From uncertainty to intelligence: building dynamic compasses in the age of complexity

On the occasion of the recent passing of Edgar Morin, I re-read some studies I had conducted a year ago for my presentation on Complexity and Uncertainty at the Conn@ctions 2025 event in Rome.

I felt that Morin’s memory deserved a space for sharing and organizing those thoughts from a year ago—some of which I shared during my talk at Conn@ctions, while others I did not. I was quoting Morin, but also Taleb.

The recent passing of Edgar Morin deprives us of one of the most lucid interpreters of our time, yet leaves us with a fundamental legacy: the paradigm of complexity. In a world of continuous and systemic change, his teachings are the key to reading a present that eludes old definitions.

Today, we are not facing a temporary “crisis,” but a permanent transition. We are immersed in a context marked by global volatility, technological acceleration, and instability. Imagine the scene: you are holding a map, but the streets are changing as you walk them. How do you find your way?

Beyond static maps: the “well-formed mind”

Morin taught us that to understand the human condition, we must move beyond disciplinary boundaries—those “cages” that fragment reality and prevent us from seeing its connections. Quoting Montaigne, the philosopher urged us to cultivate a “well-formed mind” rather than a “well-filled mind.” In an era dominated by an ocean of information delivered by the media, merely filling our heads with notions is not enough. We need an intelligence capable of orientation and meaning, one that can hybridize mathematical and algorithmic rigor with narrative thought and myth.

From uncertainty to Antifragility

If Morin provided us with the lens to read complexity, Nassim Nicholas Taleb offers us the model to act within it. The opposite of fragile is not “robust.” A robust system (like a rigid map) resists shocks by remaining exactly the same, but sooner or later, it breaks. An antifragile system, on the other hand, thrives and benefits from disorder, stressors, and volatility.

Organizations today should not pursue a perfect, artificial stability—which only conceals explosive risks—but must instead evolve through trial and error, where small mistakes become vital pieces of information to strengthen the system. We must embrace chaos as an engine for learning.

Intelligent listening and representing chaos

To navigate this complexity, we must change our very representations by extending our senses. The sciences of complexity show us that when traditional images fall short, we can turn to augmented representations. Translating data into sound—listening to the “music” produced by volcanic lava or a heartbeat—allows us to capture rhythms, anomalies, and hidden patterns that the eye would miss.

This is what we can define as intelligent and relational listening:

• Uniting data, weak signals, and informal voices.

• Blending human listening with algorithmic listening.

Enabler technologies and human connections

In this transition, technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI) are fundamental levers, but they must remain enablers, not dominators. AI is only useful if it is put at the service of the right questions: the Prompt is increasingly more important than the Output.

In my direct experience, the winning factor in complex projects is never the algorithm itself, but the organizational culture and human empathy capable of interpreting it. Therefore, we need new soft skills: systemic thinking for anticipation, mental plasticity to let go of the familiar, and a distributed leadership capable of orchestrating rather than centralizing.