The Complexity of Empty Space

Empty space is a bigger mess#

When people hear "complexity," they picture mess. Tangled processes, legacy systems, that one spreadsheet from 2019 that somehow runs payroll. And yes, that's complex. But it's a manageable kind. Mess has handles. You can trace it, pull threads, see what moves. There's something to push against.

Empty space has none of that.

Starting a growth strategy from scratch, entering a market with zero data, defining positioning when you could say literally anything — these feel like freedom. They're not. They're a different kind of complexity, one most people are completely unprepared for. We're pattern-recognition machines. Give us a broken system, we'll diagnose it. Give us nothing? The playbook breaks.

Where the complexity hides#

If you're staring at a blank page, three layers of complexity are waiting for you. You've met them already. Now let me introduce them.

First: no constraints. Existing systems are full of limitations — budgets, expectations, dependencies. You may hate them, but they're useful. They eliminate options. They tell you what not to do. Empty space offers no such gift. Every direction looks equally valid, which means no direction feels valid enough. Freedom turns into paralysis.

Second: invisible disagreement. When nothing exists yet, people project. Everyone fills the blank page with their own assumptions about what matters, what "good" looks like, what the real problem is. And yet — everyone keeps nodding in the same meeting. There's nothing concrete to disagree about. But you're not aligned. You're pre-conflict.

Third, and this one runs deepest: no agreement on how to agree. Teams jump straight to "What should we do?" without answering the prior question: "How will we decide?" What criteria matter? What tradeoffs are acceptable? In empty space, these aren't established. You can debate solutions endlessly because everyone's judging by rules they haven't shared.

Why you can't think your way out#

Faced with empty space, smart people reach for smart-people tools. Analyze harder. Plan more carefully. Align the stakeholders. Build the deck. It feels like progress. It's not.

Complexity theory — the actual academic discipline — offers a useful lens here. Complexity doesn't live in elements; it lives in relationships between them. A system becomes complex not because it has many parts, but because those parts interact in emergent, unpredictable ways. In empty space, the relationships don't exist yet. You can't map interactions that haven't happened. You can't optimize a system that hasn't formed.

The map cannot precede the territory when there's no territory.

And tomorrow you'll build the deck anyway. I will too. Because fiction feels safer than saying "I don't know" out loud in a room full of people who also don't know but definitely aren't saying it.

The (almost) right moves#

Three moves everyone makes. Each contains something true. Each fails anyway.

"Let's align on objectives." You'll need objectives eventually. But in empty space, objectives give you a destination without orientation. "Grow revenue 30%" names a desire, not a direction. In existing systems, objectives guide action because you already know the terrain. In empty space, you don't. The objective floats, untethered.

"Let's test and learn." Sounds modern and rigorous. But testing presumes a hypothesis — a belief specific enough to be wrong. Empty space is pre-hypothesis. Did that campaign work? Depends on what "working" means, which you haven't defined. You're not experimenting. You're just moving.

"Let's just start somewhere." Closest to right. But dangerous. Starting without intent to observe is just motion. Or worse — the first thing you build becomes the default by accident, then calcifies into "the strategy" simply because it exists and nobody wants to undo work.

What works#

The discomfort is pointing somewhere. Follow it.

Empty the empty space first. Get assumptions on the table before they collide in execution. "What do you think this is? No, what do you actually think?" Make sure your blank page is actually blank — not crowded with hidden disagreements waiting to surface.

Solve for conversation before solutions. Often you need shared vocabulary just to discuss the problem. The answer comes later. The language to find it comes first.

Accept that your first move will be arbitrary. It can't be otherwise — there's no data to justify it yet. But arbitrary isn't random. Pick what's most likely to generate signal. Treat it as a starting point to revise, not a foundation to defend.

Commit hard enough to create friction. The system has to run before it shows you where it breaks. Relationships reveal themselves in motion, not on whiteboards. Half-hearted pilots teach nothing. The territory only appears when you walk into it, trip on a rock, and think "huh, there are rocks here."

What remains#

Empty space refuses the thing we want most: certainty before commitment. We want to know we're right before we move. Want the plan validated before we execute.

Doesn't work that way. The discomfort isn't a sign you're doing it wrong. It's the feel of doing it right. The uncertainty doesn't resolve — you just learn to move within it.

That's not a flaw in the process. That is the process.