So the emerging solutions require a new world view. The first, and in my view the most important, change in world view has been the acceptance and understanding of a dynamic, non-linear, non-equilibrium view of complex systems; and the ways in which the actions of biological and social agents working with simple rules based on local information can produce emergent system-level properties. This ‘unruly systemism’ – the action of agents in a recursive context – is a middle ground between the totally reductionist, individualist view and the structuralist view of system dynamics. This view allows for high degrees of non-linearity, surprises and hysteresis effects: precisely what we observe in nature. It is also a way of understanding the behaviour of meso-scale entities, landscapes and waterscapes – but not necessarily being able to predict what is going to happen. This ‘networked’ view of nature seems to show up many consistent patterns associated with scale-free (or ‘small world’) networks, which occur in everything from networks of interacting enzymes in cellular metabolism to social networks across continents. I think Bateson would have been proud to see the ways in which some of his ideas have developed and taken root. Not only are individual people and families best seen in ‘context’ but these concepts have been a powerful ways of exploring and explaining much of what we see around us.