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 early 2000s, a French hand surgeon named Jean-Claude Guimberteau threaded an endoscopic camera beneath living human skin and captured something no anatomist had ever seen in motion: 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...