The complexity of our world is overwhelming. Organisational systems that refuse to respond to hierarchical logic. Social changes that accelerate without our seeing what generates them. Decisions that appear rational, yet produce unpredictable results. As professionals, we find ourselves navigating in fog.
What if the problem were not a lack of information, but rather our mental model for interpreting it?
The Lenses Physics Offers
Quantum science has confronted a dilemma analogous to our own. When physicists observed microscopic systems, they discovered a gap between what is observable and what actually generates those observables. This fundamental recognition inspired the controversial David Bohm - whose alternative interpretation of quantum mechanics remains debated yet remains mathematically rigorous - to propose that behind apparent reality exists a deeper, "implicate" order, enfolded within each part of the system.
Bohm suggested that reality operates through two simultaneous orders: the explicate order (what we see, measure, report) and the implicate order (deep structures, latent patterns, invisible connections). Applied to human organisations, this framework reveals how the implicate order operates through: the shared assumptions, ancestral values, and institutional legacies that shape every decision without our explicitly stating them.
Quantum mechanics also revealed something more: there hypothetically exist hidden variables—determining factors we cannot measure directly yet which, nonetheless, generate the outcomes we observe. It is information that simply remains invisible.
Applying This Framework to Our Challenges
What would happen if we thought about our organisations and societies through this lens?
Crises that "appear suddenly" do not arise from nowhere. They represent the unfolding of tensions encapsulated in the system for years: contradictory values, misaligned incentives, unprocessed histories. Rupturing change would not be an anomaly, but rather a bifurcation of the deterministic chaos that was already present.
The most effective leaders sense this. They do not process only explicit data (reports, metrics), but access deep structures: historical context, relational dynamics, shared meaning. The best decision-making occurs when present consciousness co-implicates with collective memory.
Hidden variables in the human context are initially invisible: ancestral beliefs, inherited patterns of power, institutional traumas. Yet they determine trajectories: an organisation with the same formal structure but a different "implicate order" creates entirely different cultures.
A Tool, Not a Truth
Although all this is not proven predictive science, it offers a potent conceptual framework for seeing the invisible. Like any model, it has limits. But as an instrument for professionals navigating an unprecedented complexity each day, it provides a way to look beneath the surface and recognise that human systems are neither purely rational nor random, but profoundly structured in ways our conventional metrics cannot capture.
Significantly, this principle - the co-implication of past and present contexts to model futures - is precisely the architectural mechanism on which LLMs base their functioning: they bring latent information from past context (implicit memory) into the present to project future responses. The structure underlying both human and artificial intelligence is the same.
In these moments of apparent chaos, the most effective change often does not come from adding more explicit information, but rather from accessing - and transforming - the implicate order that silently generates everything.
For those wishing to deepen their understanding: Bohm's realist interpretation of quantum mechanics offers rigorous foundations. Organisational Homeostasis explores application to human systems. Implicate Orders in Learning connects with organisational development and LLMs.
This article is republished from Futuribles. Here's the original article in Spanish and English.
