Events Evaporate, Patterns Persist: Lessons from Eddie Obeng on Navigating Complexity
Written by Oliver Cronk (using quotes from the episode with Eddie, with some AI editing)
Eddie Obeng holds a special place in the Architect Tomorrow story. His concept of “the world after midnight”, the idea that the pace of change overtook our ability to learn and adapt sometime around the early 1990s, was a foundational inspiration for this podcast and community. So it was a genuine privilege to finally sit down with him on location in his office for a conversation that ranged across engineering, ecosystems, governance, sustainability, and what it actually takes to make progress in a complex world.
For those unfamiliar with Eddie: he’s an engineer turned educator turned author turned sense-maker. Chemical and biochemical engineering degrees, a PhD, an MBA, ten books (including Financial Times bestsellers), a TED talk, work with roughly 70% of the FT 100 over his career, and the creation of Qube, a collaborative digital platform. He’s also one of the fastest talkers you’ll ever encounter, which suits me just fine as I tend to run at 1.25x speed myself!
What follows are the ideas from our conversation that I think matter most for architects, systems thinkers, and anyone trying to build something better.
A word of context before we dive in: Eddie is a provocateur, and deliberately so. He takes positions to their extremes to force you to examine your assumptions. Some of what follows, particularly on governance and the role of government, I found myself pushing back on in the conversation and still wrestle with now. That’s the point. I don’t think you have to agree with Eddie on everything to find his thinking enormously valuable. Regular readers will know that this newsletter has consistently argued for governance as an innovation enabler. But I also believe that uncomfortable conversations sharpen thinking. Take what challenges you. Discard what doesn’t. And ideally, let me know where you land in the comments.
The full podcast is now available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2qbwlaDMeM
The World Already Changed. You Just Didn’t Notice.
The “world after midnight” concept sounds dramatic, but Eddie’s explanation is rooted in straightforward observation. Working with telecoms and banking clients in the early 1990s, he noticed organisations doing sensible things and getting nonsensical results:
“They had a mindset of how the world changed. They had a pace to themselves: quarterly, monthly, annual. That’s how they saw the world. Meanwhile, everything was connecting up. There were more people on the planet. They were moving into cities. The technology was going faster and faster.”
Plot the pace of change (exponential, self-reinforcing) against our pace of learning (constrained by meetings, hierarchies, attention spans), and you get a crossing point. That crossing point was midnight:
“The world had already flipped. But you hadn’t noticed because no one rang a bell. Hence, midnight. We were asleep.”
He first presented this at Ashridge Business School in 1992. At the time, he says, it was “basically bonkers.” Over three decades later, it feels more relevant than ever. Every organisation I work with is grappling with this gap, and the emergence of generative AI has arguably widened it further.
The Wildebeest and the Immune System
I shared my concept of the “corporate immune system”, the idea that organisations have a natural defence mechanism that pushes out ideas that are too radical. Eddie appreciated the thinking but offered a characteristically blunter metaphor:
“Once the wildebeest start running, they’re going in a direction. You go, ‘I think we should go this way.’ They nudge you back. You do it again and this time they just knock you over and trample you on and move on. I think it’s the momentum of all the old ideas, heuristics, processes, and KPIs. It just flattens you as you go.”
I laughed, and then stopped laughing, because it’s painfully accurate. The wildebeest image captures something the immune system metaphor perhaps doesn’t: it’s not a sophisticated defence mechanism. It’s just momentum. There’s no malice in it. The herd doesn’t decide to trample you. It simply can’t change direction fast enough.
This connects directly to the challenges we’ve discussed on this podcast around AI adoption. Organisations are applying old transformation patterns (waterfall planning, fixed target states, linear business cases) to an immature emerging technology (that exhibits different traits due to its non-determinism). The wildebeest are running. The question is whether architects can find ways to redirect the herd or whether they’ll keep getting trampled.
Events Evaporate, Patterns Persist
If there was one phrase from our conversation that I’d print on the wall of every architecture practice, it’s this:
“The best way of dealing with the situation is not to deal with the events which come at you, but to spend some time looking at the underlying patterns and underlying causes.”
Eddie went further: “Even in a complex system, there are rarely ever more than half a dozen things you really should focus on. And if you focus on those, you always have all the time in the world. If you focus on all the events, events evaporate, patterns persist.”
This is architectural thinking at its most fundamental. And yet how many architecture teams spend their time chasing events? A new AI model launches, a competitor makes an announcement, a vendor pitches a shiny platform, and the whole team pivots. Meanwhile, the persistent patterns (data fragmentation, organisational silos, skills gaps, sustainability debt) go unaddressed.
