Transform Staff Wellbeing with Systems Thinking

Do you feel like you keep going around in circles?

No matter how you train your leaders or support your team, the same frustrations keep happening again and again?

I've been thinking a lot lately about why well-meaning executives are struggling to see sustainable change, no matter how hard they work at improving things for their teams or organisations. And the short answer is simply that we continue to believe the narrative that leaders (or staff, for that matter) are the problem.

Everyone seems to think that the natural order of poor staff wellbeing is something along the lines of Leadership - Load - Culture - Resilience. Or some other colour-coded Canva model that looks good, sounds smart, and solves nothing.

But the truth sucks more. Because the truth is that it's way messier. Sadly, it's simply cognitively easier to have a simple answer that "fits" than do the awful mental (and real) work to find the real answers.

This scribble I just made is only a tiny inkling of it because if I tried to make it show the real story it would be too hard to read (plus, it was really just a procrasti-planning exercise anyway). But my points still stands, even without a slick palatable Canva visual to accompany.

The truth is uncomfortable because none of us want it to be that hard. We want silver bullets, and things that a workshop will fix, or another training day, or poster on the wall about behaviours. We want to feel like there's an end in sight, and that there IS a linear, clean way to improve what's not working in your organisation (or our industry).

But I'm afraid to say, it's just not. The reality is that SYSTEMS THINKING challenges power, sacred cows, internal contradictions, and comfort zones. Systems thinking refers to understanding that nothing is good or broken in isolation. Everything touches one another, and has flow on effects - intended or otherwise.

And it's why workshops on resilience for the team, putting more staff into an overloaded workplace, getting the manager more training, give you a week of feeling good about "fixing" the issue, only for it to show up again next month in some other way.

Because you fixed a cog in a wheel, and left the system to carry on grinding the gears.

• Leadership behaviour is downstream AND sideways of system design.

• Culture is downstream AND sideways of system leadership.

• Resilience is downstream AND sideways of load.

• I cannot even tell you how closely systems and load are intertwined

• And then it all goes back upwards and around again.

So in 2026, let's move on from thinking about culture, leadership, resilience, or individuals as things to be fixed, and start treating them as interdependent. Let's look at how the system works, and start building something that works in the real world rather than looks clean on paper...