Does Change Follow Universal Patterns?
“What comes next stems from what came before.”
The Test
With ending poverty as Goal 1 of the UN Sustainable Development Goals, a fundamental question is: why can farmers, organizations, and even entire countries improve their technologies, knowledge, skills, and infrastructure and increase productivity yet still remain far from the prosperity they seek? Investigating this contradiction led us, in the previous column, to distinguish three possible kinds of change: progress may require improving the components themselves, changing the relationships among components that are already capable enough, or integrating previously separate units into a larger organized whole capable of achieving what none could achieve independently.
The distinction matters because each Type points to a different kind of intervention. If farmers primarily lack knowledge, skills, resources, or other capabilities, strengthening those capabilities may be enough. But if the missing Capability depends on how farmers are connected to exporters, logistics providers, financiers, regulators, and buyers, improving farmers alone will not solve the problem. We developed these three Types while studying human systems, but the ULIC (Universal Law of Increasing Complexity) theory raises a broader possibility: that similar patterns of Energy, Structure, Direction, and emergent Capability may also appear in very different domains. This leaves us with a simple question: do the three Types still make sense beyond human systems?
To answer that question, we should not start with ULIC and then look for examples that seem to confirm it. Instead, we can treat the three Types as provisional ideas and test them in nonliving systems, where there are no managers, markets, policies, or deliberate goals. A few examples cannot prove a universal pattern, but they can show whether these distinctions still help us understand change once human intention is removed. If they do, the framework becomes more interesting; if they fail or reveal ambiguities, we will need to refine it. The purpose is not to defend the three Types but to see how far they hold.
We will therefore ask what changed, at what level, what became possible, and whether the consequences carried over into what followed. Matter is a useful place to begin, but even there the first difficulty appears immediately. Before we can classify a change, we need to know what we treat as the component and what we treat as the whole.
Levels
Once we look inside matter, the idea of a component becomes less obvious. Atoms contain electrons and nuclei; nuclei contain protons and neutrons; and protons and neutrons are themselves made of quarks and gluons. A proton, for example, is the larger whole when viewed in relation to the quarks and gluons from which it is made, yet that same proton becomes a component when viewed within an atomic nucleus. The nucleus can then become a component of an atom, and the atom a component of a molecule. What we call a component therefore depends on the level at which we examine the system. Before classifying a change, we need to specify that level, because what appears to be a change in a component may, upon closer examination, involve changes in the relationships among smaller components.
Even after fixing the level of analysis, change can take different forms. Electrons have the same intrinsic properties, yet atoms can occupy different states depending on how those electrons are arranged and interact. Number can matter as well: an atom with one proton is hydrogen, while an atom with six protons is carbon, even though the protons themselves are the same kind of particle. Therefore, what changes need not be the identity of the components themselves; it may be their number, state, or relationships.
Organization has another important consequence. Once lower-level components form a sufficiently stable whole, that whole can function as a new unit in later processes. An atom, for example, can participate in chemical reactions as an atom without those reactions separately involving all of its underlying constituents. The lower-level organization remains essential, but it has created something that can now serve as a building block for further organization.
Applying the three Types beyond human systems therefore requires us to be precise about both the level at which we are looking and the aspect of the system that is changing. So far, we have focused mainly on changes involving the components themselves, which broadly correspond to Type 1. We can now move to Type 2 by holding the kinds and numbers of components essentially constant and asking a simpler question: what happens when the components remain the same but the relationships among them change?
Relationships
To isolate the effect of relationships, we can compare two molecules that contain exactly the same kinds and numbers of atoms: two carbon atoms, six hydrogen atoms, and one oxygen atom. Arranged one way, they form ethanol; arranged another, they form dimethyl ether, a very different substance. Both therefore share the same molecular formula, C₂H₆O, but differ in how their atoms are connected. Chemists call such molecules constitutional isomers.
The key lesson is that knowing which components a system contains may not be enough to explain what it becomes; how those components are connected also matters. Diamond and graphite, two allotropes of carbon, make the same point even more clearly. Both consist entirely of carbon, yet in diamond the atoms form a three-dimensional network, while in graphite they are arranged in layers. The result is two materials with very different properties: diamond is extremely hard, while graphite is soft enough to leave marks on paper and can conduct electricity. The components are the same, but changing their relationships changes the behavior of the whole.
These chemical examples therefore illustrate the logic of Type 2: changing relationships can alter the behavior of the whole even when the components themselves remain the same. This does not mean that chemical bonds and human relationships work in the same way; they clearly do not. The comparison simply shows that changing relationships can be distinguished from changing components. At the same time, relationships cannot replace the components themselves: ethanol still requires the appropriate atoms, just as diamond still requires carbon.
