Seeing the Future In Today’s Systemic Pressures
In recent weeks, as the year draws to a close, I've noticed something in conversations with clients: a gentle fatigue. Not just from the volume of work, but from what the year has revealed and what the work has demanded.
Under pressure, systems show themselves
The conversations have revealed how quickly systems can default from strategic to reactive - and struggle to find a pathway back. I've heard this from health executives navigating rising demand alongside workforce shortages, from leaders in organisations undergoing restructures while trying to maintain service delivery, from teams facing fiscal constraints while expectations continue to grow.
A theme has how easily work fragments when priorities stack faster than sense can be made. When we most need strategic clarity and decision making to navigate tough trade-offs, decision cycles slow to circles. Urgency crowds out reflection, even when we know reflection and perspective would help.
I've watched collaboration exist on paper while genuine partnership remains elusive - difficult conversations arise, people retreat to silos. I've seen leaders carry accountability for outcomes they have no direct authority to deliver, responsible for results that depend on many others across boundaries they cannot control. And little space or capability to navigate the competing commitments and perspectives across the system.
These are all features of complex systems, navigating heightened demands.
What Pressure Reveals
This year showed how much depends on the perception and perspectives we have available to us.
In the same conditions, some teams became more brittle, narrowing their focus to what felt controllable. Others found ways to pause, even briefly, to widen the lens and reconnect to multiple ways of seeing and ground back to what mattered most.
In one piece of work this year, a senior leadership group was operating under intense delivery pressure, with overlapping priorities and growing frustration about stalled progress. Conversations stayed at the level of tasks, risks, and short‑term fixes. When space was created to step back and look at patterns across the system, including interdependencies, competing demands, and decision bottlenecks, something shifted. Leaders were able to make clearer trade‑offs, name what needed to stop, and agree on clear priorities that could realistically move together.
Nothing about the context changed. What changed was what they were perceiving and paying attention to.
Where leaders made space to see perspectives and patterns rather than just problems, different conversations became possible. Where we stayed curious rather than certain, collaboration become more possible.
Where we created conditions for hard calls to be made - and to stick - rather than endlessly circling, momentum returned. Where we focused on building collective capacity rather than relying on individual heroics, work began to move with less resistance.
This is where futures thinking becomes practical. It is not about predicting distant scenarios or producing another plan. It is about paying attention to the trajectories already forming, and recognising the kinds of futures our systems are being nudged towards through today’s decisions, habits, and defaults.
The Appetite for Something Different
I'm also hearing something else: an appetite for a different kind of conversation.
A conversation that opens up new perspectives. That creates space to understand what problem we're actually addressing - both immediately and on the horizons. That shifts pace toward deeper reflection without stalling momentum. That builds capacity to influence beyond direct authority and mobilise at the speed and scale the work demands.
The question I keep hearing beneath the surface: How do we open up new thinking, new perspectives? We go around the same conversations—we have an opportunity now to look up at the horizon. What's going to enable a shift? A new way forward?
There is a quieter recognition emerging that the leadership toolkit many of us rely on may need refreshing. Not because it is wrong, but because it was shaped for conditions that were more stable, more bounded, and more predictable than the ones leaders are now navigating.
The load is real. Politically exposed, emotionally charged, relentless. And there is a growing sense that sustaining this work requires different ways of seeing, being, deciding, and working together.
This is a threshold many leaders are standing at as the year closes.
A Quieter Question
As we head into the break, there is an opportunity to refresh, recharge and reenergise into the new year.
There may be value in pausing to notice what this year has already been showing you. These questions, inspired by the questions asked by Mille Bojer in her opening keynote at the Making More Health conference, point in that direction:
What is emerging or breaking down in your system right now that might be an early signal of what is coming next?
What future are you quietly reinforcing through what you are rewarding, tolerating, and repeating today?
These questions invite us to widen our lens and noticing of how tomorrow is already taking shape through everyday choices, habits, and ways of working.
Wishing you a joy-filled and restful break over the festive season!
If you're ready to create space for the kind of strategic thinking that opens new possibilities, I'd welcome a conversation about how we might work together in 2026.
Get in touch to explore executive coaching, Strategy + Sensemaking Labs, or systemic leadership work designed for the complexity you're navigating.
