Making Sense & Making Change: Social Innovation in Complex Systems

18 December 2025

Communities Working Together Winter Seminar Series | 18 December 2025 Prof. Katharine McGowan, Mount Royal University, Calgary

Our December seminar brought a wide-ranging and genuinely thought-provoking two hours with Prof. Katharine McGowan — historian turned social innovation researcher at Mount Royal University in Calgary — on complex systems, what they are, and how understanding them more clearly can help us work within and upon them more effectively.

Skipping stones and big rocks

Katharine opened with a deceptively simple image: the difference between skipping a stone across water and throwing in a large rock. Much of our work in community and public service innovation, she suggested, aspires to be the skipping stone — light-touch interventions that create ripples across a wide system, building resilience without requiring enormous investment. In practice, it often looks more like the rock: a big, well-intentioned throw, a significant splash, and then uncertain, hard-to-trace impact.

Understanding why that happens — and doing something about it — is what systems thinking is for.

What systems thinking actually is

Katharine traced the origins of systems thinking to the 1930s and the work of mathematician Ludwig von Bertalanffy, who was interested in why outcomes so often couldn’t be explained simply by reducing things to their component parts. The whole behaves differently from the sum of its parts —  systems thinking pushes us to understand that difference . She was careful to note this is not a replacement for rigorous evidence-based approaches; rather, it becomes relevant when we can’t explain the outcomes we’re getting just by looking at what should, in theory, be working.

One of the session’s most useful contributions was Katharine’s iceberg model: the idea that most of what drives a system’s behaviour is invisible. Above the surface are the events we respond to. Beneath them are patterns and trends, then the underlying structures, and finally — deepest of all — the mental models, assumptions and values that shape everything above. Real systems change, she argued, rarely happens by responding to events alone. It requires working at the level of structures and mental models, which is slower, harder and less immediately rewarding, but far more likely to create lasting shifts.

The conversation in Argyll and Bute

The discussion that followed was honest about the difficulty of applying this in practice. Participants reflected on the pull towards short-term, visible action in systems that reward exactly that — and the challenge of making the case for slower, more relational work when the pressure to demonstrate immediate outcomes is so intense.

Katharine’s closing words were offered as a kind of permission: the people in the room are not the reason things aren’t working. The systems we work within are designed — through their incentives, their accountability structures, their deep-seated assumptions — to reproduce themselves. The goal is not to work harder within those systems, but to identify the small, strategic shifts that move things incrementally in a better direction. How can we help the work already being done shift the system towards greater resilience for our whole community? That, she suggested, should be our focus.