JP Castlin and Doug Garnett wrote an article titled Why Marketing Systems Work Until They Don’t for WARC (11 September 2026).
« The interdisciplinary field of complex systems science… At its core lies a study of how simple, interconnected, and adaptive components in systems such as economies, markets, ecosystems, and societies produce macro patterns that cannot be deduced from the properties of the parts considered separately, nor from simply adding those parts together. »
« Optimizing the parts in a complex system does not necessarily improve the whole; as W. Edwards Deming observed, if the whole is optimized, the different parts will not be optimized. »
« Marketers are, shall we say, strongly encouraged to look for linear causality, as this makes demonstrating past results and forecasting future returns far easier… Yet all such actions ignore connections that are not visible; they exclude variables, relationships, and feedback loops that later may prove decisive. A dashboard, funnel, brand architecture, or attribution model are, after all, never “the system”. They are always an abstraction – one cut through reality. They will reveal some things and hide others. »
« Reducing a brand into numbers means losing much of the nuance that makes it what it is. »
« Focusing on what a dashboard tracks at the cost of that which it does not makes companies forget the critical aspects of the reality in which they exist. »
« The best marketing systems are consequently not the most stringent, nor the most clearly defined, but those that remain open to correction. They are the ones that are informative enough to create coherence, but not so descriptive that they blind the company to what is changing… the difference between using systems and being used by them. »
« … establishing strategic guardrails within (but not outside of) which marketers are enabled to react, explore, and adapt… Exploration within the guardrails should consequently, as far as possible, be safe-to-fail. Any exploration which is not safe-to-fail should be guided by groups particularly skilled at such exploration, working with senior executives. »
« The balance between exploitation and exploration is… the balance between what the firm knows and wants to know. A critical result of experiments, even if they do not deliver the hoped-for output, is feedback from which the firm can learn. »
Doug Garnett is the author of The Complexity Paradigm: Using System Science to Drive Business Success
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