Most managers we work with lead organisations or organisational functions, trying to influence change in contexts of ever-increasing ambiguity and complexity. Geo-political instability, climate pressures and adaptation, digital disruption accelerated by Al, and unpredictable global markets create a high degree of complexity for organisations and their people to navigate. Still, managers are expected to make good-enough decisions to shape future directions at pace, with confidence that it will lead the organisation to success.
Faced with complexity, most managers simplify. This usually means breaking down a problem into manageable parts and reaching for familiar tools like a SWOT analysis, a matrix, or other frameworks to run the analysis, prioritise, set the Key Performance Indicators, and steer from the top. Professor Chris Mowles calls this a typical set of activities undertaken in the "management orthodoxy": the assumption that leaders can predict and control outcomes, decide on change through top-down strategy, and separate thinking from action. We understand why it appeals, however organisations are run by humans, and humans are unpredictable in how they behave, which is why Mowles describes organisational life as "predictably unpredictable." The management orthodoxy struggles to effectively work through the human conditions that make up this complexity in addition to the external pressures swirling around.
Systemic design takes a different approach. As a human and relational sensibility, it doesn't simplify complexity away or force it into constrained models or frameworks - it helps managers work with it. It makes problems visible as part of a system, mapping the interconnected roles and activities of people and teams. Systemic design helps managers see which parts of the system are best placed to change, to most effectively deal with the complexities as a dynamic set of relationships, activities and choices.
Too much complexity can paralyse an organisation. But ignoring complexity carries its own risks like overlooking innovation, and losing the human experience and motivation that deliver good work. So, how can organisations work with complexity? Here's a starting point.
Four dimensions of management where designers can affect change
Across our work at Snowmelt, systemic design is used to work with complexity and support managers in their work. We present these as four management dimensions for systemic design intervention.
1. Strategy and identity
This is how organisations define their purpose and navigate change. The shift is moving from fixed notions of strategy and identity, toward creating strategy that is adaptive, responsive and iterative. It considers how team identity is shaped by how individuals and teams see themselves in their work and in relation to the changes that may need to come. The systemic design work involves facilitating strategic conversations, design-informed sensemaking and synthesis, system visualisation, and the prototyping and testing of possible future configurations. The goal is enough direction to act with intention while keeping its identity loose enough to meet new needs as they arise, both internally and externally.
2. Governance
This covers decision rights, accountability, and the processes that hold work together: how a portfolio of work is conceived, and how progress is monitored, evaluated and learned from. Instead of hierarchical control and compliance, governance orients toward establishing a distributed model of stewardship treated as shared sensing, learning and acting. Systemic design draws on process and system mapping to make intangible relationships visible, service blueprinting to articulate the inputs and outputs of governance, and simple templates to guide specific conversations: stand-ups, dashboards, reporting, quarterly and annual planning. This helps managers and organisations to move from a control logic toward an orchestration and learning logic.
3. Relational dynamics
This is how people and organisations connect, listen and collaborate. Systemic design supports a greater focus on the human dynamics in work that enables building relationships with trust, shared intent and creating visibility of roles and teamwork, rather than focusing on the surface level of relationships as managed through contracts, roles and formal structures. Methods such as ethnographic research, relationship mapping, appreciative inquiry and design synthesis support deep listening, holding ambiguity in exploratory conversations, and trust-building. The move is from consulting stakeholders toward co-designing with them, whilst surfacing tacit knowledge that might otherwise stay unspoken.
4. Ways of working
This dimension contains the operational habits, rituals and daily structures of work. A systemic design lens helps managers to shift toward cyclical, experimental approaches that are built on reflection, iteration, collective learning and emergence. These purposefully help managers move away from an overreliance on linear processes, milestones, KPIs and individual performance indicators to achieve success. Systemic design makes these working habits visible by exploring how people spend their time, what rituals they keep, and what each produces. Once visible, a way of working becomes something that can be designed. New formats and templates can then support the reflective practice that more complex work depends on.
A developing design practice
Across all four dimensions, systemic design practices can offer an alternative perspective to the traditional management orthodoxy.
The value of systemic design practice is that it turns a team or organisation's strategy and identity, governance, relational dynamics and ways of working into things that can be questioned and redesigned to fit the unique needs of the complexity the team actually faces. They also bring the human and relational side of managing back into view, something the orthodoxy often leaves out.
Complexity is a permanent feature of organisational life. It's present whether you acknowledge it or not.
Managers we work with can unlock new perspectives when we design for complexity rather than take it away. It's not easy to make the shift towards these practices when organisational inertia often works against them. The question for the designer is... how might you support managers to work with complexity? In doing so, you also create more advocates for design.
This article was published in 'The Perspective' Issue 01: Firebrand, July 2026 and is based on a recent conference paper: Sobel, L., Tompson, T. and Oru, C. (2025) 'A complexity paradigm: four dimensions of management where systemic design practices support work in complexity; Proceedings from Relating Systems Thinking & Design Conference 14 (RSD14)
