BookTree — Age of the Unthinkable
Age of the Unthinkable is one of the top books in eigenvector centrality.


Age of the Unthinkable is connected to the following books:
- Powershift (#35)
- Seventh Sense (#12)
- Ubiquity (#6)
- The Black Swan (#16)
- Emergence (#1)

The Age of the Unthinkable is part of a range of books that began to look at how to apply the concepts of complexity to global issues. This was in contrast to the complexity books that sought to explain various sets of phenomena, and to expand it into issues of popular discourse — on global issues, such as terrorism, climate change.
What most people would take issue with is how general or bland the recommendations might be. The conclusion that one draws from Ramo’s book is that organisations need to be adaptable, and learn from the environment. That by itself might be a generic prescription, but what people don’t realise is how stressful learning is, and especially when organisations have to actually try things and fail. It goes against the efficiency framework that they ahve been brought up to do.
The other major learning that most organisations fail to do, which Ramo looks at — is to look at network effects more closely. A single action at the right location in a brittle network can have drastic consequences for the restof the systems.
Nonetheless, it is an important effort in trying to figure out the world we live in — as it is, and not what we wish it to be.
Other related books to “Age of the Unthinkable” would be, Ann-Marie Slaughter’s “Chessboard and the Web”, Geoff Mulgan’s “Connexity.” The theme about how an organisation can adapt and learn can also be found in Stanley McChrystal’s book “Team of Teams”, where he described his experience leading JSOC, developing the capabilities that would culminate in the killing of Osama Bin Laden.
Joshua Cooper Ramo himself would go on to write “The Seventh Sense” — an continuation of some of the themes about connections and networks that he wrote here.

