Making Sense Of Complex Systems

Thinking Through Complexity and Wicked Problems

Join us this January for a lecture that takes a step back from solutions—and instead asks how we think about the world’s hardest problems in the first place.

About the Lecture

The most pressing challenges of our time, climate change, demographic shifts, infectious diseases, are often treated as isolated crises. In reality, they are deeply entangled. They are what researchers call wicked problems: issues shaped by many interacting forces, with no single solution that can satisfy everyone.

This lecture introduces the idea of the world as a complex system, one where outcomes emerge not from individual parts, but from their interactions. Using examples drawn from population dynamics, climate systems, and disease spread, the session shows why these problems cannot be understood, let alone addressed, from within the boundaries of a single discipline.

Drawing on insights from physics, biology, and sustainability science, the lecture explores:

• What makes a problem “wicked,” and why such problems resist simple fixes
• Why interdisciplinary thinking is not optional, but essential
• How complexity challenges our instinct to seek linear cause-and-effect explanations
• Why keeping sustainability at the core of decision-making may be one of the few viable paths forward

About the Speaker

Gautam Menon is Professor of Physics and Biology and Dean of Research at Ashoka University, where he is also Co-Director of the Centre for Climate Change and Sustainability.

Previously, he was a Professor in the Theoretical Physics and Computational Biology groups at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, where he also served as the Founding Dean of the Computational Biology group. He has held visiting and adjunct positions at Tata Institute of Fundamental Research and the National University of Singapore.

PS: Your ticket includes a complimentary beverage or snack at the venue.

About unLecture

unLecture brings experts out of classrooms and into cafés, bars and neighbourhood spaces across Delhi. Created by three friends from St. Stephen’s, Delhi who wanted learning to feel warm, social and alive. unLecture turns an otherwise ordinary evening into a conversation you may think about long after it ends.