate, ecologic and social systems, expose us to a domino effect where if something breaks the dysfunction can propagate across the whole system, at any spatial and temporal scale, like what happens during a power outage. Thanks to decades of network science we have understood the main mechanisms that drive the cascade failures and we are still struggling to understand how to manage this.
The potential collapse of a tipping element, like the AMOC, might have catastrophic consequences for our society, accelerating large-scale migration in a way that we are not prepared to deal with and changing the ecosystems in unpredictable ways.
The rise of temperatures and precipitations is also linked to global health risks by increasing cross-species viral transmission risk.
Addressing such intertwined issues requires integrated policies that balance immediate risk management with long-term environmental sustainability. But are we ready?
According to the same report by the WEF we are not ready, at least not in the same way. Awareness is the first stage to challenge a problem: sadly.
“despite persistent and extreme weather impacts, Failure of climate-change adaptation was a top-five risk in only six countries for the two-year time frame”
The pitfalls of linear thinking in complex systems
Linear thinking focuses on immediate, direct relationships between cause and effect. While this approach may be effective for short-term, straightforward problems, it fails to account for the nonlinear, dynamic nature of complex systems.
In mathematical terms, we know that linear approximations are valid only for small deviations in a system’s trajectory. However, according to dynamical systems theory, any deviation between an actual trajectory and, for instance, its linear approximation, tends to grow exponentially over time. This implies that relying only on linear strategies without continuous adjustments leads to increasingly ineffective or even counterproductive interventions.
Systemic problems, such as wildfires driven by climate change, require adaptive strategies that consider feedback loops, emergent behaviors, and long-term consequences. Policies must be flexible and responsive, adjusting to evolving conditions much like navigating an evolving trajectory in a high-dimensional state space. We can’t pretend to tell this to any decision maker, at least not in these terms, and scientists worldwide struggle to do their best to bring on the tables of policy and decision makers. They must be heard: their insights must inform decision-making at every level.
An oversimplified narrative, like Trump’s around California’s wildfire crisis, is the n-th case that exemplifies the dangers of linear thinking in addressing complex, systemic issues. Effective decision-making must move beyond simplistic cause-and-effect models and embrace systemic approaches that account for interconnected risks and adaptive solutions. Only by recognizing the complexity of global challenges can policymakers develop resilient strategies to mitigate crises and foster sustainable development.
And we need decision makers open and ready to embrace complexity.
I work in the public healthcare systems in Italy and our progressive trajectory towards the tipping point is felt every day for anyone whi is willing to just think for a minute and follow the consequences what we see everyday.
It's not only that a pluralistic, multidisciplinary scientific view is needed (i.e.: complexity science), but also, as you clearly point out, that the method and the matter are the same: each system state can have enormous consequences of other systems of our society.
The day we stop thinking in disciplinary silos and understand that education, transportation, healthcare, welfare etc have deep consequences on eacother we will truly address problems that otherwise will be briefly pollished just to crash later.
It would be invaluable to get your contribution (on this substack, on any other occasion feasible) on themes that affect our healthcare system to broaden the view of people which work in it and of policymakers who can make it better. I'd be glad to interact with you on the specific matter, trying to help disseminating your knowledge on the topic that I feel in healthcare is tragically completely neglected from the bottom up.
I am enjoying your substack immensely!
I think almost anything of value or interest to humans is non linear.
Reductionist linear thinking is however, much easier to compress into memes (In Dawkins' original sense of the word) and so they outcompete complex attempts to understand complex systems.
Perhaps, ironically, vast complex interconnected societies such as modern humanity tend towards reductionism for ease of management.