In my work with leaders and teams over the past year, one theme keeps surfacing: the sense that the usual playbook no longer applies. Strategy feels shaky. Roles blur. Goals shift mid-flight. It’s not dysfunction — it’s complexity.
Why the Playbook Doesn’t Fit Anymore
Team alignment — the connection people have to their work and to each other in their work — is central to multiple disciplines: team effectiveness, organizational development, change management, and leadership.
In all of these, one thing is becoming increasingly clear: we’re pretty much always dealing with complexity. There’s a simple rule of thumb from complexity thinking that I find helpful: If there are more than three interacting causal factors, you're likely in complexity. While that’s not a hard scientific boundary, it’s a useful flag. As soon as multiple variables are interacting in non-linear ways –which is nearly always true in organizations – simple analysis and top-down control stop being effective.
Yet, many of our dominant approaches are still built for a simpler world. I would call these ‘begin with the end in mind’ approaches. (A nod to Stephen Covey here.)
Take strategic planning, for instance. In most organizations, strategy is still created at the top and cascaded down through reporting lines. Senior leaders set the direction; everyone else is expected to align. It’s a command and control approach that assumes a stable environment and predictable cause-and-effect relationships.
That world rarely exists anymore.
By the time strategy filters down, the ground has usually shifted.
To quote Mike Cardus, Strategic OD & Design Leader, based in the US, in a recent lively LinkedIn discussion,
“Most internal folks aren’t walking around saying, ‘This is a complex system.’ They’re just trying to figure out why communication broke down, why a decision is stalled, or why a project keeps getting stuck.”
One Leader’s Story
This was brought home to me recently in a coaching relationship with a senior leader in a large public sector organization.
We began our work in a fairly conventional way. He’d identified a couple of areas where he wanted to see progress, around culture change and team dynamics. He is smart, self-aware, motivated. A strong start.
When he arrived for our second session, he was clearly unsettled. Since we’d last met, a new senior leader had been appointed, not someone he directly reported to but adjacent to his sphere of work. Some of his portfolio had been handed to a newly promoted colleague, without warning, consultation, or clarity. Many other things were happening in the organization that were unexpected and seemingly left field.
The goals we’d discussed now felt irrelevant.
We spent most of that session with him downloading and me listening. At the end, I asked if I could offer a few thoughts. One of them was this: What you're experiencing isn’t a failure of planning – it's complexity. The conditions had changed. Multiple causes were interacting. The situation was no longer something to “solve” with clearer goals or a revised action plan.
From Frustration to Awareness
Trying to respond to complexity with linear tools leads to those familiar symptoms that people experience: frustration, overwhelm, and blame. In his case, I sensed something else too – a kind of dejection and paralysis. The tools he was trying to use just didn’t match the terrain.
As Otto Scharmer puts it:
“You cannot transform the behaviour of a system unless you transform the quality of attention that people apply to their actions within that system.”
When I shared these thoughts with my coachee, something shifted. You could feel it in the room. I could see palpable relief, and the dejection was replaced with energization. He could now see where he could act, but in a different way from what he previously had thought.
That shift in perception matters. It’s not just cognitive. It changes how people show up.
Alignment Emerges, It’s Not Delivered
When you scale this up to teams, teams of teams, and whole organizations, the need for a different response multiplies. Most team meetings are still focused on implementation, information sharing, and box-ticking. The assumption is that someone higher up has clarity; we just need to execute.
But in a complex environment, clarity doesn’t live at the top. It emerges through conversation, through noticing patterns, through sense-making at the local level.
This is where the real work of alignment happens. Not through cascading decisions, but through building shared understanding. Not through rigid plans, but through responsive learning.
The Conversations That Make it Possible
It starts with a different kind of conversation – one that’s not about having all the answers, but about making space for what’s real to surface, in a way that people can engage with and act from. In complexity, strategy and alignment don’t cascade – they emerge through the quality of the conversations we have.
I believe that this kind of conversation needs to be characterised by a few key characteristics:
Frequency – It happens often, not once a quarter or on an away day. It becomes part of the rhythm of work.
Responsiveness – It stays tuned to what's changing, adjusting as new information and experiences surface.
Surfacing – It brings what's under the surface into view, so people can name, explore and work with what’s really going on.
Incrementality – It doesn’t aim for grand resolutions but moves in small, meaningful steps, testing and learning as it goes.
More listening than implementing – It creates space to really hear what people are seeing, feeling, and learning — not just rush to action.
Dialogue is the Structure
These conversations don’t just support the work — they are the work. In complex systems, dialogue isn’t soft. It’s structural. It’s how coherence forms.
I’ll end with a quote from Barry Oshry, from his superb book, Seeing Systems:
And so, we sit in our room
together
Thinking,
Planning,
Deciding
Everything
An issue comes up
Together
We think,
we plan
We decide
Another issue comes up
(there are three more at the door)
Together
We think
We plan
We decide
Four new issues at the door,
Six outside the window
Three opportunities just flew past
(waving bye bye)
The issue flow in
Under the door
Through the keyholes
Over the airwaves.
Our thinking grows fuzzy,
But still they come
Our planning is….
(What happened to planning?),
And still they come.
More issues
Didn’t we already handle that one?
Our decisions are random
(someone has to decide)
At least we’re still together thinking…
John Hill is a Systemic Team Coach and Strategic Advisor at Mirror Mirror.
At Mirror Mirror, we help leaders, facilitators, and coaches bring shared clarity to how teams think, act and work together. Our diagnostic and alignment process creates space for teams to pause, reflect, and tackle what’s really going on — beyond surface-level dynamics. It’s not about personality profiles or complicated frameworks. It’s about revealing perspectives, surfacing what’s unsaid, and taking practical steps forward, together.