Practicing at the Edge:
What We’re Learning at the Intersection of Systems and Strategy
At 103, our work sits at a delicate intersection: between systems thinking and organisational strategy; between long-term transformation and near-term decision-making; between complexity and the need to act. This year, much of our learning has come not from tidy answers, but from the tensions we encounter daily in practice.
Across our projects, we’ve been reminded that systems work only matters insofar as it helps people make better decisions under uncertainty. That means grappling honestly with limits to control, with ambiguity, and with the relational conditions required for change to stick. Below, members of the 103 team share their biggest learning from the past year – offered not as conclusions, but as reflections from ongoing practice.
Ashley Scarborough
Confidence in uncertainty
Mapping and working with complex systems involves letting go of the expectation to fully understand every part. Systems are inherently messy, layered, and dynamic – no single person can ever know it all. Importantly, uncertainty isn’t just a gap in knowledge or skill – it’s built into the nature of complex systems themselves.
As Jean Boulton reminds us, the world is often paradoxical, fuzzy, and indeterminate. The system doesn’t sit still long enough to be pinned down with precision. The drive for clarity can be paralysing, but what matters is building a “good enough” understanding through collaboration. The role of the systems mapper isn’t to hold the entire system, but to help surface and connect the knowledge held across many people and perspectives, facilitating shared sensemaking that reveals patterns and opens up opportunities for change. Learning to be at ease with the uncertainty of complexity is vital. Strengthening systems leadership means developing the capacity to navigate ambiguity, hold paradox, and still move forward.
An illustration by Ashley titled “Messy Systems.”
Adaptability and flexibility as core skills in systems work
Working in complexity, systems analysis, systems mapping, and systems change requires collaborative sensemaking, iteration, and adaptability. It involves almost blindly trusting a process, while also knowing that no matter how well structured it is from the outset, it is very likely that things will not go as planned.
As Fritjof Capra reminds us, the coexistence of stability and change is a defining characteristic of living systems. Adapting to change is essential when working in complexity. Having solid structures and networks that can hold and respond to that change is what makes the difference. Learning from how different people and processes react to change are key ingredients of resilient systems work, which is inherently a social endeavour, and therefore human.
Laura Garcia
Image credit: Eilis Garvey
Brian Blankinship
Doing the right things, not just doing things right
When we want to be systems leaders, we start by asking what the system needs, and then following that up by asking what it needs from us.
Cognitive biases are well understood by most strategic thinkers. We know that our experiences – and the mental models we construct as a result – shape how we see the world. And while it’s notoriously difficult to see our own blind spots, we’re often open to them when others point them out.
In systems transformation work, even after we’ve moved beyond pure self-interest and begun to care about the health of the whole system, what we focus on still shapes how we act. With limited resources and big challenges, it can feel prudent – even responsible – to focus on our strengths and mandates. But this is optimisation.
Real systems leadership requires something harder: doing the right things, not just doing things the right way. That means stepping back not only from our roles and responsibilities, but from our own perspectives – holding them lightly as we engage in dialogue, challenge assumptions, and build richer systems intelligence together.
Charmaine Che
Strategy sharpens when systems maps expose leverage, as well as the limits of organisational control
In corporate environments, systems maps add value only when they are used to identify the intervention points that can genuinely shift outcomes, rather than reinforcing a desire to either not act or act everywhere at once in complex, geopolitically sensitive situations. By making dependencies and constraints explicit, maps help leaders see where effort will have limited impact or influence, where there are trade-offs, and where moves could introduce disproportionate risk.
This translation from insight to strategy is most powerful when leaders use the map to confront difficult truths: that some initiatives may never be enough to move the dial, that influence is constrained by interdependence, and that progress often requires restraint as much as action. This discipline, choosing where to act and where not to act, is what turns systemic understanding into coherent strategy.
Systems insight does not translate into action without the field to hold it
Mapping and other forms of systems analysis are valuable, but on their own they rarely change outcomes. In complex and geopolitically sensitive systems, insight only becomes actionable when there is sufficient field-level infrastructure to absorb it – shared understanding, trusted interfaces between institutions, and relationships capable of sustaining coordination under uncertainty.
Field-building is therefore not a soft complement to systems programmes, but a strategic capability in its own right. This work is inherently relational as well as technical, requiring sustained engagement to create the conditions in which collective intelligence and action can take shape. Without it, even high-quality systems insight risks remaining abstract, contested, or politically unusable.
Kate Wolfenden
Walking the line between corporate strategy and systems practice
It’s a difficult ask.
To enable the kind of change that systems intelligence points toward, we need both a deep embrace of complexity and the ability to translate that complexity into strategy-shaping insights on the ground. Practitioners often do one or the other well, but rarely both. Learning to walk this line – from complexity into a concrete business case, and from rigid impact management toward emergence – is what turns systems intelligence into systems impact.
Even within these short paragraphs, there is a sea of contested words and definitions, too often reduced to differences between “systems” and “strategy.” What feels powerful is integrating the best of both: taking the business case of old and layering in realistic relationships to planning, financing, and impact; and taking the systems map of old and layering in bridging and navigation tools that turn complexity into usable corporate transformation intelligence.
This is not a task to be achieved alone. Teams with genuinely combinatory skill sets are the answer. Even when exposure to opposing perspectives is uncomfortable, the outcome has the potential to be far greater than the sum of its parts. This remains a work in progress – we don’t have the answers – but we will continue to iterate and share what we learn along the way.
