What’s getting lost in the shuffle?
German systems theorist Niklas Luhmann wrote 10,000 pages of research, but the core of his theory lies in a card catalog, or “Zettelkasten,” that's still at the University of Bielefeld in Nordrhein-Westfalen.
Luhmann’s card catalog
According to the Niklas Luhmann Archive, the card catalog encompasses about 90,000 undated notecards, representing Luhmann’s life’s work.
Luhmann used this format for thinking through ideas because it fit how he wrote and thought. A systems theorist, he believed any complex system—the human mind, a bacterial infection, a company, or an ant farm—emerges from a few basic choices made at the very beginning in response to the world around it. Once made, these choices form the basis of every subsequent decision.
These basic decisions are always at least somewhat arbitrary, he emphasized. When a system is just starting out, it’s just experimenting with life, figuring out what works and what doesn’t. It's dealing with limited time and resources. More often than not, it's experiencing adversity that's putting its survival into question.
The system is fumbling in the dark. But it also needs to survive. And to survive, it needs to choose.
When a system finds a workable solution, it keeps it without stopping to think about whether there's a better one. This solution may be the best given the situation it's facing, but that "best" solution might also be the best of a bunch of rotten options.
The system just keeps going, forgetting that its entire life is based on a series of choices that may no longer be true—if they were ever true at all.
To illustrate how this works, Luhmann put a single card in his Zettelkasten that says that all the other cards in the catalog are wrong.
Over time, as that one notecard was joined by 89,999 others, it got lost in the shuffle. The choices he knew were once arbitrary or provisional became baked into how his system works. The system became increasingly complex, but the bigger and more powerful it got, the more fragile it became. Because one day that lone notecard could be right.
The same is true for the organizations and lives we lead, which are also based on a few basic assumptions and core beliefs we decided were true when we, too, were fumbling in the dark. Things like:
"My job will never go away."
"If I'm going to be safe, I need to be in control."
"If I ever want to succeed, I have to work harder than everyone else."
Over time, those core beliefs became part of our reality, just the way things are. We forget that those beliefs we think are so true could be false, just an arbitrary decision we made under pressure when we didn't know any better.
Sometimes they might still serve us, but other times, they’re the source of our fragility. And if we are to grow, we need to confront those beliefs, test them, and see if we need to change them.
What assumptions might you need to change?
