“Spinoza is a largely untapped resource for systems thinking. For example, his concept of ‘conatus’ (an innate inclination of a thing to continue to exist and enhance itself) anticipates the concept of ‘autopoiesis’ and seems to me richer in overall insight, even if it is, of course (because of later scientific advances) less empirically well grounded.” Prof Mike Jackson The above is a comment by Mike Jackson on Richard Beasley’s recent LinkedIn post. As with most of Mike’s work, it is a characteristically precise remark, appreciative, historically situated, but also quietly competitive in the way that serious intellectual traditions tend to be when they sense a powerful idea might belong elsewhere. I offer this response in the same spirit and agree that Spinoza is underutilised in the modern age. But I want to push the observation further: the question is not only whether Spinoza is a resource for systems thinking, but whether his deepest commitments point beyond it, toward the complexity science tradition that systems thinking has always regarded with a mixture of interest and unease. There is a parlour game worth playing over a beer to two: take a dead thinker and ask which consulting methodology they would have chosen. Usually, the exercise is trivial; Descartes might well have loved a balanced scorecard, Hegel would have written impenetrable change-management frameworks, Nietzsche has far too much in common with many a CEO, and so on. But the question of where Spinoza would have landed is less trivial than it appears, and the answer is more instructive than flattering to any particular camp. Mike’s comment sent me back to some undergraduate notes and both primary and secondary sources. Rereading that material over the last few days in the Lake District (see yesterday’s post) had been a real pleasure, but what follows is some preliminary thinking; to make it a paper would be another six months of work! In this post, I may be overdependent on notes made some five decades ago. So that is one caution, but there is another: Spinoza was not a management thinker. He was a seventeenth-century lens-grinder from Amsterdam who was excommunicated by his own community for ideas so radical that he chose not to publish his masterwork, the Ethics, in his lifetime. Recruiting him as a posthumous endorsement for any contemporary methodology is an act of interpretation that he would likely regard with suspicion. So let me be precise about what I am and am not claiming. To be clear, I was heavily involved in systems thinking approaches at the tail end of the last century, working with Frank and others to replicate the LSE Pod as a portable facility and experimenting with systems dynamics. But the most value I got was from Peter Checkland’s soft systems, which we used extensively in DataScience’s Genus Programme, transforming Joint Application Development workshops, and much of that was brought over into Cynefin facilitation methods over the years. I also remember a delightful debate with Peter and Nonaka, hosted by the University of Lyon, when I was first starting to bring complexity science into the field of Knowledge Management. That tradition of soft systems within systems thinking, which Jackson’s critical systems thinking inherits, is a genuinely important intellectual achievement. It moved management and organisational consulting beyond the naïve reductionism of early scientific management. It emphasised wholes, relationships, and the danger of optimising parts at the expense of the system. Jackson’s meta-methodological pluralism, in particular, represents a sophisticated attempt to avoid the imperialism of any single framework. But there is a structural problem that Spinoza would have identified immediately. Systems thinking, in almost all its variants, preserves a subject who stands outside the system and manages it. You define the system. You articulate its purpose; its Checklandian root definition. You choose the appropriate methodology from your meta-level toolkit. You intervene. Even in its most critical forms, systems thinking assumes a Cartesian ghost in the machine: a knowing subject with sufficient epistemic altitude to design, steer, or transform the whole. Spinoza had no room for this figure. His God, who is identical with Nature, who is causa sui, self-causing, has no external architect. There is no transcendent designer who imposed order from outside. Substance unfolds through its own internal necessity. Modes express attributes. Everything that happens is immanent to the system that contains it, including the observer. You cannot step outside Nature to manage it. You are Nature, knowing itself partially and inadequately. This is not a minor quibble. It is a different ontology. Complexity science, which underpins the Cynefin framework and its associated methods, begins from a different set of assumptions. The framework does not offer you a view from nowhere. It insists, rather, that your position in the landscape determines what you can know and what kinds of action are appropriate. The dark or aporetic zone at the centre of the framework is not a failure of methodology; it is an honest acknowledgement that some situations resist categorisation entirely, and that premature clarity is more dangerous than productive ambiguity. The move from complicated to complex in the Cynefin taxonomy is, in Spinozan terms, a move from adequate to inadequate