How do you make change in a complex system, clearer and more malleable to more people, in a way that realises the hidden potential held in disparate parts?

I based my career on strategic design and systems thinking. Since establishing my own practice, I’ve developed this work through the lens of living systems design, or emergent organisational strategy.

This approach layers many structures, processes and understanding about how systems work and change, which I typically amalgamate using the Three Horizons Framework. This enables a collaborative approach where participants to step into the process of change and observe which aspects of the system are in decline, what is emerging and the innovations that bridge between the two.

Working with the framework allows everyone to talk the same language and have shared reference points, through which the rich diversity of participants experience and perspective can emerge and flourish.

Sensing into what the organisation could become

The Association of Sustainability Practitioners is one of our most established sustainability communities, with over 20 years in the field. So, I was honoured when they asked me, of all their wonderful members, to design a distributed, non-hierarchical process to bring wealth of member insight into their evolution and development.

We used the Three Horizons Framework as a form of action research, not just to generate proposals for their future, but to sense into what the organisation could become.

Over four months, we hosted a series of online co-design workshops, working through each Horizon to establish an emergent understanding of who the ASP were, the values their unite their approach and the diversity that enriches it. Each session started with a creative provocation - artworks, poetry, even operatic arias - creating a shared space of possibility, emergence and alignment.

This would have been a top-down nightmare, with little-to-no traction, but bottom-up it’s a dream that has revitalised membership and structure.

Groups of ASP members are now self organising around topics and opportunities identified during the process, enabling the organisation’s development to be both led by, and resourced from, it’s members.