You know how I'm supposed to open this article. A clever mixture of intrigue and just enough panic, to make you keep reading.
A leadership vignette. A boardroom. A capable executive making all the wrong calls for entirely understandable reasons.
Here instead, is a note from my research files, saved during my Masters at the University of Sydney sometime around 2012.
It's an article by a British physicist and management consultant Mark McKergow. He coined a word using Japanese roots because English didn't have one for the concept he was trying to describe. The word is rutenso (流転相) — drawn from ruten (流転), the Japanese term for constant change.
He called it the art of working with complex systems.
I saved it in my Evernote files in 2012. It's 2026 and I keep coming back to it.
The distinction that changes everything.
A quick 'crash course' in two important frameworks because they help me 'level up' my systems thinking.
The first is Cynefin (pronounced kuh-NEV-in) developed by Dave Snowden at IBM in 1999 and popularised in a 2007 Harvard Business Review paper that won the Academy of Management's Outstanding Practitioner-Oriented Paper award. Snowden's core observation: most leaders fail not because they're poor decision-makers, but because they apply the wrong decision-making mode to the situation.
The elevator pitch is that (amongst many things), his framework separates complicated problems from complex ones.
Complicated = sense, analyse, respond. There's a right answer. An expert can find it. Cause and effect are discoverable through analysis. A jet engine is complicated. A tax return is complicated. Most change programmes are designed as though they're complicated.
Complex = probe, sense, respond. Causes and effects are only knowable in retrospect. Patterns emerge from parallel experiments. No right answer exists in advance — only emergent practice. A culture shift is complex. An AI-era transformation is complex. Most of the change problems landing on senior leaders' desks in 2026 are complex.
The second framework is McKergow's rutenso. Where Cynefin tells you which domain you're in, rutenso helped me grapple how to operate once you accept you're in the complex one. McKergow contrasts koteiso (the fixed framework mindset) with rutenso (the complex framework mindset) across seven pairs. Four of them for example below:
Goals and targets are vital versus direction and momentum are vital.
Huge plans give huge results versus small actions start things quickly.
Reduce complexity, find the key versus embrace complexity, look widely, there are no magic bullets.
When it's hard, speed up and act versus when it's hard, slow down and observe.
(Take good note of that last one: When it's hard, slow down and observe. If you have ever wondered why Executive Coaching can be so helpful...this is a key insight)
That is the single most counterintuitive piece of leadership advice available in a complex programme…and the one most consistently violated in the more high stakes meetings I've sat in.
What complex change looks like in 2026.
I've previously written about the CMI Futures of Change research as lead by Dr Elissa Farrow paints a consistent picture of what's landing on senior leaders right now.
Distributed authority replacing hierarchical control. Human-AI collaboration producing emergent dynamics nobody has (yet) designed for. Continuous change ecosystems replacing discrete, bounded programmes.
From my perspective, here are the five archetypes of complex change the leaders I chat with, are grappling right now:
The AI adoption programme where the technology decision has been made, but the organisation hasn't been redesigned around it. Someone bought a platform. Someone commissioned a rollout. What nobody scoped is which capabilities need to change, how the operating model needs to shift, or whether the strategy coheres with what the technology can actually do. As I've written about in the Coherence Premium piece, AI doesn't create strategic clarity; it amplifies whatever "clarity" (read: incoherence) already exists.
The enterprise transformation still running on a 2005 playbook. Stable hierarchy. Waterfall delivery. A small credentialled team delivering change to the organisation while everyone else waits to receive it gracefully. That model made sense for the world it was built for. The world I work in, doesn't resemble that any more...but the default playbook is unchanged.
The change where leaders are arguing from fixed future-state positions and calling it consultation (aka: 'destination change'). The destination has been decided. The programme is designed to deliver it. The 'engagement' is, in practice, a managed process of acceptance. This is one of the surest ways to doom a change from the outset — and the Dunning-Kruger effect tends to explain why the most senior leader in the room can't see it happening.
The capability uplift where the consultant leaves and nothing sticks. The training ran. The workshops happened. The framework was handed over. And you can bet the invoices were sent on time!
