For the last decade, I’ve been in rooms with Australian leaders at the local, state, and federal levels, designing and facilitating approaches to systemic reform and transformation. The challenges have been wide-ranging, from new approaches to critical infrastructure and policing to managing water across jurisdictions and tackling modern slavery. Amid the diversity and complexity of these challenges, one emerging pattern is consistent.

The type of government leaders making the greatest impacts is changing. Rather than leading with more charisma, authority, or analytical data, they lead from a place of personal vulnerability, greater relational curiosity, and the courage to engage from a position of care. Care that connects individuals and diverse experiences with personal agency. This creates new capacity for entire systems to come together to articulate, design, and drive different futures for their communities.

Complexity Is Evolving the Context for Leadership

The geopolitical landscape is shifting, natural disasters are intensifying, and artificial intelligence presents fundamental questions about how public services should be ethically and responsibly modernized. Community leaders are increasingly at the front lines of complex issues, where reason, relationships, and resources must coalesce into response.

The leader who is able to make a difference in complex challenges knows how to serve in the role of convenor, participant, or promoter. They know how to empower networks and resources in their communities through co-design, innovative policies, and more fluid, reimagined partnerships and alliances. These emergent leaders inherently understand that change in these contexts is messy, not linear. A multi-path pursuit more than a single destination.

City and county managers can both incorporate these emerging competencies into their leadership practice and seek to identify and amplify others who demonstrate them.

Four Emerging Competencies for Managers Navigating Complexity

1. Broad Boundaries on Context, Constituents, Catalysts, and Connectors

It is tempting for any leader to compartmentalize complex challenges. To artificially segment an issue into simple cause-and-effect scenarios, sound bites, and structures of existing departments, strategic plans, and budgets.

Complexity requires an approach that is more nuanced, emergent, and enduring. First, a wide-frame view is needed to understand how people, institutions, incentives, and relationships have contributed to creating a situation. Then, we must map the interactions across systems, such as those that maintain the current state or can amplify new approaches, to understand what may be intentionally (or unintentionally) compounding issues or influenced if changes are made. The field of cybernetics brings a helpful transdisciplinary way to understand, monitor, and influence these dynamic feedback loops between people, technology, and their environments.

I once had a government program sponsor—passionate about innovation and participatory design—ask me to help her include as much of “the system” as she could in designing a fundamentally different approach to major transport projects. I was handed the artifacts to understand the system: an organization chart of government departments, a process flow for government decision-making, and an Excel sheet with “important” stakeholders.

Our first activity became expanding the frame to think about the system through a resident’s lens, including every public and private entity, process, technology, platform, and interaction that might be affected, involved, or influential in the context of transportation.

This led to an entirely different mission statement for the program, different considerations of risk and opportunities, and conversations with contributors who had no precedent for previously being in a room together. The nature of the strategy and program plan completely changed, addressing and harnessing dynamics in the wider system that might have otherwise worked against the strategic intent rather than with it.

Another example of the power of system thinking is the role that veterinarians have come to play in many municipal actions to combat domestic violence. Research has shown that up to 70% of domestic abuse perpetrators are concurrently abusing or neglecting pets.¹ By including veterinary clinics, animal hospitals, and associated local nonprofits in the system map of domestic violence in a community, new points for early intervention emerge for identifying victims and providing earlier support.

Questions to Add to Your Toolkit: 

How do we bring a wider frame to defining, reimagining, and addressing a complex challenge? Who has a vested interest or different perspective into this space? What existing data or technology platforms are part of this system? What natural ecosystems need to be considered? How will we understand the impact that incremental changes are having across the system? Through what vantage point(s) are we mapping a system and what blindspots does it create?

2. Sense-making Across Complex Systems

Stakeholders are traditionally treated as isolated, one-dimensional players. They can be consulted. Mapped. Heard. Informed. Managed. Surveyed. Analyzed.

City and county managers have always served as a living bridge between the public, elected officials, and the departments that translate public priorities into services. The temptation with growing investment in AI-driven data and agents will be to narrow this bridge and replace it with a stream of widening analytical information. It will appear more cost-effective, objective, and efficient. These enhanced digital capabilities are useful, but should place more onus on a manager’s mandate to cultivate strong civic connections, empowerment, and participation.

I love Nora Bateson’s frame of “warm data” to understand the limitations of purely analytical approaches to decision-making. Leaders who know how to convene and harness relational data understand their role first and foremost as sense-makers rather than decision-makers. Sense-makers embody a deep curiosity about the lived reality of what communities need, feel, and experience and why. They bring an embodied, deep listening approach to discern the morale, value, safety, trust, and well-being that sit in the space between facts. They see people as the community, not players in it.

AI can in itself provide managers with enhanced forms of participatory democracy and sociocracy. For instance, platforms such as Remesh, and others rapidly emerging in the field, can be used to facilitate dynamic conversations at scale with dispersed audiences.

These digital platforms can enable two-way engagement, rich discussions, and rapid access to qualitative data. Free text responses can be gathered from thousands of collaborators simultaneously, translated into multiple languages, analyzed live for trends and patterns, shared back transparently across participants to ratify and validate strong and divergent themes. Then summarized in real time so new questions can be formed and posed by facilitators live in the same session.

