Mentorship in medicine is a Complex opportunity

Mentorship is now recognized as essential to the personal and professional development of physicians. Over the past decade, it has become a common theme in medical education literature, and through this our understanding of mentorship has evolved. Despite this progress, we believe that the prevailing reductionist view of mentorship is oversimplified and may hinder further advances in this space. Instead, we propose that mentorship be viewed through the lens of complexity theory, positioning it as a prototypical complex adaptive system. This shift in perspective will inform our mentorship interventions and evaluations, and can avoid the disappointment that invariably follows when we apply a simple approach to a complex situation.