Ron Kersic talked about “incremental truth” in his episode on futuring architectures. Jenny Wilson brought the lens of evolutionary thinking from her zoology background. Eddie’s “events evaporate, patterns persist” is the same insight from yet another angle. The best architects I know have internalised this. They don’t ignore events, but they don’t let events drive their strategy either.
Dynamic Stability: The Spinning Top, Not the Vase
One of the most thought-provoking moments came when Eddie challenged the common understanding of sustainability. His mother was an environmental biologist and parasitologist, so he grew up with sustainability meaning ecosystem dynamics, not corporate ESG reports:
“When people say sustainability, I smile because I know they haven’t thought through what that actually is. They all imagine it stabilising flat on the table.”
He described three types of stability: flat on a table (static equilibrium), balanced in a bowl (dynamic but self-correcting), and balanced on a mountaintop (unstable, any perturbation is catastrophic). Most organisations aim for the first. Most sustainability strategies assume the first. But real systems, the ones that endure, work like the second:
“What’s more useful is what I call dynamic stability, which is the spinning top. You hit a spinning top and it’s rotating but stays upright. It’s the balance. And the spinning top in the bowl. Fantastic. Because it can move around.”
The implications for architecture are profound. If you’re designing for a static target state, you’re designing for a world that doesn’t exist. You need to design for dynamic stability: systems that maintain their essential purpose whilst continuously adapting to changing conditions. This resonates with the cone of possibilities framework I’ve been developing, which explicitly maps multiple futures rather than trying to predict a single one.
It also has direct implications for how we think about AI sustainability. As I discussed at HM Treasury’s ID25 event last year, the brute-force approach to AI is inherently fragile. Massive centralised infrastructure, enormous energy consumption, and winner-takes-all economics are the opposite of dynamic stability. A more distributed, right-sized, and adaptable approach to AI infrastructure would be far more resilient.
The Problem with Governance (and Government)
Here’s where the conversation got properly spicy and where I want to be transparent about where Eddie and I diverge. Eddie holds a view that essentially all government intervention distorts markets and impoverishes people, a position I pushed back on but found fascinating to explore. His argument centres on the idea that intervention, however well-intentioned, always steals resources from the working system:
“You put guardrails and you’re stealing from someone. Who are you stealing from?”
He illustrated this with his experience designing the UK’s Sparks innovation investment model: government announces innovation grants for an emerging sector, people who aren’t in that sector but want the money write proposals to get it, and end up competing with (and sometimes destroying) the very innovators the grants were meant to help.
I’ll be honest: I struggle with this in its purest form. I think governance (as distinct from government) plays a vital enabling role, and Selena Evans made this case powerfully in our previous episode: “Governance unlocks your innovation engine.” But Eddie’s point about scale and transparency is one I find much harder to argue with:
“It’s not the size which is important. It’s the scale and transparency. If you can see what people are doing, they tend not to be able to cheat so much.”
The architectural lesson here isn’t about adopting Eddie’s political philosophy wholesale. It’s about designing governance that is proportionate, transparent, and scaled appropriately. Bad governance, as Selena also noted, “slows things down… in the way that organisations practise it very defensively and with a frame of risk aversion at all costs.” Good governance is invisible, enabling, and honest about trade-offs. I still believe governance is essential, particularly for AI deployment and sustainability. But Eddie’s challenge on scale and transparency is one I think we should take seriously rather than dismiss. As I often say: give me the freedom of a tight brief.
All the Problems of the World Are Trivial
This was the claim that made me laugh out loud. But Eddie backed it up with a story.
Trying to sell Qube to the Scottish government, he was drawing a diagram of commuting journeys and their carbon impact. He noticed that every location in the journey (home, car, train, office) had space heating. He recalled skiing at minus 20 without burning a single carbon. The solution?
“What if I dress properly? You solve climate change by just persuading everyone to dress differently. All you need is a celebrity or a designer who designs the really stunning fashion.”
Now, I don’t think this literally solves climate change, and I suspect most of you reading this don’t either. But the underlying point is incisive: problems that should be engineering and design challenges get handed to people who worry, then to politicians, then to blame exercises, and the actual problem solvers never get in the room. As Eddie put it:
“The whole conversation at a global level didn’t involve engineers, architects, designers, problem solvers.”
