Seeing What Isn’t Seen: Strategy in Complexity Preparedness and strategy need to be fit for purpose. This article looks at a recent event in Finland that parallels COVID-19 and illustrates how we need to think of health systems strategy as a dynamic, complexity-ready process, not a static plan.

Strategy and preparedness in health systems can learn from other contexts like the recent incident in Finland where one of the most prepared countries in the world missed something that was right under their nose.

Researchers Asked LLMs for Strategic Advice. They Got “Trendslop” in Return. Leaders might assume that LLMs are able to offer a kind of unbiased, outside perspective. But new research found that leading LLMs have clear biases when it comes to strategy and consistently recommen...

So about that whole use AI to bypass the time and energy required to do real strategy making? Yeah, that's not going so well. Introducing "trendslop" hbr.org/2026/03/rese...

Post Image

The complexity of the present day has echoes of COVID-19 -- we can learn lessons from then to apply to today's complex world.

censemaking.com/2026/04/08/to-live-and-l...

Weakness of Strong Signals Massive signals everywhere that are noise on their own. AI and our new automated culture of writing and production is making it hard to know what is signal, what is noise.

Weakness of Strong Signals

Don't take my word for it. www.amazon.com/product-revi...

Post Image

When wisdom seems thin, and complexity seems high. What way do find through it all? My thoughts on what happens when we go past our ability to make sense of where we are and our place in…

censemaking.com/2026/01/29/when-complexi...

Designing Beyond Boundaries Finding and Setting System Parameters for Innovation

Want to learn how to practically apply systems thinking to health and social impact design? Try Boundary Critique. We introduce the questions to get you going in the latest Design Loft lesson #systemthinking #strategicdesign #healthdesign designloft.substack.com/p/designing-...

Post Image

Want to resist the algorithmic prison that our feeds have become? It might be time to check your email.

censemaking.com/2026/01/16/algorithmic-a...

Remembrance and Care University of Winnipeg Faculty Association It started out with a post of remembrance every year and, alas, I’ve let things slip in recent years. Yet, this is not out of lack of remembrance, but lack of sharing my thoughts on a day that has lived with me since it happened. Today, I’m picking up the tradition I’ve let falter and want to recognize the lives lost on December 6th, and remind us of what their deaths stand for. One Night in 1989 I was just completing high school and looking forward to university when I learned that women at L’Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal were singled out, separated from men in their Engineering class, and brutally killed in a place where they should have felt safe.

Remembrance and Care

Post Image

What does it mean to create or make strategy? If you're creating a healthier future, you'll want to read this and consider how to build your strategy, by design.

#strategicdesign #strategy…

censemaking.com/2025/11/09/the-practice-...

Future health sciences students, visit us at the Explore Health Sciences: Grad & Professional Programs Fair at U of T on Thurs., Nov. 13! Register here: https://ow.ly/lxGS50XizzB

We design strategy, impact assessment, and implementation plans into every strategic plan we create. You can do more than just fit your work into a logic model. We can help -- let's talk if you want our help bit.ly/talkcense #strategicdesign

Fall Into Strategy: The Practice of Making Strategy Real Strategy is the means of connecting our aspirations and resources to our actions and outcomes. Strategy is something we design with our organization's goals, values, assets, people, and customers/clients/patients/partners in mind. Strategic design is the means and positive impact is the end. Over the coming weeks, we'll be walking through the art and science of making strategy and putting it into practice. We are going to explore what the practice of strategy looks like -- from the perspective of leaders and stakeholders at all levels. This multi-layered, systemic and creative approach is what makes it strategic design and not strategic planning.

Fall Into Strategy: The Practice of Making Strategy Real

Strategy is the means of connecting our aspirations and resources to our actions and outcomes. Strategy is something we design with our organization's goals, values, assets, people, and customers/clients/patients/partners in mind. Strategic…

Agreed. Few people have shaped the way we view the science of animals living in their natural habitats and the role of conservation more than Dr. Goodall.

Discover the Power of #Journalism in #PublicHealth
Join us for the Dalla Lana Fellowship Online Open House in Oct 2025! Learn how journalism can be a catalyst for public health change. 👉 Reserve your spot now: www.eventbrite.ca/o/dalla-lana...