Six months later, the organisation has quietly drifted back because the new capability was delivered alongside the work, not embedded in it. You can't train your way to capability. You embed it. I've written about why this happens and what the alternative looks like.
The permeable ecosystem. I wrestled with this from the Exec table in a Tier 2 telecoms provider and then saw it increasingly in healthcare, digital infrastructure, and now AI-enabled sectors. The same individual rotates through multiple roles across a programme's lifecycle. Client one year. Your staff the next. Subcontractor after that. Competitor eventually. Advisor simultaneously.
In reading up on this, I found that Brandenburger and Nalebuff named the static version of this dynamic 'coopetition' back in 1996. What I've just described is more fluid than that: roles rotating across time, boundaries of "the firm" dissolving and reforming, authority and accountability perpetually in motion. The 2005 playbook has no governance model that handles it. Most change plans don't account for it either.
Related side note with a self interest: I built Pragma at app.pragmaticchange.com.au so leaders of complex change could get actionable advice from my knowledge base and in my tone of voice, for all and any of the scenarios above. Send your team in to sharpen their thinking or soundboard in confidence, first five messages are free.
What leading complex change actually requires.
A disposition. The seriously sharp Camile LeClerc (as an old Escient mentor) pointed me in the direction of change management Grandfather Daryl Conner and his observation on a high performing leader: "The capacity to absorb high levels of change while displaying minimal dysfunctional behavior."
The leaders who navigate complexity well carry a different kind of confidence. Not less — different. Confident enough to:
Probe and assess before acting (or rather, reacting)
Distribute authority without losing the golden thread from strategy to behaviour
To say I don't know yet in a steering committee and mean it as a design principle, not an apology.
What connects all of it: complex change rewards the leader who treats the first problem presented as the door, not the destination. The investigation is the methodology.
McKergow again: "Many managers, when confronted with complexity for the first time, say 'Aha, yes, I see...' and then rush to tackle the issues using their conventional management tools."
As you may have noticed, I'm skeptical on what conventional management tools have yielded us: The Planning Fallacy tells us we're overconfident in our predictions. The Quiet Influencers tells us the most valuable intelligence in a complex programme tends to sit with people who aren't presenting at the steering committee. The WEIRD frameworks investigation tells us that most of the tools we deploy were built for organisations that don't look like ours.
The recognition of complexity is not the work. The way you carry yourself in exploring the domains of that complexity, is the work.
Luckily for you, two pretty clever chaps built a Toolkit for Turbulence designed exactly for that kind of exploring!
Good news: You've been doing this your whole life.
Here's the part that gets lost in the conversation about how hard all of this is.
Dr Lara Boyd is a Professor and Canada Research Chair in Neurobiology of Motor Learning at the University of British Columbia, whose 2015 TEDx talk on neuroplasticity has been watched more than 22 million times...it's a must watch for every human on the planet and I will die on that hill.
Put it simply: "The best driver of neuroplastic change in your brain is your behaviour. Nothing is more effective than practice at helping you learn, and you need to do the work."
I first learned that there is measurable structural brain change in adult brains (driven by sustained effort in a normal working life) with this fascinating study on London Cab Drivers and the impact of having to memorise tens of thousands of places and routes. (Spoiler alert: the parts of the brain associated with memory got bigger)
The bridge I'm making here is mine, and not in the peer-reviewed literature: if individual brains demonstrate this level of structural adaptation in response to sustained behavioural change…the collective capacity of your organisation is almost certainly higher than your current change plan assumes.
It's a simple logic: You have been adapting your whole life. So has every person in your organisation.
The question isn't whether they can change. It's whether the programme you're leading is designed in a way that deserves their capacity.
By the way, that's the opening proposition of my upcoming book Pragmatic Change. Sign up now to be notified of its release.
Dave Snowden and Mary Boone's foundational Cynefin framing: Harvard Business Review, November 2007. Mark McKergow's original rutenso article: synthesisips.net (archived). CMI Futures of Change research: change-management-institute.com. Lara Boyd's TEDx talk: ted.com.