In complex settings, different practices like evaluation, co-design, systems thinking, social learning, and participatory action research often build on common foundations. This post brings together a set of recent reflections that explore these shared starting points: clarity of purpose, attention to context, relational work, and space for reflection and learning.
Over the past year, many of my blog posts have explored a shared set of challenges: how we work together in the face of complexity – across systems, sectors, and ways of knowing. While each post stands on its own, they also feel connected. Not as a formal series, but as a conversation that keeps returning to familiar starting points: clarity of purpose, attention to context, and the relational and reflective work that supports constructive change.
As these posts took shape, it became clearer how different practices – evaluation, co-design, systems thinking, social learning, and participatory action research – all draw from similar underlying principles: being clear on where we’re heading, grounding action in context, working with others, and staying open to learning and reflection. While each has its own language and professional culture, they often have elements in common.
That’s not surprising. All these approaches are, in different ways, about making sense of real-world complexity and helping people navigate it well. What’s useful, I think, is noticing how they reinforce each other in practice and how we might bridge them more deliberately.
Complexity-aware evaluation
In Evaluation in complex settings, I reflected on how evaluation needs to shift when outcomes are emergent and values are contested. Rather than focusing solely on predefined targets, complexity-aware approaches support learning, adaptation, and shared sense-making as change unfolds. In practice, this means creating space for reflection, using monitoring to guide rather than measure, and working across different perspectives.
This orientation also shapes how we think about design and collaboration more broadly.
Co-design and collaboration
Co-design in complex settings looks at how design becomes a collective and adaptive process when the future isn’t fully knowable. Good co-design begins with purpose: where are we trying to go, and what principles or values will guide us? That’s also where evaluation begins. The two are closely linked. Both help clarify direction, support alignment, and strengthen our ability to work thoughtfully amid uncertainty.
As design opens up to wider participation, the role of learning and reflection becomes even more important.
Social learning
In Social learning and collaboration, I explored how teams and partnerships build insight together, not through instruction but through shared experience and ongoing interaction. In complex, multi-stakeholder initiatives, this kind of learning isn’t an optional extra. It helps build understanding and enables adaptive response.
But learning together also depends on how we reflect, both individually and collectively, and how we carry that reflection into our actions.
Reflection and reflexivity: working on ourselves
Among these posts, On reflection and reflexivity perhaps carries a slightly different tone. While social learning focuses on how we adapt together, this piece turns the lens inward. It explores the quieter, often solitary practice of reflection and, more importantly, reflexivity – our (or our team’s) capacity to examine how our own experiences, values, and assumptions shape the way we see and engage with the world.
In complex work, this focus on reflexive practice is easy to overlook, especially in team settings focused on collective process. But it remains essential. It invites us to pause, question our role, and notice what we may be bringing into the room. While teams can build shared habits of reflection, reflexivity is often more personal and ongoing. Still, it doesn’t sit outside systems work; it anchors it.
Relational practice and breaking down silos
Relational foundations for change reflects on the quieter, sometimes invisible, aspects of collaboration – the trust, dialogue, and willingness to work with difference. This kind of relational work isn’t just about team dynamics. It provides the orientation for change processes at many levels, from organisational and sectoral transformation through to broader system change. Without it, efforts to shift structures or strategies often falter.
Breaking the silos continues this thread by exploring how systems, institutions, and habits can reinforce fragmentation, even when intentions are shared. It highlights the barriers that can arise when teams or organisations operate in isolation. It also points to the importance of creating intentional bridges – through relationships, shared language, and collaborative practice – to enable more holistic and adaptive responses.
In complex settings, strong relationships and a shared understanding of context create the conditions for learning, co-design, and evaluation to flourish. These, in turn, help us see and work with the bigger picture.
Systems design: seeing the bigger picture
An introduction to systems and systemic design offers a way to understand complexity more clearly and to act within it. It looks at mapping, sense-making, and identifying points of influence. Just as importantly, it draws together earlier ideas around purpose, participation, and adaptive practice.
While systems thinking can sometimes seem abstract, its real value lies in making sense of complexity and guiding thoughtful action. It doesn’t replace the other approaches here. Instead, it helps bring them together within a broader frame.
Participatory action research in complexity
In Participatory action research: tackling today’s complex challenges, I outline how participatory action research (PAR) offers another entry point for working with complexity. Like the other approaches discussed here, PAR starts from context and purpose. But it places special emphasis on power, participation, and lived experience. In doing so, it creates space for inquiry that is grounded, reflective, and directed toward practical action.
This post reinforces many of the themes above – including collaboration, reflexivity, and systems awareness – and offers a way to centre action and inquiry within the same process.
Concluding thoughts
Looking back, I didn’t set out to write a series. But taken together, these posts reflect a shared orientation. Working in complexity asks us to stay grounded in context, reflect on our role, and support learning with others. Whether through evaluation, co-design, facilitation, participatory research, or systems thinking, the underlying patterns often align.
That includes clarifying purpose, engaging with context, surfacing values, and supporting learning – both individually and collectively. And it depends on building the relationships that make collaborative work possible.
While each approach brings its own tools and language, they share an interest in learning through doing, in surfacing assumptions, and in working across boundaries. In that sense, the distinctions between them may matter less than we often assume. What also matters is how they can strengthen each other in practice. Used together, they can help us work more wisely, more reflectively, and more effectively in uncertain settings.
This is a personal reflection, not an exhaustive comparison. While each approach brings its own history, values, and unique contributions – which should not be overlooked – there’s much to learn from their points of connection. Recognising shared ground does not diminish their distinctions. Rather, it may help us see how insights developed through the practice of each approach can complement each other and deepen our collective capacity to respond.
If you’re working in similar settings, I hope these reflections are useful. And as always, I’d be interested to hear how others are bringing these strands together in their own work.
This post also sits within a broader reflection, as Learning for Sustainability marks 20 years online in 2025. Many of the ideas explored here have been shaped by that ongoing work—supporting participatory processes, systems thinking, and collaborative practice across diverse settings.
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