The world will mess with you

There are reasons to be cheerful. You could view what’s happening in UK politics right now as a dangerous mess, or you could see it as a mature constitutional system under extraordinary pressure, but still working. In many countries around the world, militias would be forming by now, and tanks would be clanking down the streets.

Anyway, what happened to Theresa May’s Brexit plan? Simple: the world messed with it. By ‘the world’ I mean systems, the interlinked networks of tangible and intangible forces that screw things up for us. To name just a few: political systems, economic systems, technological systems, environmental systems, personal and mass psychological systems, cultural systems.

The world will mess with you. The strike by air traffic controllers in Paris will cancel your holiday, and the panic in financial markets caused by a blustering world leader will damage your customer base.

The control you have over systems ranges from a bit, in your own little zone of influence, to nil out beyond it.

You can respond, though. System forces ripple along to us through the medium of people and their words, deeds, feelings and decisions, which means we can cushion their impact and even mount a response through relationships.

Deep and deliberate delegation can be a bulwark against the tyranny of systems.