Questions to Add to Your Toolkit: 

What questions does the data raise? Do we understand the relationships across our community and how elements interact? Have we engaged the community in defining the problem before designing solutions? Do we understand the diversity of constituent agendas? What potential historical patterns might be unintentionally reinforced through the data analysis we are receiving? How can we use technology to better enable more active participation and visibility of outcomes in our community?

3. Cultivating the Conditions and Vision for Alternative Futures

Outcomes from most attempts to adapt or transform are not determined by the best technical experts, plan, or funding model. They are determined by the belief, capability, and contextual agency that people across a system used to turn intentions into actions and iterative improvements. Community members need to understand the evolution and drivers of a change, play a role in defining the different futures that are possible, and be treated as co-owners of the outcomes, with timely access to tools, information, and opportunities for refinement and course correction.

As humans, we can only tell where something is when we understand where it sits in relation to something else. This speaks volumes for the level of coherence, transparency, and communication required from managers in communities confronting complexity. Effective leaders must understand the spectrum of sentiment and experience that exists, meet people where they are, and continuously build bridges to a coherent and compelling future—even if it isn’t fully known.

This requires a community vision for the future big enough to hold multiple agendas, beliefs, ways of working, course changes, and lessons along the way. Complex problems need space and time to be navigated, not just solved. In these circumstances, communities require managers who act as stewards of common ground that enables diverse groups to continuously build new capability and adapt as new insights and opportunities emerge.

When data revealed that the prevalence of modern slavery in local Australian communities was being significantly underestimated, the insight was shared across law enforcement, victim support services, government bodies, and religious organizations. This cross-sector collaboration enabled a coordinated push to raise public awareness and shift both national and local conversations. By working together, these groups amplified their impact, resulting in a compounding effect on public understanding and engagement.

Using insights from data to drive targeted, collective action can be incredibly powerful. It not only streamlines efforts and resources to address short-term concerns, but also builds new connections and patterns of interaction between institutions.

Questions to Add to Your Toolkit: 

Who has a stake in overcoming this issue? Where do different community agendas, beliefs, and intentions overlap? Are we holding enough space for multiple contributing factors, objectives, and approaches to coexist? Could more impact be made if there were new relationships, structures, or platforms for collaboration? Does the system possess data and tools that could be shared more broadly? How will insights we discover be shared in a way that builds trust and capability across the whole system?

4. Capability-building Through Communications

How government leaders, and the communities they serve, talk about the past, the present, and future is not trivial. Science shows how storytelling fundamentally shapes the way individuals think about themselves and what is collectively possible and important. Neural coupling demonstrates how storytelling leads both the speaker’s and listeners’ brain activity to synchronize, especially in regions tied to emotion and meaning-making. Language is never neutral. It has the ability to create power imbalances, build alliances, prime responses, imply preferences, and create a sense of scarcity or abundance.

Meaning is also influenced by context. Government leaders who resonate broadly are often intentional in maintaining simplicity and avoiding over-intellectualized or technical language. How and when something is said, and who says it, is as important as what is said.

Navigating complexity with groups who don’t usually interact requires accessible language and continuously synthesizing and sharing contributions with strong situational awareness. At times, directly addressing the need for agreement on shared definitions may be critical to be able to move forward. Misalignment in intent often starts as misalignment in language.

In New Zealand, a broad initiative to engage a community in reimagining the future of a port after its damage in the Kaikoura earthquake intentionally began with a more universal language of visuals. A temporary, physical space was established as a dedicated engagement point that invited laughter, play, and extreme metaphors as participants used an unfurling mural of butcher paper to co-create a story of the past, present, and future of the port through their own lenses. A new, shared vocabulary was found through the stories and words that emerged, eventually creating a visual and verbal storybook anchored not in rational concepts of containers and economic contribution but in pride, resilience, regional stability, and a sense of connection to the world.

These foundational strategic narratives always bring to life two critical insights in a system:

1. The multiple lenses any single element can be seen through.

2. The words, concepts, and language that provide connective tissue across diverse groups and agendas.

Questions to Add to Your Toolkit: 

What does listening to others reveal about similarities and differences in language and perception of challenges and opportunities? Is the language we use to engage intentional and open? Are we artificially segmenting a system in how we engage with it? Do we create safe and respectful spaces for engagement? Are we engaging through multiple mechanisms, including play, visuals, and storytelling? How do different narratives or frames reveal what is visible or possible in the future?

Conclusion

It has never been more important for city and county managers to bring an enhanced sense of humanity, not simply resident input, back to the center of municipal operations, policies, and decisions about the future.

KATIE REID is a former partner in PwC Australia’s Government and Public Sector practice. She is a visiting fellow in the Australian National University’s College of Systems and Society and has recently been appointed director of regenerative impact and innovation at WWF Australia.

Endnote

¹ Ascione FR. The International Handbook of Animal Abuse and Cruelty: Theory, Research, and Application. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press (2008).