In the 1970s, Henry Kissinger asked Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai what he thought of the French Revolution of 1789. Zhou’s reply was brief but devastating: “It’s too soon to tell.“

This was not a diplomatic evasion. It reflected an uncomfortable truth in our accelerated societies: the complex systems we inhabit often do not reveal the consequences of their dynamics until a very long time has passed.

Henry Kissinger and Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai

The effects of strategic, structural, and big changes usually appear on timescales that clash with our urgency. In Western cultures, political and organisational life tends to revolve around short cycles of about four years; other cultures operate with a different “tempo”, less visible but far more decisive. In this article, the focus is on complex systems that transform over decades and then collapse in a moment.

How can strategic interventions be designed when the consequences of today’s decisions may not appear until it is too late? How can a crisis be recognized before it becomes obvious? The response is articulated through the story of Great Stink “the Great Stink of London in 1858“, which is not just a historical anecdote but a near-perfect X-ray of how systems generate systemic crises when three key dynamics are ignored: stocks and flows, temporal delays, and shifts in loop dominance.

The Great Stink of London, 1858

Few innovations have had as much impact on human life as the modern flush toilet. Its contribution to public health and quality of life has been fundamental. Modern sanitation has been central to the reduction of deadly diseases such as cholera, dysentery, and typhoid fever; before it became widespread, these diseases routinely decimated entire populations. Safe waste disposal and improved hygiene have saved millions of lives, curbed epidemics, and become a key factor in rising life expectancy in modern societies.

The flush toilet as we know it is commonly associated with the 19th‑century British plumber Thomas Crapper, though he was not its original inventor. The basic idea dates back to 1596, when Sir John Harington, a courtier of Queen Elizabeth I, designed a similar system. Crapper’s role was to refine and popularise the flushing mechanism, turning it into a standard fixture in modern homes.

Nineteenth-century product advertisement by Thomas Crapper

However, the early spread of the flush toilet largely ignored the consequences of mass adoption. In 19th‑century London, its rapid popularisation without an adequate sanitation infrastructure became one of the key factors behind the historical episode known as “The Great Stink”: the massive accumulation of untreated sewage in the River Thames and the resulting public‑health crisis.

London’s population grew exponentially during the 19th century, reaching about 2.5 million inhabitants by 1850. Human and industrial waste dumped into the river increased accordingly. For a long time, human excreta were handled by “night soil men,” who collected waste from cesspits and transported it for use as fertilizer on agricultural land.

19th-century illustration of “Night Soil Men” in London

Once flush toilets were introduced, this role quickly became obsolete. Direct drainage from toilets made cesspits impractical, and cleaning them was no longer economically viable. As a result, sewage ended up flowing straight into the Thames, which in practice became London’s main open‑air sewer.

Another element added to the catastrophe. Between 1831 and 1854, cholera outbreaks caused thousands of deaths. The dominant theory blamed “miasmas or bad air for the spread of disease; only later was cholera firmly identified as a waterborne disease linked to fecal contamination.

The summer of 1858 was exceptionally hot. Shade temperatures reached between 34 and 36 °C (93–97 °F), and in direct sun up to 48 °C (118 °F). A prolonged drought lowered the level of the Thames, exposing vast quantities of decaying waste along its banks. In 1855, Michael Faraday had already warned of the river’s condition in a letter to The Times, describing the water as a “dense” foulness.

In July and August 1858, the stench of the Thames became unbearable. Newspapers called it a “pestilential abomination.” The smell reached every layer of society: Queen Victoria and Prince Albert stopped taking boat trips on the river, and in Parliament, various quick fixes were tried—such as dumping lime and carbolic acid into the water or even debating whether to move the government out of London—but none of these measures could control the fetid river.

Stocks: Silent Accumulation

What happened between roughly 1830 and 1858 is a textbook lesson in stocks: accumulations that build up slowly and invisibly until continuous pressure makes them explode.

Every day, large volumes of human waste were discharged into the river. Year after year. Decade after decade. Population growth increased the inflow, but there was no effectiveoutflowin the form of treatment or removal. The river became a reservoir of pollution that no one was seriously measuring or monitoring.

Stocks change slowly. The deterioration is not obvious week to week. Londoners gradually adjusted their tolerance to the smell, normalising the problem.

Then an extraordinarily hot, dry summer exposed what had been building up for decades. Low water levels concentrated the waste. Heat-accelerated decomposition. Suddenly, what had been invisible became impossible to ignore.

Delays: Solutions That Arrive Too Late

From the initial emergence of the problem to its broad recognition, there was a monumental delay. The cholera outbreaks from 1831 to 1854 had already killed thousands, yet cholera was not widely accepted as a waterborne disease until much later. The miasma theory was not simply ignorance; it reflected what the dominant medical establishment of the time accepted as scientific truth.

Delays are not just lags in detecting causality. They are epistemic delays: the gap between what is happening in the system and what people understand about it.

John Snow’s map showing the clustering of cholera cases in the 1854 epidemic

By 1854, John Snow had already produced his famous map of cholera deaths in London’s Soho district, clustering fatalities around the Broad Street water pump. The statistical and spatial pattern clearly linked mortality to specific water sources contaminated with cholera.

It then took Louis Pasteur’s work in 1861 to experimentally demonstrate that microorganisms in air and water caused fermentation and putrefaction and could also cause disease. In the 1860s and 1870s, Joseph Lister applied germ theory to surgery, introducing antiseptic methods. In the 1870s and 1880s, Robert Koch identified specific bacteria as causal agents of particular diseases. Historical accounts converge on the idea that germ theory began solidifying around 1870 but did not achieve broad acceptance among physicians and public‑health authorities until the 1880s, and only after considerable resistance.

