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Working well with complexity, together.

Strategy, facilitation, and learning for organizations navigating complex social and environmental challenges.

Ways We Work Together

Whole Story helps organizations work well with complexity through facilitation, strategy, and learning that builds shared understanding of what’s happening, supports thoughtful choices about where to act, and strengths the ability to learn and adapt as conditions change.

SENSE

Understanding what's happening

We create space to step back from immediate action and make sense of complex challenges together by bringing in multiple perspectives, exploring patterns, and developing a shared understanding of the system you’re working in.

Choose

Focusing where it matters most

We support teams to identify where and how to act by clarifying priorities, exploring leverage points, and making thoughtful decisions about where to focus effort in a complex and evolving context.

adapt

Learning and adjusting through change

We build in reflection and learning so teams can notice what’s changing, respond to new information, and adapt their approach as conditions evolve.

We are living through overlapping and interconnected challenges—climate change, biodiversity loss, housing pressures, and growing social strain. Many organizations are working hard to respond, but are sensing a tension. Meaningful change is slower and more difficult than expected, and it’s not coming from a lack of care or intelligence.

Systems have become skilled at implementing technical solutions and expertise. These play an important role in addressing aspects of these challenges, but they are not the full picture. These challenges are not only technical, they are complex, involving many actors, diverse perspectives, and systems that interact in dynamic and often unpredictable ways.

This calls for a different kind of problem solving, not just working harder or more compassionately, but working in ways that better match the nature of the challenges themselves. It requires a deeper understanding of how complex systems function, and what that means for how we act within them.

Responding well requires ways of working that help groups make sense of complexity together, bring diverse perspectives into relationship, support thoughtful decision-making, and allow organizations to learn and adapt as conditions evolve.

Whole Story supports groups to work well with complexity in practice by shaping how they work together in ways that recognize that it’s not just what we do, but how we work together that shape what becomes possible.

Why this Work Matters

How We Think

Essays exploring how people and organizations can work well with complexity and steward the conditions for responsible systems change.

The Playground Doesn’t Scale, But the Game Does

We spend a lot of time trying to scale change. If something works, we assume the next step is to scale it—standardize it, replicate it, roll it out more broadly. But what if change in complex human systems doesn’t always move the way we think? As spring arrives, my family has been spending more time at the park. I’ve been watching kids play a game called grounders—a game I never played growing up—and it got me thinking about how things spread. One child introduces it. Others

How Knowledge Moves: Looking through a Jane Jacobs Lens

An exploration of knowledge as a living process that moves through sensing, acting, reflecting, and stabilizing

Thinking About Emergence: Conditions That Shape What Unfolds

I’ve been thinking a lot about emergence lately. Emergence is frequently named in conversations about complexity and systems change, yet its implications for how we plan, lead, and make decisions are often left under-explored. If emergence is a natural phenomenon in complex systems, what does that mean for where we actually have agency, how we show up in the systems we’re part of, and whether the future that unfolds is generative—or extractive? I recently wrote a longer refle

Spaces to Learn

Upcoming practice-based learning for working well with complexity, including workshops, dialogues, and reflective spaces.

Territorial Acknowledgement

Whole Story is based within the traditional territories of the Anishinaabe, Chonnonton, and Haudenosaunee peoples on lands within the Haldimand Treaty of 1784. We approach our work from a position of learning and humility, committed to building relationships of reciprocity and respect, and acknowledging the many sources of knowledge that guide our practice.

LET'S CONNECT

If your organization is working on a complex challenge and would value space to think together, feel free to connect to explore what’s present and what might be helpful next.