Composting the analyst

“To understand the cause of things” (motto of London School of Economics)

”Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas.” Happy is the one who has been able to understand the causes of things. It is a beautiful sentence (from the Latin poet Virgilius). Clean, grounded, and full of quiet confidence in the human capacity to make sense of the world.

I have lived much of my life inside that sentence. For years, I trusted analysis as my primary way of orienting myself and making a living. The task was clear. Look out at the world, identify the forces at play, understand what drives what. Then offer an answer to a simple, familiar question, from an old friend or a CEO client: what do I need to know about X?

I was rarely the specialist producing the long report. More often, I was asked to give a “brief”. Sometimes one page, sometimes three minutes. Something that could hold together just enough of the complexity to guide a decision or shape a conversation. I became reasonably good at this craft of distilling, framing, naming and describing in words what matters.

And yet, even early on, something felt slightly off.

The world we were trying to describe was not standing still. It was moving, and it was layered in ways that resisted the neatness of our categories. We spoke of environments as if they were external, stable, observable. But we were inside them. Acting, reacting, shaping and being shaped at the same time. The distance implied by analysis was never quite real. Also, we focused on elements, and not relationships, when in fact what we were analyzing and describing was precisely flows and interactions.

That intuition has only grown stronger. We now speak of metacrisis, polycrisis, unraveling. Words that try to gesture toward a situation where many systems shift at once, interacting in ways that are hard to track and harder still to predict. Climate, energy, geopolitics, technology, finance, ecosystems, values, lifestyles. Each with its own dynamics. All entangled. And resulting in the pea soup that futurists and analysts see.

Can anyone really keep track of it all? Can anyone still form a reliable sense of where they are? Murray Gell-Mann once spoke of the need for “A crude look at the whole”. I’ve returned to that phrase often. It carries a certain humility: the whole will never be fully grasped, the view will always be partial. Still, the attempt matters.

I sometimes describe myself, half jokingly, as a recovering futurist, a reluctant analyst, because there comes a point where more analysis just does not bring more clarity. It produces more language around something that is slipping beyond language (and that’s even before the tsunami of words that’s been unleashed by the LLMs).

I remember hearing Vanessa Andreotti suggest that we probably grasp only a tiny fraction, perhaps one percent, of what is happening around us, and that only a fraction, perhaps also one percent, of that can be put into words. Whether the numbers are right hardly matters. We feel that so much of reality exceeds what can be named, categorized, or explained.

And still we try. We write. We model. We brief.

All of this has had value, and I have lived inside it for years. Thinking, reading, talking to experts, analysing, writing, producing briefs. But now I find myself stepping away from it.

Because the world I am trying to understand no longer yields to analysis in the way it once seemed to. For me, this shift began about a decade ago. Brexit. Trump in 2016. The continued inability to act on climate despite overwhelming evidence. The rise of misinformation. The return of war in Europe. Events that did not fit the models I had learned to trust. Events that made the world feel illegible.

So I stopped trying, at least in the old way, and I turned elsewhere.

At first it was a small shift in language, from “analysis” to “sense making”. Then the toolbox began to change. Less statistics suites and powerpoints, more stillness and meditation. The analytic mind remains, somewhere in the background, but it no longer leads, or decides what counts as understanding.

This is not new. Leaders have always searched for non-analytical ways to see into the future and understand the movement of the world. Astrologers, readers of tea leaves, crystal gazers, seers, sibyls, shamans, prophets have gathered around rulers and courts. Sure, there have also been forecasters, strategists, intelligence briefings, scenarios, quantitative models. But there is also a recognition that reality exceeds what can be captured in rational frameworks alone.

So something else begins to loosen: Letting certain habits of thought break down. Letting the need for clean explanations soften. Allowing older tools to decompose, so that something more attentive can emerge. Less concerned with mastery. More concerned with contact.

The old Latin motto returns here. Rerum cognoscere causas. To understand the causes of things. I have lived well by that idea. It shaped how I learned to see, but now I hear it differently. It feels less like a call to explain the world, more like a reminder to stay close to it. To remain with the question. To let understanding grow through presence as much as through thought. To sit in a forest as readily as one reads a report. To allow silence to carry part of the knowing. And to be willing to say “I really don’t know” when asked about the possible ramifications of some particular event.

Happy, perhaps, is no longer the one who understands the causes of things.