About Whole Story
Working on complex challenges can often feel like you’re going in circles. You're trying to move things forward while navigating diverse perspectives, competing priorities, and constant change.
You might be putting in effort without seeing meaningful progress, or finding that plans don’t hold as conditions shift. Even when people are committed and capable, it can be difficult to align, make decisions, and move forward in a way that feels coherent.
Part of the challenge is a mismatch
Many of the tools we rely on, such as strategic planning, decision-making processes, and evaluation methods, are designed for problems that are predictable and controllable. In these situations, outcomes can often be planned and controlled through careful analysis and execution.
But complex challenges don't behave this way. They involve many actors, shifting conditions, and relationships that influence one another over time. Cause and effect are not always clear, and outcomes cannot be directly controlled.
This creates a mismatch between how we are trying to solve problems and the nature of the problems themselves.
If the challenges we’re facing are largely complex, then we need a deeper understanding of how complex systems function and what it means to act well within them.
At the heart of complex systems are relationships. How groups come together to make sense of challenges, make decisions, and respond over time shapes what becomes possible.
Whole Story Approach
We believe complex challenges can only be addressed when we see the full picture — the people, perspectives, histories, and systems that shape them. To move from surface-level fixes to lasting solutions, we need ways of working that embrace complexity rather than reducing it. Our approach is grounded in five guiding principles: Whole Self, Whole Perspective, Whole Circle, Whole Time, and Whole Care.
By showing up as our full selves, we honour lived experience and wisdom alongside professional roles. By welcoming many perspectives, we make space for many ways of knowing - whether they are scientific, community-rooted, cultural, or experiential. By seeing the circle, we recognize the interconnection of social, environmental, cultural, and economic systems. By remembering the past as well as imagining the future, we understand challenges and solutions as part of a larger story unfolding through time. And by caring for ourselves and each other, we create a culture of trust, respect, and reciprocity that makes honest collaboration possible.
Practicing these principles allows us to notice the fuller story behind each challenge: the narratives that guide decision-making, whose voices and experiences are included or excluded, and how systems are interconnected. From this deeper awareness, we can begin to co-create solutions that are more meaningful, inclusive, and lasting.
Learning in Relationship
The Whole Story approach draws on diverse forms of knowledge and continues to evolve through practice, including through dialogue, reflection, experimentation, and learning in real-world settings. This includes insights from systems thinking and complexity science, as well as community-based, relational, and participatory approaches that focus on how people come together to make sense of challenges and act within them. It also draws on knowledge from lived experience and community contexts, recognizing that no single perspective holds the full picture.
Whole Story is also influenced by Indigenous knowledge systems, where teachings are shared through relationship and consent. We recognize that Indigenous knowledges are not ours to claim or translate. Instead, our role is to listen, create space for knowledge to be shared directly, and support learning across perspectives in ways that respect difference, relationship, and responsibility.
About the Founder
Julia Coburn
(She/Her)
Founder and Relational Systems Facilitator
Julia Coburn is a relational systems facilitator who supports organizations and collaborative networks working on complex social and environmental challenges. Her work focuses on helping groups make sense of complex challenges, develop thoughtful strategy, and bring diverse perspectives into relationship so that collective intelligence can emerge.
Across her career, Julia has worked in many contexts and at many scales. She co-founded WorldVuze, a global dialogue platform connecting students in over 70 countries, and supported ational partnerships with organizations such as UNICEF Canada and Kids Help Phone.
She helped steward a national Community of Practice in community-based research, collaborating with community, Indigenous, peer, and academic researchers across Canada. She also co-founded Cross Community Connect in Tanzania, supporting community-led solutions, youth leadership, and local entrepreneurship.
In municipal planning and sustainability, Julia has contributed to nature-based planning, climate resilience, and systems-focused initiatives, supported by her Master’s in Environmental Studies (Planning) from the University of Waterloo. As a researcher with the Centre for Community-Based Research, she co-designed and implemented community-engaged research with people with lived experience, community members, staff, and other partners to inform organizational learning, alignment, and programming.
Julia also writes about complexity, governance, and systems change, exploring how organizations can work responsibly in interconnected systems.
Through Whole Story, she brings these threads together to support organizations in building shared understanding, developing thoughtful direction, and strengthening their capacity to learn and adapt as conditions change.