People as Code 3 - Quantum Uncertainty

People as Code explored how humans could become systems, and People as Code 2 - Collapse, rewild, regenerate. discussed how systems could start to imitate us, narrowing possibilities, and what we need to think about is rewilding and regenerative approaches. This post dives more into uncertainty and wondering what happens when we stop pretending control was ever possible.

The quantum turn

Ah the soon to be new hype - quantum computing. But what has that got to do with People As Code? What has it got to do with us and the work we do and the choices we make?

Classical computing at its most basic works in the binary: on or off, yes or no, a bit that is either one or zero. Quantum computing on the other hand operates in probabilities. A bit can be both one and zero until it’s observed. 

And it is this plurality, this uncertainty that perhaps we could learn from in our work. 

Designing with uncertainty

What would it mean to build systems that embrace that truth? To accept that knowledge has limits? That outcomes are plural? That impact can be both real and indeterminate at the same time? What if, instead of designing systems to eliminate uncertainty, we learned to work with it?

In quantum terms many futures exist in superposition - overlapping, entangled, influencing each other. Change in one particle affects another, no matter the distance.

Social change is like that. A funding decision here affects a movement there. An . All overlapping, entangled. Every decision, every funding round, every intervention in one system creates ripples in another. A grant made or not in one region or part of a system shifts the landscape in another. A story told here changes what’s possible there. Our systems, digital, organisational, ecological are already entangled.

We pretend we can map it all, but we can’t and maybe we shouldn’t try. The myth of control tells us we can isolate cause and effect, plan outcomes, predict impact. But quantum reality maybe suggests otherwise, that every action alters the field in ways intended and not.

In quantum systems, probability is reality. What’s possible depends on what’s allowed, what states can exist, what interactions are permitted.

In social systems, the same logic applies. The policy decisions defines the probability of something happening. What we choose to fund defines which futures can exist.

So perhaps the task isn’t to manage uncertainty, but to design the probabilities that shape it. To make more just, more imaginative futures more likely.

By choosing what to measure we choose what matters

The act of measurement defines reality.

The way we measure impact reduces the possible futures into metrics, sometimes necessary, almost always reductive. Which stories remain unobserved because they don’t fit the framework? What are we eliminating by our choice of forced measurement?

When we demand certainty too soon, we collapse possibility into metrics. We kill the experiment before it’s had time to become.

Quantum thinking invites a slower kind of evaluation - one that sees measurement as observation, not verdict and learning as ongoing, not final.

Uncertainty as design principle

Instead of designing around uncertainty, we could design with it.

To design with uncertainty is to acknowledge that systems are alive. They change midstream. They adapt, decay, regenerate.

Imagine if funding supported us to operated like that - iterative, adaptive, relational. Imagine if governance allowed branching and recombination, if programmes could evolve instead of expire.

Uncertainty then becomes not a risk, but a space for creativity.