This distinction matters when we return to farmers, organizations, and value chains. When performance is poor, the natural response is often to look for weaknesses in the parts: insufficient knowledge, inadequate technology, limited finance, poor equipment, or missing skills. Sometimes that is exactly where the problem lies. But if the real limitation lies in how otherwise capable components connect, improving the parts may still leave the main problem unresolved.
Chemistry shows that changing relationships can alter the whole even when the components remain the same, confirming Type 2 as a useful distinction. But this raises another question: are components and relationships enough to explain what becomes possible? To find out, we can examine what happens when the amount of matter changes the conditions under which those components interact. Stars provide a useful case because, as more matter accumulates, the conditions inside them change, and new transformations become possible. To understand how, however, we need to begin before stars formed, with the changing conditions of the early universe.
Conditions
Before stars could form, the matter that would later become them had already been shaped by changing conditions in the early universe. At first, the universe was too hot for stable atomic nuclei to persist. As it expanded and cooled, protons and neutrons could combine during the first few minutes into light nuclei, mainly hydrogen and helium, with small amounts of other light nuclei. Much later, after further cooling, electrons could remain bound to nuclei and neutral atoms could form. The important point is that cooling did not simply mean that less could happen; it closed some possibilities while opening others. Different conditions made different transformations possible.
Over time, gravity drew some of this matter into increasingly dense concentrations. As more matter accumulated, gravitational compression increased, raising the pressure, density, and temperature toward the center. Above a certain mass, those conditions were sufficient to sustain hydrogen fusion, allowing a star to form. More matter did not confer this new capability simply because there was more of it; rather, changing the system's scale altered the conditions within it, making a new transformation possible. This suggests that the three Types alone may not tell us everything: whether a change can occur also depends on the conditions under which components and relationships operate.
Once fusion began, the material inside a star also changed: hydrogen fusion produced helium, and in stars that later reached sufficiently high temperatures and densities, further reactions could produce heavier elements such as carbon and oxygen, while still heavier nuclei formed under other extreme stellar conditions and events. The important point is that each stage could act on material produced by earlier stages. What became possible later therefore depended not only on the conditions at that moment but also on what previous transformations had left behind.
Much of the hydrogen in our bodies ultimately traces back to the early universe, whereas carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and many other elements required later stellar processes. The material from which we are made therefore carries the products of different stages of cosmic history, each building on what came before. This leads to the next question: for one transformation to build on an earlier one, what must remain from what happened before?
Retention
The simplest way for an earlier transformation to influence what follows is for what it produced to persist. An atom formed under one set of conditions can later become part of a molecule, and that molecule can become part of something larger; we call this persistence. But the whole itself does not always have to survive. A star may disappear while the elements it produced remain, disperse, and later become part of entirely different systems; we call this retention. In persistence, the organized whole continues; in retention, something it produced continues and can influence what happens later.
This distinction also clarifies what it means to say that history matters: what happened earlier matters later only if some consequence of it endures. A factory makes this easy to see; a production line may contain all the necessary machines, materials, energy, and skilled operators, yet still fail if the stages occur in the wrong order or if the output of one stage is not available to the next. Each stage can build on what the previous one leaves behind. Unlike a factory, the cosmic sequence we examined was not organized toward an intended result, but the principle is similar: what happened before can shape what happens next only through something that carries forward.
Human organizations carry the effects of earlier change forward in many forms. Knowledge, routines, technologies, institutions, relationships, and infrastructure can all shape what becomes possible later. A company, value chain, or society therefore never begins from a blank slate. Its present Structure reflects what earlier development has preserved and embedded, while its history is the path by which that Structure came to be.
This also clarifies the roles of Energy, Structure, and Direction. Energy makes transformation possible, while Structure shapes what a system can sustain and produce. Direction provides continuity through change, allowing what happened earlier to contribute to what follows. Retention means that something from the past remains available; Direction concerns whether what remains contributes to a continuing path.
For the practical problems that brought us here, this changes how we think about improvement. Understanding what a farmer, organization, value chain, or society can do today requires looking not only at its components and relationships but also at what earlier development has left behind. An intervention may improve performance while it lasts, yet leave little behind when it ends. Other changes become embedded in capabilities, relationships, institutions, or other lasting conditions, shaping what becomes possible next.
So far, the three Types still help us describe change, but our investigation has shown they are not sufficient on their own. We also need to ask at what level change occurs, under what conditions it becomes possible, and what remains afterward. Nonliving systems can carry the effects of earlier change forward, but living systems developed far more powerful ways to do so. What changes when what came before can be reproduced, varied, and passed from one generation to the next?
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See you soon,
Nimrod
Dr. Nimrod Israely writes on the structural foundations of prosperity and human systems, and is the CEO and Founder of Dream Valley and Biofeed.
P.S. If your organization has the people, resources, and motivation but still struggles to move forward, message me and we can set up an introductory call.
P.P.S. Previous column: “What Kind of Change Do We Need?”
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