In 1854, far from addressing root causes, authorities focused on symptomatic solutions: adding lime and carbolic acid to mask the smell. Temporary patches were applied to a structural problem, even though credible evidence already pointed to contaminated water as the deeper cause.

Why was there no decisive action decades earlier, when early warning signs existed?

1. The feedback loop between cause and effect was too slow. The population boom of the 1830s was not mentally connected by policymakers to the stench of 1858.
2. Information about the true cause (contaminated water) was trapped in an epistemic delay. By the time the waterborne nature of cholera was widely accepted, the worst of the crisis was already behind them.
3. Decision‑makers prioritised immediate relief under political and social pressure. The odour was the urgent symptom; the contaminated water was the structural cause. Policy focused on the former, not the latter.

Shift in Dominance: When the System Changes

The most critical systemic event was the shift in dominance between feedback loops.

For a time, as long as population growth remained within the river’s assimilation capacity, there was an implicit balancing loop:

• More people → more waste → but the river still “absorbs” it without visible impact.

The system appeared self‑regulating, in a kind of pseudo‑equilibrium.

Accumulation stock

As the population grew exponentially and waste accumulated faster than the river could dilute and oxygenate it, a reinforcing degradation loop took over:

• More waste → more accumulation → chemical changes in the water → reduced aeration → faster decomposition → more stench and public‑health problems.

Overshot accumulation stock at its tipping point

This shift in loop dominance unfolded gradually over decades. Yet once the reinforcing loop fully dominated, the system effectively changed state. The danger with shifts in dominance is that they are almost impossible to see while they are happening and only become obvious at the tipping point. By then, prevention is no longer an option; all that remains is crisis management.

Strategic Complex Design: Reading System Signals

What lessons does systems thinking offer for Strategic Complex Design?

1. Monitor Stocks, Not Just Flows

London’s authorities in the 1840s paid attention to flows: the daily volume of sewage entering the river. No one tracked the stock: how much contamination had already accumulated in the riverbed.

Contemporary strategic design repeats this pattern. Organisations measure outputs, conversions, and activity metrics, but rarely track accumulations such as: Technical debt, Talent exhaustion and burnout. Erosion of trust, Cognitive overload among users or customers.

Key question for Strategic Complex Design: Which stocks in your system are growing quietly in the background?

Examples include legacy software that no one dares to refactor, a short‑termist culture that undermines talent retention, or a value proposition that drifted out of sync with the actual product years ago but continues to sell by sheer inertia.

Strategic Complex Design aims to anticipate which of these stocks will eventually surface as crises, after delays and in the absence of measurement.

2. Anticipate Delays in Causal Chains

The failure of London’s authorities lay in refusing to accept time lags between cause and effect. If the city was functioning “today”, they assumed it would function “tomorrow”.

For Strategic Complex Design, this implies:

• Designing with a time horizon of years or decades, not just quarters. Ask: Which consequences of this decision will only appear in 3, 5, or 10 years? Integrate futures literacy and foresight from the outset.
• Explicitly mapping delays in feedback loops. How long does market feedback really take? How long before cultural changes consolidate? How long before a systemic hypothesis can be validated or falsified?
• Recognising that delays can be informational as well as physical. The interval between “something is broken in the system” and “we collectively recognise it” can span many years.

3. Search for Shifts in Dominance Before the Crisis

Shifts in loop dominance mark critical breakpoints. In London, this happened when waste loads exceeded the Thames’s self‑regulating capacity. In your own system, where is such a shift underway?

Warning signs of an imminent shift include:

1. Stability metrics that start showing volatility where there used to be linear patterns
2. Previously reliable solutions that stop working as expected
3. Maintenance costs of the status quo are becoming exponential rather than incremental

In Strategic Complex Design, the work is to detect and act on these shifts while they are still manageable, rather than after they have escalated into full‑blown crises.

The Structural Solution: Joseph Bazalgette and Strategic Patience

This story does, in the end, include a structural solution. When decisive action finally came, it was of a very different nature. Joseph Bazalgette, chief engineer of the Metropolitan Board of Works, designed a sewer system that:

1. Acknowledged the new reality of the stock: instead of relying on the river to assimilate waste, enormous volumes of sewage had to be moved out of the city.
2. Anticipated future delays and growth: he over‑engineered capacity, built multiple layers of sewers at different levels, and used durable materials such as Portland cement assuming London would continue expanding for decades
3. Intervened at the structural level before the reinforcing loop became completely unmanageable: although his solution came after the 1858 crisis, it was robust enough to keep London functioning for roughly 150 years.

Much of this Victorian system is still in operation today, even if it has been recently upgraded and extended. The original construction depended heavily on manual labour.

Implications for Strategic Complex Design

In Strategic Complex Design, it is crucial to keep these dynamics in view:

Before intervening, diagnose:

• Which stocks are growing unnoticed?Map them and define early‑warning thresholds.
• Where are the systemic delays? Anticipate how postponed decisions and slow learning will shape outcomes. Design to anticipate, not merely react.
• Which feedback loops are at risk of changing dominance? Identify where your system is drifting from balanced to reinforcing dynamics (or vice versa). These are the critical leverage points.

Design interventions that respect systemic time:

Avoid quick fixes. Bazalgette did not solve the crisis with a small pumping station; he built an infrastructure meant to last for generations. Aim at root causes, not just symptoms. Accept delays in results. Anticipate shifts in dominance before they lock in.

As Zhou Enlai reportedly said of the French Revolution, some outcomes can only be assessed over centuries. The long term is not a distant horizon; it is the set of dynamics that are already unfolding in your system today.