From chapter 1:

Complexity isn’t the problem. The problem is how we’re facing and embracing it—or, rather, how we’re not facing or embracing it. 

This brings about a sense of vulnerability. Fear and discomfort quickly bubble to the surface when thinking about modern complexity and how poorly equipped we are to face it. But when these feelings arise, it’s important to stay present and resist the urge to fall back into comfortable ways of thinking. 

The solution begins with new representations of the ever-changing nature of the world. We need new means to model reality and reason about the complexity that surrounds us.

We need to augment our perceptual abilities, but with a caveat: collective thinking in the midst of complexity requires not only perceiving signals of information that are out of reach to our default capabilities but also recognizing that the conceptual meaning of those new signals might be not accessible to us, and even if they were accessible, they might be subjective or different for different observers. They might require a higher level of reasoning that we, as individuals, just don’t have.