During the delivery of this talk, I was fortunate to be aided by a wonderful visualization of a complex system created by Magdalena Fernandez. The talk covered how dynamic entanglements are the source of the system's complexity (and variety in an Ashby sense) and the relation of these entanglements to the threats faced by emergency managers. The possible benefits of integrating complex systems theory into approaches to understanding and managing organizations were then covered before a brief look at any remaining characteristics from Cilliers. The functional presence of the past and future in the present was expanded upon. The talk ended with a long discussion of complex systems and threats, distinguishing between threats that injure and those that cause death, which is much more prevalent in the private sector than in the public. Still, public complex systems can lose certain states. For example, an emergency management organization's state pre-COVID cannot be returned to after the incident "concludes." This is about history and how it makes adopting some possibilities more probable or possible than others. The pre-COVID state dies when the actors realize they cannot materialize the state they were in before. There is room to talk about trauma and human experiences, but the discussion remains grounded in history.