Complex Systems

** There be heavy philosophical pondering ahead!** I wrote this a while ago and found it a bit all over the place. But it gets at an idea that I find fascinating. How can we map all human knowledge and then make connections between non-obvious data points. …

In the Netherlands, we don’t have Santa Claus, but instead, another fellow in a red suit and white beard called Sinterklaas. He comes on December 5th, and it’s a big event for kids. When I was five or six years old and started asking critical questions about Sinterklaas’ infrastructure, supply…

Lately, I have been studying large language models, such as ChatGPT, and discovered that they fundamentally predict the next word by sampling from a vast vocabulary of probable words, based on being trained on billions of text documents. …

Moving Beyond Supervision Zero Tolerance: A Just Culture for Quality Improvement Shattering the Glass Ceiling of Quality: A Call for Systemic Change In the Netherlands, we have several regulators such as the Healthcare Inspectorate, the Financial Markets Authority and the Education Inspectorate. However, there are many more and for every…

Another of my comments on The Honest Sorcerer’s latest post, that discusses our inevitable low-tech future… Yet another excellent look into what is likely to befall humanity in the not so distant future. …

Why, in the world of complex design, don’t government clients value the creation of relationships as an outcome? For the past few months, I’ve had the luxury of a sabbatical, exploring how to drive change in complex systems. It’s been a time to reflect, and to connect. Across nearly a…

Motivation In my conversations with professionals in the fields of token engineering, economic design, and game design, I have discovered that there are common gripes about the tools we use to model and reason about our complex systems. Machinations and CadCAD seem to be the common tools of choice in these…

Organizational agility is becoming increasingly important in today's fast-paced business environment. Companies that can respond quickly and effectively to changing market conditions are more likely to be successful over the long term. However, achieving organizational agility requires careful planning and a deep understanding of the complex systems that underlie a…