Inside the System: Learning to Work in Complexity

At Climate KIC, Inna Chilik has a reputation for building bridges where she finds walls. As our Collective Sensemaking and Strategic Learning co-lead, she spends her days developing participatory approaches that spark learning, build leadership, and drive systemic, locally grounded innovations toward climate neutrality. So, when the idea of supporting Climate KIC’s community members in navigating complexity surfaced, she immediately recognised its importance.

Climate professionals, she knew, live with complexity every day, and climate solutions can’t thrive without people who know how to collaborate across sectors, navigate entrenched power dynamics and manage uncertainty. Yet the support to do this well was largely missing.

With this in mind, and alongside experts such as Marco Valente at Cultivating Leaderships, Climate KIC’s learning experts designed Working in Complexity, a programme that attracted community members from across Europe and Latin America. One sustainability scientist attended with five colleagues from the Cyprus Institute, hoping to expand their knowledge toolkit and become more adaptive to responding to complex challenges in dynamic climate environments. Others joined to weave systems thinking more intentionally into their everyday work.

For Romanian environmental engineer Adina Pascu, curiosity was the initial hook. “My first thought was, how will they compress complexity into one course?” she said. “I wanted to see how you approach things that feel unapproachable.”

The power of shared learning

Launched in the spring of 2025, a season of significant and record-breaking weather anomalies, the course’s seven modules explored how to better understand and tackle climate challenges, beginning with why climate change is a ‘wicked’ rather than a ‘kind’ problem, and what that means for effective action. Among the tools introduced was the Cynefin Framework, which helped community members identify the nature of the green transition challenges they face and choose responses that match the context rather than relying on one-size-fits-all solutions. The course presented practices like experimentation, sensemaking and adaptive decision-making to navigate uncertainty with greater clarity and confidence.

These ideas and approaches were explored through plenaries, facilitated sessions, self-directed learning and participant-led group work, encouraging the members to deepen their understanding and ground the concepts in their own shared stories. The course broke “traditional education models where you have the teacher who is the source of the knowledge,” Inna says. “Because we all are that source of knowledge. We all have accumulated lots of experience and knowledge along our journeys.”

For Adina, this approach immediately resonated. “Complexity felt like a very difficult thing to teach” she said, “but that’s what made it powerful. We had to live it to understand it.”

For others, the peer-led dynamic felt unfamiliar. The self-facilitated groups sometimes shrank due to absences, making conversations harder to sustain. Yet possible discomfort became a catalyst for deeper understanding. María Cantone, a researcher in climate change and cities, reflected that “whilst self-regulating our learning was new, and not necessarily bad, we were used to having a facilitator. In the self-facilitated sessions, we had to moderate and facilitate ourselves, so that was a little bit tricky.” Even so, she found the diversity of perspectives, and their commonalities, enriching. “We had great conversations, and we have similar issues, whether we are working in a company, in the government or in civil society. It was interesting to see we are not so different, and the processes are not so different.”

Inna noticed this too. She saw how often someone would share a challenge and others would immediately recognise it. “People resonated with each other’s examples,” she says. “They began sharing how they overcame similar challenges… It was empowering to find support within each other.”

Week after week, subtle shifts took root. Community members stopped treating complexity as a puzzle to solve. Some participants initially wondered if the course might be too theoretical but later realised that “complexity insights are a lens for action.”

This shift appeared clearly in the post-course survey. Over 80 percent of participants reported feeling fairly or very confident in leading conversations that acknowledge uncertainty, creating conditions for experimentation and supporting others in complexity. As one participant put it, “I am more confident in all aspects now.”

Embracing uncertainty: putting learning into practice

Nearly six months later, Climate KIC’s community members are sharing how they’ve carried these approaches and skills into their work. In the post-course survey, 83 percent said they now feel confident using frameworks like Cynefin to navigate uncertainty. For many, it became a bridge between theory and action. “The Cynefin Framework helps us distinguish between predictable and unpredictable aspects of our work,”  one participant said. “It helps us map our challenges more accurately.”

At the Cyprus Institute, colleagues are using other complexity tools, such as safe-to-fail experiments, while preparing for forthcoming climate change conference. They rotated roles within the team, used participatory processes to shape agendas and ran testing sessions with sample participants, small experiments that revealed early insights before decisions were fixed. The course also strengthened connections between colleagues as they collaborate on Green Talent, a new Horizon Europe project focused on skills for the green transition.

María hasn’t applied the tools formally yet, but the course reinforced her instinctive way of working. Her adaptive, exploratory approach, shaped by a previous Climate KIC course and years of practice, now feels validated. “It pushed me further down my existing path,” she said. “It reassured me that being adaptive is a good way to deal with uncertainty.”

For Adina, the learning became immediate and personal. Living close to the conflict in Ukraine, she found that the course gave her grounding during moments of disruption. “Sometimes when things feel chaotic, I think about what I learned. If you can’t change the system, you can still choose how you respond.”

This rings true for Inna. Beyond tools and frameworks, she wanted the course to help participants “find courage, agency and understanding to explore my uniqueness and who I am as a leader.”

Moving forward

As María and others have shared their learning with colleagues and partners, Climate KIC is keen to build on the momentum created by Working in Complexity. Through the Community Platform, we hope to sustain the connections that formed during the course and grow a wider network of practitioners and system innovators who can learn from one another. In doing so, there will be opportunities to continue to build conditions for larger-scale change through small, connected acts of learning that strengthen relationships and opens spaces for collaboration. As Inna knows, it’s about building bridges instead of walls.