You've been thinking about systems wrong your entire career.

Every breakthrough in understanding complex systems begins with seeing what was always there but somehow invisible. In the 1970s, a French hand surgeon slipped a tiny camera under human skin and discovered something that would revolutionize anatomy: the body wasn't assembled from discrete parts like a machine, but woven together in one continuous, living web.

This web, fascia, had been discarded as packing material by anatomists for centuries. It was the stuff you cut through to get to the "real" structures. Muscles, bones, organs: those were the units that mattered. The translucent tissue connecting them was noise.

That assumption was catastrophically wrong. And the same assumption is running your organization right now.

Consider how most companies are structured: departments, teams, roles. Marketing over here. Engineering over there. Sales in another building entirely. Each unit has its own budget, its own goals, its own language. Leaders optimize within these boundaries. They hire for them, measure against them, promote within them.

But here's what fascia teaches us: the boundaries are an illusion. What actually determines how a system performs isn't the strength of individual units. It's the quality of what connects them...