Beliefs Become Systems
When architecting systems, the hardest work isn’t changing technology patterns or project management tools. It’s changing the beliefs that generate the systems we build.
Those beliefs form our worldview. When they are shared, we call it a paradigm.
This week, I asked ChatGPT, “What paradigm shifts are emerging now?”
Shifting from:
things are made of parts → analyze parts separately
To:
behavior emerges from relationships → analyze interactions and feedback
Now, that’s the work I do, so perhaps the answer was biased. But it’s also true.
Back in 1960, Ted Nelson described human knowledge as “intertwingled” — complex, inseparable, and non-hierarchical. He even coined the term hypermedia decades before the internet existed.
We’ve always known that knowledge behaves like a system.
Yet, we built technology — software, information flows, user experience — by reducing them to their most basic, controllable parts. Simplified. Siloed. Like a factory floor.
Perhaps the real paradigm shift isn’t AI pushing us into some new future. It’s remembering something we already knew.
Knowledge emerges when we design systems that support the complexity of human relationships — not systems that reduce them to controllable parts.
Activity: Relational Mapping
Relationships between people, ideas, events, and toolsets form the fabric of any organization system. Relational mapping makes the relationships that shape meaning and outcomes explicit.
It is the ongoing practice of identifying, verifying, and articulating connections between people, ideas, events, and systems.
Example: A technology team creates a repository that links customer stories, business goals, and security constraints to the capabilities they are building. When making decisions, they tag people with business, design, or security expertise to understand the broader impact.
Make connections visible:
- Consider a challenge you are currently facing.
- Seek out someone who has a different perspective on that challenge.
- Link the perspectives in a way that generates new meaning.
Watch: Everything is Connected
A short talk showing how complex systems emerge from simple relationships. Chi demonstrates how large-scale behaviors arise not from individual parts, but from interactions between them.
Everything is Connected -- Here's How
Tim Chi, GoogleX Co-founder
Naming Things
Paradigm
The mindset out of which a system’s goals, structure, rules, delays, parameters arise.
Intertwingled
Things are interconnected, mixed, or knotted together in a complex, inseparable way. Components are composed of one another.
Emergence
Patterns and behaviors that arise from relationships between parts.
Composability
Designing systems so parts can combine and recombine to produce new behaviors.
Consider This
Have you partnered with someone to deliver something that neither of you could deliver alone?
The true system, the real system, is our present construction of systematic thought itself, rationality itself, and if a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory.— Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance