Fall of the Domain Expert - Rise of the Systems Thinker

Modernity

If you imagine modernity, this historical period, that we still live in, as a huge wave of discoveries in science, organisational and social design and productivity, to name some, the people surfing the crest are specialists or "domain experts".

The belief was, and to some degree still is, that the world can be viewed as a complicated system, full of small parts. By figuring out the intricacies of those - we'll learn the behaviour of the larger structures and make sense of them as deterministic systems.

For this focused journey into the small world of the specifics - you need specialists, each capable of analysing more and going deeper and that has worked well in the past.

Complicated and Complex Systems

Now, we distinguish between complicated and complex systems and it looks like a lot of those we thought of complicated are actually complex or becoming complex.

The oversimplification of reality (a complicated systems perspective of a complex system), which is the hallmark of reductionism, leads to a loss of emergent properties and fails to acknowledge and understand interconnectedness of all other systems in the play.

Systems Thinker

To be a systems thinker is to be able to pay attention to how things relate to each other and their dynamics in the constantly evolving world.

For me it's also about the top down approach - starting from the whole and analysing down. Being able to see "the forest" - and not stare too much into the trees. Seeing us and our growth as part of the problem we're trying to solve.

How is neurodivergence related to this? How will the widespread use of the AI change the dynamics between the Domain Expert and the Systems Thinker?