The Great Unravelling
How complexity broke the logic of control
This essay is part of a series on leadership for complex systems. The first post traced how specialisation built the modern world and the illusion of control. This essay explores why that logic failed, and what leaders must cultivate instead: coherence.
When the Maps Melted
In early 2020, the world went quiet. Flights grounded. Streets emptied. Shelves cleared. The hum of globalisation, once so constant it felt eternal, fell silent almost overnight. For a brief moment, humanity experienced what it means for the system itself to stop.
COVID-19 did not just test our health systems. It tested the assumptions beneath modern life. The invisible threads of trade, data, and movement revealed their fragility. A microscopic virus exposed what centuries of specialisation had concealed: our tightly coupled world was far less stable than it appeared.
In Australia’s aged care sector, the lesson was painfully clear. The system had been designed for safety and compliance, built to minimise risk rather than navigate disruption. Layers of regulation, funding streams, and reporting requirements ensured consistency in normal times but created paralysis in crisis. Each stakeholder owned a piece of responsibility, yet no one held the whole. When the pandemic struck, coordination faltered, federal and state boundaries blurred, and frontline teams improvised in real time. Care is not a process but a relationship. Amid isolation and fear, the system’s greatest strength proved to be its people. Nurses, managers, and leaders wove connection through chaos. They were not following a manual. They were creating coherence as they went.
COVID-19 revealed the limits of control logic. Systems designed for efficiency struggled to adapt because they were built to resist change. Stability and fragility often shared the same foundation.
Complexity Rising
For decades, we mistook the complicated for the complex. Complicated systems are mechanical and predictable: a jet engine, a legal contract, a manufacturing line. Complexity is living and adaptive: a rainforest, a market, a community. It cannot be controlled, only understood.
The twentieth century’s great institutions were designed for the complicated. Their hierarchies, specialisations, and controls worked when variables were limited and environments stable. As the world became a web of interdependencies, no single discipline could explain it. The faster we optimised, the less we understood.
Leadership theory caught up. David Snowden and Mary Boone’s Cynefin framework distinguished the simple, the complicated, the complex, and the chaotic. In the complex domain, cause and effect are only clear in retrospect. Outcomes emerge through safe-to-try experiments. The effective leader becomes a sensemaker, not a controller. It should have transformed how we operate. Instead, it collided with a century of managerial conditioning.
System Overload
As the twenty-first century accelerated, our systems began to fail under their own weight. The 2008 financial crisis showed how interdependence without transparency turns efficiency into contagion. COVID-19 extended that lesson into every sector. Hospitals overflowed. Supply chains snapped. Global logistics froze. Systems built to deliver reliability collapsed when faced with variability.
Healthcare gave this failure a human face. Rosters, compliance frameworks, and digital reporting platforms, all designed for stability, proved too rigid for real-time complexity. The people inside them compensated through improvisation and empathy. Complexity does not respond to command. It responds to connection.
Advantage now decays faster than organisations can plan. Structures outlast their relevance. Levers intended to stabilise systems become sources of fragility. The pandemic made this visible at scale.
The BANI World
VUCA felt insufficient. Jamais Cascio’s BANI captures the new texture of reality.
Brittle: systems look strong yet shatter under stress
Anxious: people operate in heightened vigilance
Nonlinear: small inputs trigger outsized, unpredictable outcomes
Incomprehensible: data overwhelms meaning
In a BANI world, traditional control is not only impossible but counterproductive. Attempts to impose certainty amplify anxiety and brittleness. Leaders who cling to control exhaust themselves and their teams. As Margaret Wheatley reminds us, “We can never direct a living system; we can only disturb it.” The task is not to manage complexity, but to work with it.
Collapse of Certainty
The Great Unravelling is structural and psychological. The pursuit of mastery promised safety. Its erosion produces disorientation. When old maps fail, leaders face not only operational uncertainty but existential doubt. The question shifts from “What should we do?” to “What is even happening?”
Burnout, mistrust, and disengagement are symptoms of this deeper uncertainty. In rigid organisations, people retreat to their silos, the only territory they feel they can control. That retreat accelerates fragmentation. The more we seek certainty, the more brittle we become.
Clarity is a process, not a position. The leaders who endured stayed connected to people, purpose, and learning. They replaced authority with curiosity and control with coherence. Their strength lay not in certainty, but in creating meaning amid flux.
The New Imperative: Coherence
What emerges from the unravelling is not despair but invitation. Complexity is not chaos. It has patterns if we learn how to see.
The imperative is to shift from control to coherence.
Coherence does not mean unanimity. It means connection between people, processes, and purpose. It is the capacity to align diverse parts without erasing their differences. In a complex world, coherence becomes the new efficiency: the ability to move together without having all the answers.
The pandemic offered glimpses of this future. In healthcare, when procedures failed, relationships held. In businesses, cross-functional teams broke silos overnight to deliver new solutions. In communities, strangers coordinated through shared purpose rather than formal hierarchy. These were Weavist moments, acts of integration born from necessity.
Coherence begins with perspective. Where the specialist asks, What is my role? the Weavist asks, What is our pattern? Where the manager seeks control, the Weavist seeks connection. Leadership becomes an act of weaving: aligning context, meaning, and action into a living fabric.
Where we go next
The age of mastery taught us to divide and control. The Great Unravelling has shown the cost of that logic. Complexity has humbled certainty. Control is giving way to connection.
But a harder question remains. What happens to those who built their identity on mastery itself?