ideas, not in the pejorative sense, but in the technical sense that Spinoza intended. In the complicated domain, expert analysis can in principle yield full understanding: causes and effects are knowable, even if the work is difficult. In the complex domain, you are dealing with emergent phenomena that exceed any single analytical frame. You probe, sense, and respond in parallel; you gather weak signals, you resist the temptation to impose a solution architecture derived from past experience. Spinoza would recognise this epistemological posture. His distinction between imaginatio (the fragmentary, partial knowledge we derive from sensory experience and hearsay), ratio (the understanding of common notions and general laws), and scientia intuitiva (direct knowledge of particular essences in their relation to Substance) maps onto a gradient of adequacy that has real organisational implications. Most of what organisations think they know about themselves is imaginatio: pattern-matching from past experience, stories told about causation that may be retrospectively coherent but prospectively useless. SenseMaker®, working with the Deleuzian idea of de-territorialisation, is designed to use those stories, but not allow their appropriation into the consultant-client power axis. Its self-signification methodology refuses to let the consultant or facilitator impose interpretive categories on what people report. Respondents situate their own narratives within frameworks they partly define. The aggregated patterns that emerge are genuinely distributed sense-making rather than the consultant’s model of what the organisation must be experiencing. This is, in Spinozan terms, an attempt to gather imaginatio systematically rather than replacing it with the consultant’s allegedly superior ratio. Tentatively, I think we can, as a thought experiment, map Spinoza’s three kinds of knowledge (imaginatio, ratio, scientia intuitiva) onto the Cynefin domains: Now that is very tentative – it’s an opening of a conversation! Mike’s instinct about conatus is sound, and his comparison with autopoiesis is illuminating, though I think it actually makes the case against his own tradition more than he intends. Autopoiesis, as Maturana and Varela developed it, describes systems that continuously reproduce their own components and boundary conditions. It is a powerful concept, and systems thinking absorbed it productively. But autopoiesis is fundamentally a biological model; it describes the self-maintenance of living systems as bounded, self-referential unities. When translated into organisational theory, as Luhmann did with his social systems work, it tends to produce entities that are closed, self-referential, and resistant to genuine novelty from outside. The system reproduces itself. Full stop. To be clear, I am not ignoring Luhmann’s concept of structural coupling or suggesting that closure is isolation or incapable of novelty or internal reconstruction. The question of boundaries is a major source of friction between systems thinking and complexity science, and I acknowledge that it needs more work. But I stand by my earlier statement. A system that requires the concept of “structural coupling” to explain how it interacts with its environment is still fundamentally separate from it. Complexity science starts from a place of entanglement, not separation. Spinoza’s conatus is doing something richer and stranger. The striving of each thing to persist in its own being is not a closed loop of self-reproduction; it is an expression of Substance through a particular mode. Every entity’s conatus is simultaneously its own and Nature’s, because there is ultimately only one Substance expressing itself through infinite modes. This means that the drive to persist is always already entangled with everything else. There are no truly closed boundaries in Spinoza. There is only Substance, and its modifications. This maps far more naturally onto complex adaptive systems, populations of agents each pursuing local fitness, generating emergent order through interaction, with no boundary that is truly sealed, than onto the autopoietic closed system. Jackson is right that conatus anticipates autopoiesis. But it also exceeds it, in precisely the direction that complexity science has subsequently travelled. Our Estuarine Mapping, which works with the metaphor of tidal constraints, what enables, what governs, and what is beyond current influence, resonates here too. For Spinoza, freedom is not the absence of constraint but acting from one’s own nature rather than being driven by external compulsion. The distinction between enabling and governing constraints in Cynefin maps onto the Spinozan distinction between what increases our power of acting (potentia agendi) and what diminishes it. Mapping the constraint landscape before attempting to act is, in this sense, a practice of adequate knowledge, which is precisely what Spinoza thought ethics required. There are limits to this affinity. Spinoza was a thoroughgoing rationalist. He believed that through adequate ideas, the human mind could achieve a genuine understanding of Nature’s order. The Ethics is presented in geometric form: definitions, axioms, propositions, demonstrations, because Spinoza believed this was the appropriate register for truth. He would have been uncomfortable with any framework that made irreducible uncertainty a permanent resting