The following first appeared in the March 6, 2026 Strategy in Praxis newsletter.

Columbia University Press will publish my book about the inherent complexity of business practice later this year. In this post, then, let me introduce readers to a few of the core truths about complexity they’ll encounter in the book.

I first encountered scientific complexity studying ecosystem population equations in a 1982 mathematics class taught by Martin Walter at U. Colorado. Walter had spent summers at Los Alamos National Laboratories near Santa Fe, New Mexico. He brought complexity’s ideas back with him — ideas I carried throughout my career. Having eventually received my master’s degree in numerical analysis, I regularly encountered complexity on projects at rocket maker General Dynamics (Atlas rockets and Centaur upper stages) and while marketing supercomputers

Once I shifted to general business and introducing new consumer goods products, I was frustrated by exaggerated claims that scientific practices would create predictability. While there is great value in business science, such predictability is not possible.

Fortunately, my instincts and early experience with complexity helped me perceive whole realities of business ignored by my traditionally trained colleagues. While my insights surprised them, what I saw led to successes others could not perceive.

A Unique View of Complexity

What, then, is complexity? Businesses use the term in two ways. Often, it refers merely to issues which are highly complicated, intricate, not easily controlled, and difficult. While this is not entirely wrong, complexity science studies specific behaviors among interwoven sets of parts.

A useful way to think of complexity in both science and business starts with emergence. Amid complexity:

• Vast numbers of parts interact with each other and with their environment.
• These interactions cause both parts and environment to adapt and change.
• Results emerge at a macro-level from micro-level interactions and adaptation.
• These results are non-linear gestalts — more than and different from a sum of the parts.
• Critically, studying the parts cannot predict what will emerge.
• Complexity is circular and continual. Parts and environment adapt in response to what emerges leading whole results to also adapt, and so on.

Every business success, then, is a whole result emerging as vast numbers of parts interact and adapt. While this might seem confusing, successful paths in complex worlds are usually simpler than paths of intricate bureaucratic operation. Tremendous advantages come to those businesses which perceive where these paths lie.

Complexity in Business

Description in place, doing business is primarily a complex practice. While some want complexity to be neatly organized, we start with two apparently contradictory statements:

• The whole of business is complex. All business action takes place amid interacting arrays of connections from which results emerge.
• There are periods of time when complex connected effects have less impact.

These statements reveal the inherent instability of processes and organizational approaches. Despite appearing highly effective, any approach to organization can be suddenly affected by complexity making it ineffective. While process and organizational approaches are important, then, their value is limited in ways traditional training cannot understand.

Further, the most critical issues in business — profit, cash flow, demand, and success — are emergent results. Companies only succeed with emergent gestalts more than and different from a sum of the parts. While we do not control emergence, the actions we take (or do not take) have tremendous influence on whether what emerges leads to success.

Complexity is the Beginning of all Success

Whether a business acknowledges it or not, all success begins with a gestalt — enough customers must find so much value in a product or service that they pay more than a sum of the parts required to design and make the product, put it on the market, and run the company.

Achieving such a gestalt is also only a start. As soon as a company is perceived to offer such value, other companies adapt to its presence in the market while customers also adapt their spending habits. While other issues matter, companies cannot succeed except through a continual flow of such gestalts — processes of continual reinvention.

One reason this is missed by business training is that organization and process are studied using what is called ceteris paribus — the assumption that if all else is held equal then we can determine best organization styles or processes. Yet within a complex world, all else is NEVER equal and those things not equal are at least as important as organization. (Ceteris Paribus is discussed in the 20/02/2026 Strategy in Praxis newsletter).

My upcoming book starts, then, from the reality that there is no success without complexity — whether a business knows it benefits from complexity or not.

A Sense of the Book

Those experienced with the challenges of doing business are often pleased because complexity explains why following long lists of “should” (as they are continually told to do) does not lead to promised business success. Others are frustrated because complexity makes it clear these “shoulds” do not and cannot make results predictable. Many who are frustrated then blame complexity for making clear scientific truth. While results can be anticipated, they cannot be predicted in the ways investors, boards, and executives claim and demand.

Yet others enjoy the inherent humanity of complexity. Traditional training, encouraged today by AI, somehow sets out to eliminate human beings from the practice of doing business. Complexity reveals, though, that business success requires our full human abilities.

Peeking inside, the book begins with the traditional assumptions of business as well as scientific practice and the revolution of complexity. From this foundation, readers explore a framework for considering their actions within complex worlds including the unusual order of complexity. Readers also explore many of the complex forces which affect businesses — forces of emergence, self-organization, instability, our own human complexity, adaptation, and more. Finally, a survey of business practices shows the effects of complexity on some of the most critical disciplines of doing business.

Why Do We Care Deeply about Complexity?

We only improve business success by understanding how business works and this cannot be done without complexity. Fortunately, its new understanding leads to two key results. First, complexity reveals unusually effective paths to success — paths which also build resilience. Of equal importance, complexity leverages the full human abilities of managers — abilities evolution has kept because humans have lived, always, within inherently complex worlds.

Where traditional business thinking demands practitioners reject what their eyes and ears discover, complexity requires that we be naturally curious about how business works. And while many fear uncertainty in business, complexity shows success is possible only because of uncertainty — especially the dynamic uncertainty always present in business practice as often discussed in this newsletter.

There is more to come. Be well!

©2026 Doug Garnett — All Rights Reserved

Doug’s book about the value of complexity science and business success will be published by Columbia Business Press later in 2026. Through his company, Protonik LLC, Doug Garnett consults with companies as they design and bring to market new and innovative products. He has taught marketing, consumer behavior, and advertising at Portland State University since 2001.

You can read more about Doug’s unusual background (math, aerospace, supercomputers, consumer goods & national TV ads) at www.Protonik.net. Doug is a member of the RetailWire.com braintrust where he engages discussions of retail challenges. And, together with his podcast partner Shahin Khan, current issues in marketing and business are discussed on The Marketing (And Everything Else) Podcast — available on Google, Spotify, the OrionX website, and Apple Podcast.