Imagine that you’re building a totally new city from scratch. It’s up to you to create the schools, the transportation, the hospitals, and determine how people will have access to everything they need to survive (like food and water), solve problems, and get along. To make your city run smoothly, you would need to think about how everything in it connects. You would need to design a system—a way for all the parts and people in your city to work together.

Everything around us is part of a system. Your home planet, Earth, has oceans, weather, plants, animals, people, and machines on it, all of which interact and change how it functions. The human body contains your heart, lungs, brains, and muscles that work in unison to keep you alive. Your school has students, teachers, staff, rules, assignments, schedules, and classes that create a working ecosystem. Even your favorite video game has systems made of avatars, health points, experience points, leveling up, teamwork strategies, and more.

When you think about the next threshold of increasing complexity, the first thing that probably comes to mind is some new technology and how it might transform our world. After all, the two most recent thresholds involved new technologies—agriculture and fossil fuels. But just because that’s happened in the past doesn’t mean that’s what will happen in the future. What if—instead of some new technology—the next threshold happens because of some change we make to the way we run our societies? Think about how the Threshold 7—Agriculture—also changed the way humans were organized, by creating kings and priests, hierarchies, cities, and more.

So, let’s think about human systems—the ways we interact with each other. Human systems involve our governments, economies, religions, and plenty of other stuff—all the ways we organize our societies and our relationships to the world around us.

Could we make changes to the way we organize our systems that are so dramatic that they spark the next threshold of increasing complexity?

Systems thinking and futuring

Let’s return to your imaginary city. If you want it to be better than the cities that exist today, you’ll need to imagine how things might work in the future. This is called futuring. Futuring isn’t about guessing what comes next; instead, it’s about preparing for many different possibilities.

Futurists ask questions like:

• What will jobs look like in 2040?
• Can robots help us learn?
• How can future cities survive heatwaves and floods?
• What kind of future do we want—and how do we get there?

Futuring helps us become drivers of the future, not just passengers.

To truly fulfill the mission of imagining a brighter city, you would need to consider different perspectives and look at your imaginary city from different points of view. One useful perspective is called systems thinking. It’s a way of looking at the whole picture, not just one piece. It’s similar to scale switching because it helps you see how all the parts of a puzzle fit together—and how changing one thing might change others.

Constructing a whole new city is a big, complex job. So, let’s start by considering something smaller. Here’s an example you’ve probably thought about: school lunches. If you wanted to improve school lunches, what would you need to do? It might seem simple—just change the menu. But you’d also need to think about nutrition, your school’s administration, government mandates, food suppliers, and budgets. Eventually, you’ll need to dig deeper into the systems that support local farms, delivery trucks, food companies, trash and recycling, and more.

If you combine systems thinking and futuring, you can develop a strong ability to solve problems. Thinking in systems allows us to fix problems by exploring the origins of the challenges we face, identifying how things are succeeding or failing, and discovering connections and relationships that create new solutions. Futuring allows our imagination to dream brighter futures and empower new visions that can be turned into real outcomes.

Now we’re not just reacting—we’re designing a future system that works better.

The future of systems

As we design and plan the new cities—and other human systems—of the future, we can imagine that in the next 20 years, things are going to look and feel different. Here are a few ways that may happen:

1. Smarter systems—We’re already building machines and computers that can learn and make decisions. They’re called AI (artificial intelligence) systems. Some systems will even fix themselves when they break.
2. Connected everything—Phones, refrigerators, and even shoes can talk to each other now. This is called the Internet of Things. Our future devices will connect and communicate with everything around us—our friends, family, homes, workplaces, and environments.
3. Eco-friendly systems—Hopefully, our future systems will focus on helping the Earth, not harming it. That means recycling, reusing, and helping nature to regenerate itself.
4. People-powered systems—Instead of experts making big decisions, more systems will be designed with everyday people and communities in mind.

Building future systems

In order to build the systems of the future, you might have to:

1. Ask powerful questions—Find ways to solve problems by asking questions like, Who else is involved?; What other parts are connected to this?; and What happens next?
2. Look for loops—Some systems have feedback loops, which means that doing something makes it more likely to happen again. For example, if a crowd cheers when a basketball player makes a basket, that player feels more confident and is more likely to do it again, and everyone cheers more, continuing the cycle.
3. Tell future stories—Imagine a world 10, 20, and 50 years from now. How do people live? What problems have we solved? What new problems arise?
4. Map it out—You can draw a systems map of something you care about and show how all the parts connect.
5. Work in teams—The best systems are cocreated with other people! Team up with classmates and friends to solve real problems in your community.

A future of possibilities

Why does this matter? Because you’re not just going to be living in the future—you’re designers of it. Every time you ask why things work a certain way, or wonder if we can make it better, or ponder what happens if something changes—you’re thinking like a systems innovator.

Whether you’re into art, science, video games, social justice, or just about anything else, systems thinking can help you make a difference in your community—and perhaps the whole world.

As the world gets faster and more complicated, we need more people— especially young people—who can see the big picture, imagine new futures, and design better systems.

That could be you.

Whether you’re building a game, writing a story, or growing a garden, remember: you’re already practicing the skills of a systems thinker. The future isn’t something that just happens—it’s something we build together.

So…what kind of world will you create?