Is systems thinking the best way to understand complexity?

Is systems thinking really the best way to help us understand the complex systems we're working with?

If you work in public policy, intervention delivery or evaluation, chances are you’ve used systems thinking techniques in your work. But how well can it deal with the dynamic nature of our health and public sector systems?

This recently shared paper "The Future of Systems Thinking Through the Lens of Action Research and Critical Systems Practice" (Jackson, 2025) popped up on my feed and I think is a great provocation about the way forward for the field.

In it the author looks across 4 themes that are relevant to NHS, and local government today – particularly as we look towards the neighbourhood health-model.

✅ Action Research (AR) as a way to close the theory-practice gap: the long road of improvement needs techniques that are grounded in reality. Action Research is about active involvement and shaping change en-route - not as an end point - learning what works, why it works, and adapting. "Doing" and "learning" are concurrent.

Many tools, not just one fix

Challenges in the public sector are rarely simple and quick to resolve rarely 'clean'. Understanding system dynamics and the different, sometimes conflicting, perspectives of the public, council officers, community leaders, needs methods that understand difference and help define a more “whole truth” of the system, not a partial snippet of what’s going on.

Be more EPIC - Explore, Produce, Intervene, Check

The author shared a new framework to help the test and learn approach, bringing in different methods and understanding how they work. Something that is suggested will work well for complex systems - Explore the context through systems maps and models; Produce a range of potential interventions or solutions based on different perspectives; Intervene in the system, test and monitor; Check the intervention's impact and refine.

Pluralism is the key to understanding complex systems

In councils and the health systems, different stakeholders hold equally valid views on a problem. These systems are messy and complex – the only way to fully appreciate that complexity is through a lens of pluralism—respecting differences as value.

For those of us working in and with the public sector we know our most challenging problems aren't things to be simplified away.

They are systems we must understand work in, together, by continually learning and adapting.

Ref: Michael C. Jackson (2025) The Future of Systems Thinking Through the Lens of Action Research and Critical Systems Practice, Systems Research and Behavioral Science.

This post was originally posted here.