Founder/owner of Global Smart Transformation (GST). GST founder, Duncan Botting, has over 45 years of experience at the coal face of solving challenges that encompass just about every sector of the economy and across policy, legislation, commercial, technical and societal aspects of each. At a technical level as a craft/technician apprentice through senior engineering roles to Head of Technology for a major corporate engineering company he was fortunate enough to play a leading role in the understanding and subsequent solutions to many tough challenges. He then turned to leading an SME research institute and on to forming an independent consultancy to focus on whole systems approaches. From hardware, software, digital, commercial, maintenance, strategy, general management, CEO and Board Chair he has gained significant insight into the way that complex decision making (or the lack of it) impacts society. He has worked on every continent except Antarctica. He has experienced many different cultures, ideologies, political governance structures, commercial approaches, technologies, standards adoption, management methodologies and societal norms. Why is this important? Complex systems are an intricate mixture and integration involving all of these aspects. For decades reductionism has served the market approach well by allowing the silo based delivery mechanisms that have been built on reductionist theories to operate effectively for many years. This was only true because a very slow changing ecosystem that allowed each of the silos to find their quiescent operating point against the other. Unfortunately, when a fast moving transition comes along these approaches fail and fail all at the same time as their operating points become completely unstable. Pandemics, BREXIT, Climate Change, rebalancing of the world order, supply chain and logistics crisis, skills shortages, the list goes on. To operate in tomorrow’s world efficiently complex systems of systems understanding and insights are paramount to business and governments alike.