Working in complexity

Course overview

Tackling climate change means engaging in entangled, non-linear and complex systems. Acting in these systems where ambiguity meets urgency can be challenging and frustrating. This course is designed to help you explore how complexity shows up in your work and how you can navigate it more effectively. Through theory, reflection, and simple practices, you’ll learn to respond more intentionally to complexity and uncertainty. This course is all about seeing complexity through new lenses, thinking anew, and acting from this new awareness. You have the option of taking the course on your own or opting into a richer experience by joining a cohort of peer learners to reflect together and ground your learning in real-world contexts.  

This course is designed to help you understand, see, and act in complexity differently through four interdependent threads that will be running in parallel: frameworks; tools; mindsets; inner explorations. 

Course structure

1. Kind versus Wicked problems (Navigating problems when feeling a bit lost)  
   This module will provide some initial definitions of what complex problems are, and how they differ from easier ones.
2. Understanding problems through the Cynefin framework (Beginning to see anew) 
   This module will introduce the Cynefin framework and how to apply it in ways that inform diagnostics and action. 
3. Sense-making theories and practice (Making sense of complexity)  
   This module will introduce various sense-making theories, the contexts in which they are applied, and practical tools to use them.
4. Mapping complexity (Seeing more of the landscape)  
   This module will provide ideas and tools for mapping complex systems such as boundaries, attractors, path dependency, and the adjacent possible. 
5. You in complexity (The inner exploration that it takes)  
   This module will explore the inner, adaptive dimension of complex challenges, why they trigger us, and will use tools for deeper self-reflection and identification of our habitual patterns of response.
6. Simple rules, messy problems (Rules for action in complex situations)  
   This module will explore the dilemmas of balancing chaos and order, and different ideas related to self-organisation, such as requisite variety and the creation of minimum specifications.
7. Causation in complexity (What makes things happen?) 
   This module will explore the notion of cause in a complex system, and how it differs from causation in predictable environments, and its implications for practice.
8. Big risks, big rewards (Things to watch out for in non-linear worlds) 
   This module will provide an overview of the concepts of non-linear risks and non-linear rewards, how to identify them, and how to mitigate risks and leverage opportunities.
9. Steps forward in complexity (Creating experiments to feel our way forward)   
   This module will explore visioning in complexity through the metaphor of “wayfinding”, and the notion of being more experimental in complexity, through the use of safe-to-fail experiments. 

“Working in Complexity” was developed by Climate KIC and Cultivating Leadership.