Reading Sand Talk made me sit with that question. Tyson Yunkaporta , an Australian academic and author, delves into the roots of Australia’s indigenous culture, past to present, moving in spirals, loops, and seemingly disjointed stories that slowly start to weave something coherent (if you’re willing to engage with it). But he does that not by offering a traditional argument, but by offering knowledge as a system.

And at its heart is a powerful challenge: what if knowledge doesn’t live in discrete facts, but in the dynamic, often messy connections between them?

In Western traditions, as he argued, knowledge is often seen as something to be collected, stored, and transmitted in discrete units. However, knowledge is not a commodity; it’s a living flow. By thinking of knowledge systemically, we see that “every unit requires velocity and exchange in a stable system, or it will stagnate”. This shift, from knowledge as object to knowledge as movement, reframes our assumptions not just about learning, but about creativity itself.

Creativity, in this perspective, is not the product of isolated minds generating ideas in a vacuum. It’s an emergent property of interaction and participation. Therefore, instead of focusing on the things (isolated parts or individuals), we should focus on the connections between them, and then, beyond those connections, see the patterns they form. Creativity, then, is what becomes possible when we stop trying to impose order and start allowing systems to self-organize, paying attention to their delicate connections.

Another argument that I particularly loved in the book was the tendency to oversimplify complexity. “Viewing the world through a lens of simplicity always seems to make things more complicated, but simultaneously less complex”. This sentence captures something I see frequently in creative and educational settings: the pressure to streamline, to scale, to make things manageable, often ends up flattening the very dynamics that make real innovation possible. In trying to control systems, we kill the complexity needed for creativity to thrive. Simplistic views generate simplistic ideas.

This view of knowledge as a living system also informs his critique of education. In his words, “Any knowledge passed on as discrete information or skills is doomed to failure through disconnection and simplicity”. Real learning, he argues, comes from experiences that connect abstract ideas to real-world contexts.

He outlines five ways of coming to knowledge: close observation, helping, storytelling, deep listening, and reflective thinking. These are not individual activities; they are relational ones. They emphasize context, participation, and feedback—precisely the conditions in which creativity thrives.

Sand Talk doesn’t just talk about systems—it behaves like one. It is a book that resists hierarchy, embraces ambiguity, and invites the reader to enter into its logic rather than extract points from it. In a world saturated with information but starved for meaning, Yunkaporta’s book reminds us that knowledge doesn’t live in parts. It lives in the space between.

In a modern culture that praises objectivity, control, scalable solutions, and knowledge in easy-to-digest pills, could we be losing the very complexity that fuels creativity? If we are to see knowledge as a system, we must first realize that “information is in each part, but the knowledge lies in the connections between them”. In doing so, we step away from the algorithmic logic of simplification, and toward something older, more human—and perhaps more sustainable: human connection.

When we rush to simplify, we often end up severing the very ties that make things meaningful. Of course, simplicity has its role. But if we make it our guiding light, we risk flattening the world into something digestible but without flavor. So maybe the real question isn’t if simplicity is killing creativity, but rather if we are willing to sit with complexity long enough for creativity to emerge.