One suggestion though: on running experiments: what we learn from evolution is that it is better not to pick winners alone. It is more effective to eliminate the losers. As you don’t know what path will be best in the longer term, it is important to keep sufficient variability in your responses. Picking winners eliminates solutions that could become better with some further tinkering.

On firebreaks – the whole modern financial system after ‘big bang’ was deliberately engineered to be unstable, by tightly connecting the various bits together, so that any toxic debt could quickly circulate. Showed a complete lack of understanding of complex systems and leads to the inescapable conclusion that our leaders don’t understand the way the world works.

A great video (you might have linked this before) by David Snowden, explains complexity thinking in three minutes better than anything else I have seen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Miwb92eZaJg&feature=player_embedded