place rather than an invitation to deeper understanding. There are versions of complexity thinking that aestheticise uncertainty, that treat the embrace of not-knowing as a virtue in itself rather than as an honest starting point. Spinoza would have had no patience for this. Ignorance is not wisdom. The aporetic zone of Cynefin is useful precisely because it is a spur to better sense-making, not because darkness is good. Jackson’s critical systems thinking, for all its Cartesian assumptions, preserves something Spinozan in its meta-level rationalism: the belief that we can reason our way to better approaches, that methodology itself can be subjected to critique and improvement. There is a kind of intellectual discipline in critical systems thinking that complexity science lacks, especially among the extreme computational schools and those who use the language of complexity as a form of faux-mysticism. I am not arguing that Spinoza was a proto-complexity theorist. He was not. I am arguing that the deepest commitments of complexity science, immanence over transcendence, emergence over design, distributed sense-making over expert interpretation, constraint-mapping over goal-setting, are more consistent with Spinoza’s mature philosophy than the structural assumptions of systems thinking, even in its most sophisticated critical forms. This matters because methodology is not neutral. The assumptions embedded in how we approach organisational understanding have consequences for what we can see, what interventions we can imagine, and what kinds of knowledge we regard as legitimate. A methodology that preserves the transcendent consultant, the expert who steps outside the system to redesign it, will systematically underestimate the complexity of the terrain and systematically overestimate the tractability of the problems. Spinoza spent his life arguing against transcendence in theology and politics. He would, I think, recognise the same error in management science. That is not nothing. It may even be quite a lot. A note on unexpected corroboration from English comic fiction. It would be remiss to discuss Spinoza’s place in British intellectual life without noting that the philosopher’s most devoted fictional reader is Jeeves: the incomparable manservant created by P. G. Wodehouse, whose combination of preternatural competence and philosophical depth Wodehouse used as a sustained comic device across some forty years. In Joy in the Morning, Jeeves asks Bertie Wooster for a reward for services rendered. The request is characteristic: not money, not a day off, but a new annotated edition of the works of the philosopher Spinoza. Bertie, baffled but generous, sets off to a bookshop to acquire it, with predictably chaotic results. He cannot remember the name with any certainty. The comedy deepens when Bertie accidentally passes himself off as a Spinoza enthusiast to impress a woman, producing what may be the most philosophically absurd line in English comic fiction: “Oh, rather. When I have a leisure moment, you will generally find me curled up with Spinoza’s latest.” The joke runs on multiple levels: the Ethics is hardly beach reading, Spinoza published almost nothing in his lifetime, and the idea of Bertie Wooster working through geometric proofs on the nature of Substance while waiting for Jeeves to sort out the latest romantic catastrophe is almost too perfect. But there is a serious point lurking inside the comedy. Scholars of Wodehouse have noted that Jeeves’s devotion to Spinoza is philosophically deliberate. Spinoza was, above all things, a determinist who denied free will, and Jeeves operates with precisely the kind of serene, unflappable confidence that everything will come right in the end, which that worldview permits. He does not panic. He does not catastrophise. He sees the whole, assesses the constraints, identifies the enabling conditions, and acts accordingly. He also gently discourages Bertie from Nietzschean notions of autonomous self-determination. informing him at one point that “you would not enjoy Nietzsche, sir. He is fundamentally unsound.” The resonance with our argument is perhaps too convenient to be coincidental. Jeeves represents embedded intelligence, a mind that is within the situation, reads the constraint landscape with unerring accuracy, and acts from immanent understanding rather than external prescription. He does not stand outside the system and manage it. He is in it, knowing it, moving through it with adequate ideas while Bertie stumbles about with imaginatio of the most extravagant kind. The greatest fictional butler in English literature chose Spinoza as his philosopher. He had, as ever, excellent taste. This essay is the first of what may be an ongoing series exploring the philosophical underpinnings of organisational complexity work. The banner picture is used from Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Hunters in the Snow (1565), in which the hunters descend into a valley they are already part of; the landscape contains them as much as they move through it; there is no compositional position of mastery. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
The Problem with Systems Thinking
What Complexity Science Gets Right
The Cynefin overlap
The Conatus Connection
Where the Alignment Breaks Down
What this actually means
Postscript: Jeeves on Spinoza
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