In the end we never got a chance to publish our Brexit analysis. Time moved on and other things seemed more important. Like the American election. Which turned out – per our prediction – pretty much the same as Brexit. And which also triggerred much hand-wringing and self-flagellation by the media, political commentators and losing-candidate voters of the world.

Now I find myself reading the media’s post-mortem analyses of 2016 and fighting off a gnawing sense of depression. Not because the world is heading towards crisis and catastrophe – we worked that out a few years ago already – but because of the media’s deepening misunderstanding of how the world works.

The search for the ‘root cause’ of the Brexit result bumbles along fruitlessly, with six months of incubation seemingly doing nothing to bring any clarity. A lot like the drunk man looking for his car keys under the streetlight. The media demands a root cause because they’ve been taught there must be a root cause. There must be something or – preferably – someone to take the blame. The problem is, like the drunk, we’re looking for something that isn’t there. But we look anyway because it’s easier than thinking.

At least the end-of-year media analyses allowed me to update our collection of previously mooted Brexit ‘root cause’ candidates. Of which there have now been a lot. Some more ridiculous than others, but all ultimately doomed to pointless either/or debates in pubs up and down the land and on Question Time. Do we blame Gove? Or Johnson? Or Churchill (!)? Or deGaulle (!!)? Wrong question, dummy.

In a complex system, there is no such thing as a root-cause, and so any attempt to try and find one is a Sisyphus-like exercise in pushing dumb-as-a-rock thinking up the mountain, thus ensuring no meaningful progress gets made. Maybe that’s the point?

Personally, I’d rather try and make sense of what’s happening. Not that there’s anything I am likely to be able to do about the result. But at least, I’ll have a better idea about how I and the Systematic Innovation team can best find a place in the world that makes sure we’re more likely to thrive than dive.

Here’s what happened when I took all the ‘root cause’ candidates and shifted the focus to mapping the relationships between them:

I know, I know, you can’t see all the details. That’s not the point. The point is that the picture hopefully makes clear that there is no such thing as a root-cause. The only good news, if ‘good’ is anywhere close to the right word, looking at the rats-nest is that there is only one vicious cycle. The conspiracy of causes, in other words, all seems to converge on one downward loop of hell. Here’s what it looks like in more detail:

The main conclusion this picture perhaps suggests is ‘hello loudmouth, bye-bye truth’. Or, ‘welcome to the shoot-the-expert, post-truth, best-fiction-wins society’.

The other might be that we all begin to nurture and value the truth-curators once more. Or maybe, better yet, the people that write the truth-detecting software. I think the mist is clearing. I think my 2017 is becoming clear…