When the toolkit doesn’t match the territory

At several climate and sustainability practitioner conferences last year — including the UN Global Compact in Sydney and Adelaide's local Climate Network Practitioner conference — facilitators ran a simple check-in. Audiences ranged from 80 to several hundred practitioners across government, NGOs, consultancies and corporates. Via an anonymous word cloud, they asked, "How are you feeling?"

The same words kept rising to the top. Tired. Burnt out. Exhausted.

And yet, in the very next session, those same practitioners stood at lecterns presenting an upbeat, optimistic front — because that's what funders, executives, and peers expect and reward. We all want to believe in progress. But we can end up performing progress while privately eroding our own capacity. Outwardly hopeful. Inwardly depleted.

If you work in climate or sustainability, particularly inside government or a large institution, you probably know exactly what I'm describing. You may even be what I'm describing.

The Stack of Pressures

The exhaustion isn't coming from one place. It's the pace, the politics, the moral injury of seeing what's at stake and feeling under-resourced to meet it, the lack of real authority, the isolation of holding a long-view in a short-term system.

But there's something underneath all of that we don't talk about enough.

We are trying to lead systems change with a toolkit that wasn't built for systems change. The familiar one: linear project management plus compliance-style implementation. Most of us were trained to think like engineers of problems. Break the problem into parts. Assign owners with KPIs. Build a project plan. Consult stakeholders. Deliver outcomes on time and on budget. It's the water we swim in.

The trouble is, climate and sustainability challenges are not separable parts. They are deeply interdependent, shaped by mental models (the seductive belief that technology alone will save us, that endless economic growth is unquestionable), embedded in economic structures that are extractionist and inequitable by design, and held in place by institutions whose problem-solving habits are themselves part of the problem.

Applying linear project management to a complex adaptive challenge doesn't just fall short. It actively reinforces the patterns we're trying to shift. Optimising narrow KPIs incentivises silo behaviour. Consultation without shared responsibility entrenches passivity. 'Green projects' succeed on paper while emissions, procurement decisions, or land-use trade-offs remain untouched.

The Strategic Plan That Wasn't

Here's a pattern I see often.

A natural resource management organisation has a legislative requirement to produce a five-year strategic plan — extend the same thinking to any mandated strategy, net zero plan, or adaptation plan. They consult heavily. Stakeholders and staff generate a wish-list. The executive and corporate planner shape it into a plan.

The wish-list is, of course, larger than the organisation's actual resources. Priorities shift in a rapidly changing world. With the best of intentions, leadership tries to deliver everything and spreads its people thinly. Staff continue working from old habits and beliefs about what matters most. The plan ends up largely ignored. Leadership becomes reactive rather than strategic. Each stakeholder continues pursuing their own separate priorities.

The old patterns simply continue.

And the human cost is real. People spend months polishing a document that quietly gets ignored, then carry the cynicism of having watched it happen. The most committed staff are often the first to burn out, because they're the ones who genuinely believed the plan would mean something.

This isn't a failure of effort or goodwill. It's a failure of fit. Consultation that extracts views for others to decide with doesn't enable the people involved to change their views, share responsibility, or experiment their way forward together. Shared responsibility is the differentiator I keep coming back to, and it's what most processes quietly design out.

From Convincing to Convening

I know this is starting to feel heavy. Stay with me, because this is where it opens up.

Across more than 20 years of practice and research, grounding the work in complexity and adaptive leadership (e.g. Heifetz's adaptive vs technical challenges, Snowden's safe-to-fail experiments) and my own PhD on embedding sustainability into organisational culture, I've come to a single core stance.

We can't control people or outcomes in complex circumstances — but we can influence conditions, constraints, and feedback loops that change what becomes possible.

Which means we can't tell our way to systems change. The work shifts from convincing to convening.

Complex challenges are more people challenges than technical problems. As I often put it: the people with the problem are the problem — and the solution. That's not blame. It's a reminder about where the work is located.

A Different Way to Plan

If a strategic plan is required of you, we still meet the requirement — but we design the process so the plan stays alive.

Convene stakeholders for shared sense-making about the system as it is, and agree a desired direction.

Together, identify candidate leverage points — places where small changes might ripple out and catalyse others. Hold these lightly. In complexity, we usually don't know in advance what will leverage what.

Where perspectives differ, run small, safe-to-fail experiments in parallel rather than debating which view is "right".

Agree what you'll do — separately or together — so all parties carry shared responsibility and are themselves changing as the work unfolds.

Set frequent joint review cycles (every 4-8 weeks works well) to learn what's working, and scale what shows traction.

This is a systemic approach because it holds the personal, structural, and cultural shifts together.

An Invitation

The Systemic Change program is an eight-session cohort over six months, designed for exactly this. It's for sustainability and climate practitioners (typically mid-to-senior, often inside government or large institutions) who are attempting to lead change.

The program blends:

●     Monthly cohort learning on complexity, living systems thinking and new approaches to facilitating groups.

●     What positive psychology tells us about designing work to sustain you in it.

●     A self-designed action-research project to run safe-to-fail experiments inside your own organisation.

By the end, you'll have a portfolio of safe-to-fail experiments, a stakeholder map, a systems map for your initiative, an agreed review cadence with the people who matter, and a tested engagement approach. We'll also practise listening techniques to help you process the sometimes disturbing emotions as climate science keeps adding distressing news to our daily feeds.

You don't have to keep exhausting yourself trying to do change the old way. And you don't have to find another way alone.

If you're leading cross-boundary change without the authority to mandate it, this program is built for you. Join the free online webinar (29 May 2026). You'll leave with a simple diagnostic for whether your initiative needs linear delivery — or a systemic approach.

Learn more

Register for my free webinar to learn more about my Systemic Change program.