Assuming you’re working within a complex system is probably a safe default. Most of the time we don’t know how our systems are working, and whether the changes we’re making will work or backfire. But we can experiment in safe-to-fail ways, and find out more about the constraints of our systems. We can develop heuristics about how to act within them. And, with some luck, we can move these systems into the more predictable and ordered domains by adjusting the constraints. This is something that humans are quite good at.”