The difference between iteration and true innovation Let’s get one thing straight: not every shiny new product or feature is an innovation.

What does it mean to iterate, and what does it mean to innovate? @guykawasaki.bsky.social has a great primer for both: guykawasaki.substack.com/p/the-differ... #innovation #iteration #strategicdesign

The Nonprofit Sector Has an RCT Problem (SSIR) Randomized controlled trials are touted as the benchmark for evaluating social programs. The social sector should focus instead on an improvement orientation to evaluating performance. | Open...

You can read the full un-paywalled article here:

Promotional graphic that reads "The Nonprofit Sector Has an RCT Problem, a conversation with SSIR Authors" with headshot photos of the three presenters

Should RCTs be the gold standard of impact measurement?

SSIR’s Aaron Bady speaks w/ Nicole P. Marwell and Jennifer E. Mosley about their new article, “The Nonprofit Sector Has an RCT Problem.”

Join us tomorrow at 10 a.m. PT!

ssir.org/live-rct-conversation

What does complexity look like in our human systems? This article from @cdnorman.bsky.social explores how complexity manifests itself in our human service work #complexity #strategicdesign

Research design and evidence issues brought to the fore in the latest issues of @ssir.org

OCADU Graduate Programs: Evening session with #DanielHoyer + #NealHalverson on What Can System Thinkers Learn from Quantifying History, moderated by #ZaidKhan. Continues work of #PeterTurchin on cliodynamics, with #SoDy as historical policy lab. Mix of cyclical historical framing methods from MRP.

No Way Out Without a Fight (SSIR) The ground-up work to stop US oil and gas expansion and create new climate politics

"The scale and urgency of the current threat should settle a long-simmering debate about the strategic value of targeting oil and gas production directly."

@earthjustice.org president @abbiedillen.bsky.social writes in SSIR on the next chapter of the climate fight:

It's great to see 'design' discussed again. Design is the discipline of innovation, and that means doing something different to benefit people. Design poorly and we end up with many of the lousy programs and policies that we see in our communities. #strategicdesign

How is design enabling us to do policy differently at Nesta? Sharing our core principles on why good policymaking needs both disciplines working side-by-side

Good policy isn't just about good ideas - it's about designing and delivering solutions that truly work in practice.

At Nesta, we’re increasingly using design and policy skills in tandem to grow the impact of our work with key principles to guide our approach ⤵️

Integrating Strategy, Design, and Evaluation for Impact Discover how integrated strategic design in human services enhances efficiency and impact, moving beyond outdated project approaches.

Consultants can be great partners in creating positive change -- which isn't the case much of the time. Reductionist approaches to complex problems that separate strategy, learning, evaluation, and people are a big part of the reason why censemaking.com/2025/08/27/s... #strategicdesign

Post Image

Designing care into your organization is not about being nice, it's about setting yourself up to be high-performing, innovative, and complexity-ready.

#strategicdesign #care #design

https://censemaking.com/2025/08/07/caring-by-design/

Profiles in burnout In their new book, leading experts Christina Maslach and Michael Leiter bring academic rigor to organizational responses to employee overload.

Profiles in burnout isn't an overly optimistic focus of an article, but doing this draws attention to something that is a critical factor in designing human-responsive organizations.

#burnout

www.strategy-business.com/article/Prof...?

Post Image

In the last post of the summer series on strategic design and complexity we put it all together and set the table for what we hope will be a wonderful meal. Happy Summer! #strategicdesign #complexity #systemsthinking

censemaking.com/2025/08/01/setting-the-t...

Developmental Evaluation Preparedness Pilots have a pre-flight check before they fly a plane. A developmental evaluation journey requires the same kind of preparedness. Developmental Evaluation (DE) is an approach to strategic learning…

Developmental Evaluation is a way of approaching learning, innovation, and accountability that is suited to innovation, complexity, and uncertainty.

The best way to use it is to prepare yourself first, not just try it "out of the box" (it's never out of the box).
www.cense.ca/developmenta...

Post Image

Design-driven evaluation is a way to embed learning into your organization, prime yourself for innovation, and build in a compass for navigating complexity.

#strategicdesign #evaluation #innovation

censemaking.com/2025/07/24/design-driven...