Better Outcomes in Complex Landscapes
Support for those working in Natural Resource Management
Dr Josie McLean helps NRM and conservancy boards and leadership teams across Australia to implement their strategic plans more effectively and catalyse broader systemic change.
Josie works with boards and executive teams on their current priorities. Together, they identify where intervention may have the greatest impact for the least input. Interventions might include reconsidering how decisions are made, strengthening community participation, and developing the internal capability needed to lead genuine systemic change.
Josie will support the development and implementation of a new way of doing things - essentially a new ‘tool kit’ that is complexity-informed.
Established approaches can fail when…
A plan is overtaken by drought, fire, flood, policy change or shifting community expectations.
“Josie worked with me and my leadership team at Flinders University across multiple years, supporting a strategic uplift in leadership capability. Josie’s work focused on both team dynamics and individual development, and she brought a thoughtful, evidence-based approach to every engagement. Josie was highly collaborative, responsive to feedback, and deeply professional in her interactions with me and the team.
Josie’s ability to build trust and challenge constructively made her an invaluable partner in our transformation journey. I strongly endorse Josie for any role requiring leadership development, strategic facilitation, or cultural change within a complex organisation.”
Urgent issues consume attention while deeper patterns continue to shape the landscape.
Communities contribute to consultation and struggle to see how their knowledge influenced the outcome.
Scientific evidence is extensive, yet the way forward remains contested.
Funding cycles encourage projects with defined outputs while landscape change unfolds over decades.
Boards and executive teams must make defensible decisions while the conditions shaping those decisions continue to change.
The effects of each decision also travel unevenly across the system. Costs, benefits and potential losses land differently for landholders, Traditional Owners, communities, industries, governments and future generations.
This is the territory of complexity.
In a complex system, we are always developing hypotheses about why the system responds as it does. Each intervention gives us more information. Progress comes through thoughtful action, close observation and a willingness to adapt as the system changes.
Josie helps boards and executive teams develop the practices needed to work this way.
A better map for the territory
Landscape governance has inherited approaches built around prediction, linear delivery and control. These approaches have value in stable and well-understood conditions.
Living landscapes behave differently. They adapt. Relationships influence outcomes. New patterns emerge. An intervention in one part of the system can create unexpected effects elsewhere.
Better Outcomes in Complex Landscapes explores four shifts that help landscape boards respond more effectively:
Prioritise by leverage rather than urgency
A long list of urgent projects can disperse effort across the system. Josie helps boards, leadership teams, and even communities build a shared understanding of how the system they’re trying to influence functions and identify places where a well-chosen intervention may ripple through the system.
Broaden what counts as evidence
Scientific data provides an essential view of landscape health. Communities, landholders, Traditional Owners and people working on Country also hold observations developed through experience and close attention to place. Josie helps boards create facilitated processes for bringing these forms of knowledge together.
Move community engagement from consultation to co-learning
Consultation often asks people to respond to a proposal after much of the thinking has already occurred. Co-learning begins earlier.
Josie designs and facilitates processes where participants share perspectives, examine assumptions, engage with emerging science and develop possible ways forward together.
Invest in internal culture and leadership
Systemic change asks something of the organisation seeking to create it. Josie supports the inner work through executive coaching, board and leadership facilitation, team development and teaching. This develops the judgement, courage and steadiness needed to experiment, learn and lead through uncertainty.
Each area offers a possible entry point.
Your organisation may need support in one area, several areas, or different areas over time. We can begin wherever the need and readiness are greatest, using a focused pilot to test the approach.
To learn more about why extending your complexity approach is important now, download the whitepaper below.
My invitation to you
If this logic resonates with the challenges you are navigating, I’d welcome the opportunity to meet with you - online or in person - to explore where you are now and what might be most useful next.
What others say about Josie’s work
In March 2026, the executive team at Tasmanian Land Conservancy undertook a half-day system mapping exercise to identify changes that may have the greatest leverage (greatest effect for effort invested).
Download the team’s feedback and reflections on this workshop below.
“It was short, sharp and insightful way to identify and prioritise effort, time and mojo!”
“This session provides a good way to visually map out contour lines of change (volatile, influence, intractable) of the system we operate in as a team.”
“Her deep understanding of complexity...and exceptional coaching skills, have allowed our team to test ideas and become confident navigators in complexity.”
“Josie’s coaching has profoundly shaped the way I think, respond and practice in all my professional and personal roles. For all those practicing in complex systems and seeking to adapt and regenerate, having a coach like Josie to walk alongside you is invaluable.”