This resonates deeply with the architect’s predicament. We’re often brought in after the strategic decisions have been made, asked to implement rather than shape. Selena Evans and Darryl Carr both argued in our human-centred AI episode that architects should lean in to policy-making and civic architecture. Eddie’s provocation takes this further: if you’re a problem solver, stop waiting to be invited. The problems are trivial. It’s the politics, fashion, and “cocktails” (his word) that make them hard.
The Human Side: Issue, Data, Question, Build
For all the big-picture thinking, Eddie’s most practically useful advice was about working with people. He described one of his PETs (Performance Enhancement Tools) called “Issue, Data, Question, Build”:
“If somebody suggests something to you and you haven’t come up with it on your own, your brain basically panics. It treats it as a change. Something is going to eat me. But questions work. If you ask someone a question, it triggers a different part and it goes after it.”
The technique: raise an issue the other person recognises, provide concrete data, ask a question (triggering their brain’s problem-solving mode), then shut up and let them engage. Once they start answering, join the dialogue. Don’t get precious about ownership.
“That allows other people to own your idea.And to come up with something creative. Truly collaborate.”
This is gold for architects who constantly need to influence without authority. We’ve talked about this challenge across many episodes, and Eddie’s framework gives it a practical shape. The brain falls in love with its own answers far more than being told what to do.
Cybernetics and Collective Intelligence
Selena Evans asked me to put a question to Eddie about his naturally cybernetic approach and sustainable adaptability. His response was characteristically honest about human limitations:
“As human beings, we can’t deal with as many variables as natural systems. So we pretend we’re building complex systems and they’re really quite simple systems. And then we become the god of our own simple system and think it can resolve everything, which of course it can’t.”
His solution isn’t better central planning. It’s recognising that semi-connected, interdependent individuals working together can handle complexity that no individual or hierarchy ever could:
“We will never be able to deal with the complexity as individuals which we can deal with by being disconnected and semi-connected individuals.”
This is why he built Qube. It’s why he’s passionate about collaboration tools that let introverts contribute (they “have superpowers” but “won’t say a word” in traditional meetings). And it’s why he believes organisations that rely on pyramid structures and bottleneck decision-making through a handful of senior leaders are fundamentally mismatched to the world after midnight.
Don’t Screw It Up
Eddie closed with advice that was both simple and profound:
“The first most important thing is you. You have to decide whether your goal is to contribute. And if you’ve decided to contribute, then it gets easy. Because from here on, everything you do, you know is the right thing to do.”
And then, with characteristic Eddie flair:
“We’re all here. It’s an adventure. The funny part of this adventure is for all of us, it probably started several billion years ago. Because life never ends. It just continues. You get to this point after billions of years and your chance to do something which can be great. Don’t screw it up.”
What This Means for Architects
This conversation reinforced several themes that keep emerging across the Architect Tomorrow community:
Stop chasing events. The AI announcements, the vendor pitches, the market panics: these are events. They evaporate. Focus on the half dozen patterns that actually matter for your organisation. As we discussed in the AI principles piece (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/practical-pragmatic-ai-principles-autumn-oliver-cronk-jkwfe/), demanding evidence over enthusiasm and mapping reality over marketing are patterns that persist.
Design for dynamic stability. Static target states are a fiction. Whether you’re designing AI architectures, organisational structures, or governance frameworks, build for adaptability. The spinning top in the bowl, not the vase on the table.
Work with human psychology, not against it. Architects influence through ideas, not authority. Eddie’s Issue, Data, Question, Build framework is one practical technique, but the principle is broader: help people fall in love with shared answers rather than trying to impose your own.
Get in the room earlier. If problems are trivial but politics makes them hard, architects need to be involved in shaping strategy, not just implementing it. Lean in to policy, governance design, and ecosystem thinking. As we’ve explored across multiple episodes, this is where architects add irreplaceable value.
Decide to contribute. Everything else follows from this. If you’ve made that decision, the wildebeest might still trample you occasionally, but at least you’ll know which direction you were trying to go.
Eddie Obeng’s work was the spark that lit Architect Tomorrow. This conversation reminded me why. In a world after midnight, where the pace of change has long since outstripped our ability to comprehend it, we need sense-makers, pattern-finders, and people brave enough to ask uncomfortable questions. That’s what this community is about. That’s what architects do.
As Eddie would say: it’s an adventure. Don’t screw it up.
You can find Eddie’s PETs TED talk, his (Performance Enhancement Tools), books, and more by searching for Eddie Obeng online, or follow him directly on here.
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Originally published on LinkedIn. Comments and discussion live there.