Beyond Thought
By Les Mottosky
This decade has been one for the ages. It may even be studied by future historians as the moment that humanity fell apart or got our sh/t together.
For even the most vehement optimist, right now – September 2026 – it ain't looking good. (Something we can easily observe is that optimism may feel good in the moment, but realism is what gets the bills paid.)
That's not to say optimism is unwarranted. Some promising early stage – maybe revolutionary – developments are on our doorstep. There's a toad bacteria being tested on mice with cancer that is reported to shrink all related tumours after a single dose. And Japanese researchers have apparently developed a method to re-grow teeth.
But with wars hanging onto the headlines, a looming oil crisis, the cost of everything with a price tag creeping ever higher and a forecasted global financial crisis by brains much bigger than anyone reading (or writing) this article, weariness is warranted.
It made sense to extract some of the biggest learnings of the past six and 3/4 years. (Just in case those future historians want a quick and dirty summary). Below are two handfuls of old concepts – now updated – that not so long ago contained a reliability we all took for granted:
Lesson 10: Complex systems are terrifyingly fragile.
The more interconnected a system becomes, the more a seemingly insignificant disruption can ripple through everything else. We rely on astonishingly complex systems without fully understanding how dependent they are on every component continuing to work.
Life is simple.
Our lifestyles are not.
Must we forfeit one if we want a less tumultuous world?
Lesson 9: Efficiency isn't resilience.
As profitability and convenience became key goals, we valued doing everything faster, cheaper and with less redundancy. The 2020s have reminded us that the things that look inefficient in good times – buffers, backups, extra capacity and redundancy— can be precisely what saves us in bad times.
Secondary and tertiary plans may not be required, but developing them need not distract us from keeping the main thing, the main thing.
Lesson 8: Experts don't know everything.
Expertise remains invaluable, but the last six years have been a powerful reminder that hubris isn't the same as expertise. Mastering a topic doesn't eliminate uncertainty, bias or error. Sometimes the most scientifically honest answer is still, “We don't know.” A true expert has no problem leaning into that as the most accurate response.
The reality is nobody knows what they're doing with 100% confidence, 100% of the time.
And that's not always a bad thing; it's where innovation, resourcefulness, ingenuity, creativity and breakthroughs are born.
Lesson 7: Institutions aren't infallible.
Governments, universities, corporations, media organizations and other institutions are human creations. Therefore they're prone to influence, mistakes and corruption. These bodies can produce extraordinary things. But they simultaneously protect their own interests, make mistakes and occasionally get things spectacularly wrong.
This is increasingly becoming the pattern.
And it's no longer just the leery amongst us who are noticing.
Lesson 6: Technology isn't inherently progress.
We have become remarkably good at creating technologies without balancing our understanding of their consequences. A technology can make us more capable while making us less connected, less autonomous, less resilient. It can certainly make us more distracted.
This creates the potential for disaster as we hand over even more control to technology.
Lesson 5: Information isn't knowledge.
We've gone from a world where access to information was historically scarce to one where information is basically infinite, expanding every moment and ubiquitous. The rarer resource is no longer information; it's the ability to determine what's credible, relevant and valuable to our own lives.
In an environment of information overload, wisdom and discernment are the new human super-powers.
Lesson 4: Economic growth isn't necessarily human flourishing.
GDP can rise while people become lonelier, more anxious, less secure or less connected to one another. We've become exceptionally good at measuring economic activity and considerably less sophisticated at measuring whether people are actually living better lives.
The machine charges forward with little consideration for the people that fuel it.
Lesson 3: Political stability isn't guaranteed.
We spent decades assuming that liberal democracy was a destination rather than a condition requiring constant vigilance and competent maintenance. The 2020s are demonstrating that trust, institutions, norms and social cohesion can erode much faster than we imagined.
We're not in a five alarm fire yet, but the smoke detectors are starting to go-off. And it's not 'cuz the Double A's need to be replaced.
Many societies have been forced to discover the true value of freedom when the need for stability becomes the only priority of politicians.
Lesson 2: Nature remains – and will always be – enormously powerful.
For all our technological sophistication, a virus, wildfire, flood, drought or heatwave can still remind us that we rely on nature. There's no mastering it. The planet doesn't care how advanced our civilization believes itself to be. It abides by one law: balance. If our addiction to progress infringes on that law, she'll remind us of her power.
Humans need the planet.
Not the other way around.
Our hubris has us forget that.
Lesson 1: Adaptability is the ultimate survival skill.
Increasingly, the most valuable knowledge has a short shelf life because the environment around us keeps changing. The defining human advantage of the coming decades won't be what we know, but how quickly we're able – and willing – to learn, unlearn and relearn.
This is less an assertion and more an appreciation of Charles Darwin's work as summarized by business professor Leon C. Meggison: "It is not the strongest that survives; but the species that is able best to adapt and adjust to the changing environment."
And because a flourishing human future will require generosity, community and an efficiency – if not speed – of our adaptation, here's a bonus insight. It's also the underlying proposition of the above list:
The Big Lesson: Certainty is often the enemy of intelligence.
We're all attracted to confident answers, simple explanations and people who appear to know exactly what's going on. The 2020s so far has taught us the importance of actively questioning certainty.
To say “I don't know, but let's find out” might just be the signature expression of the new human intelligence.
There's an apocryphal Chinese phrase purported to state "May you live in interesting times". What isn't evident in that phrase is the implied spirit behind it. Those six words are a curse disguised as a blessing, expressing a preference for peace and stability over turmoil.
We live in irrefutably "interesting" times.
The political solution to instability is often a rigid enforcement of centralized control. (This is why all governments – even in peaceful times – maintain their quiet monopoly on force.)
The question arises: will the innate human need for peace empower us to overcome the unrelenting turmoil that the 2020s is disguising as normal?
TAGS: #Beyond Thought
Les Mottosky writes to expand the capacity of the human behind the career.
Adaptation Strategist // I help organizations turn creativity into their competitive advantage by aligning leadership, culture and strategy to unlock adaptive innovations.
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