K Shel Blogs

Systems thinking, resistance, and the ethics of pushing change

In 2014, I wrote a short blog post inspired by the film Apollo 13. You’ll probably know the scene – the ground crew, faced with a deadly carbon dioxide crisis in the spacecraft, are given the ultimate improvisation challenge. One technician tips a box of seemingly unrelated components onto a table and says:

“We gotta find a way to make this… fit into the hole for this… using nothing but that.”

It’s a great cinematic moment. But it’s also a mindset – and one that stuck with me. I titled the post:

“I don’t care about what anything was designed to do; I care what it can do.”

It was aimed at entrepreneurs and small business owners who often have to act fast, with limited resources. The post told the story of a tactical fix I co-developed with a client who was about to hit a critical cashflow wall. We didn’t have the luxury of strategy decks or systemic root cause analysis. We had an urgent problem, and a tight window to solve it. And we did. Using nothing but what was to hand.

That idea – of working with what’s available – still holds a certain appeal. But now, ten years on, and deep into my own learning about systems thinking and practice, I see it differently. Not as wrong, but as incomplete.

Because urgency doesn’t negate ethics. Improvisation doesn’t mean detachment. And action, even under pressure, is always relational.

First: keep the system alive

Looking back, the fix I helped that business owner create wasn’t a workaround instead of systems thinking. It was a way of preserving the conditions for systemic change. If we hadn’t bought time, there wouldn’t have been a business left to develop.

This was a form of temporal systems thinking – recognising that short-term viability sometimes has to precede long-term transformation. In the language of Soft Systems Methodology or developmental evaluation, it was an enabling move – something that made further learning possible.

I didn’t see it that way at the time. I just wanted to help. But now I understand that helping in a system doesn’t just mean solving a problem. It means holding the system open long enough for change to take root.

The mirror stares back

That old post came rushing back to me recently during a moment of tension in a current change initiative I’m leading – one designed to rebuild trust, devolve agency, and support new ways of working after a long period of inertia and control.

In one meeting, I found myself pressing a long-serving colleague to adapt a reporting system to include new kinds of information – signals that support more distributed working. His response:

“It wasn’t designed to do that.”

And out of my mouth, almost involuntarily, came the old refrain:

“I don’t care what it was designed to do. I care what it can do.”

There it was – Apollo 13 again, but this time in a different kind of crisis. Not life-threatening, but equally systemic. A moment of resistance. A clash of narratives. A test of whether we can move forward, or whether old constraints will win out.

And here’s the part that’s been nagging at me since:

Was I being resourceful? Or was I just using my authority to override dissent?

Was I honouring the system’s potential?

Or pushing a change that only I believed in?

Between advocacy and emergence

In systems thinking – especially second-order practice – we talk about power, perspective, and participation. About the role of the practitioner not just as an agent of change, but as part of the system. Our actions are interventions, even when we don’t mean them to be.

This moment with my colleague revealed that complexity in full.

Yes, I believed (and still believe) the change I proposed was necessary. Not just technically, but ethically – to support a culture of distributed leadership, visibility, and shared ownership.

But systems practice isn’t just about having the right vision. It’s about how you bring others with you. It’s about pace. Process. Who gets to shape the future, and who feels heard along the way.

The tension I’m sitting with now is this:

How do we hold space for emergence, while still steering the ship?

And at what point does leadership stop being facilitative, and become coercive?

That’s not a rhetorical question. It’s the central dilemma of a lot of the work I’m trying to do.

Learning to look again

The more I study systems thinking, the more I realise it’s less about mastering a set of tools, and more about becoming reflexive – able to notice not just what’s happening around me, but how I am participating in it.

So when I said “I don’t care what it was designed to do,” what I meant was:

We are not beholden to the past. Design isn’t destiny. Let’s improvise with what we’ve got.

But what my colleague might have heard was:

Your reasons don’t matter. Your history doesn’t count. My view overrides yours.

That’s the danger. And also the learning.

A different kind of resourcefulness

In Apollo 13, the quote is famous because of what follows:

A group of engineers, faced with an impossible constraint, work together with urgency, clarity, and creativity to save lives. The fix works – but not because someone barked the loudest. It works because the team collaborated under pressure, trusted one another, and refused to be boxed in by what the components were originally “meant” for.

That’s the bit I missed in the original post.

It’s not just about what things can do.

It’s about what people can do, together.

And that requires trust, respect, and a bit of patience. Even when time is tight.

So what do I believe now?

I still believe in that quote.

But I also believe in how we say it.

And when.

I believe systems are more flexible than they appear.

But I also believe people need time and space to make meaning.

I believe we should improvise.

But not by trampling over the past, or the people who still find comfort in it.

And I believe leadership means sometimes nudging the system into a new pattern – not out of ego, but to keep the whole thing from stalling.

Even if it means pushing, just a little.

If I could rewrite that old post now, I’d still keep the story. But I’d also include this:

Sometimes, the most valuable resource we have isn’t the duct tape or the email list.

It’s the willingness to listen, to reflect, and to ask:

What’s really needed here?

And how am I part of the system that needs it?

That’s not just good crisis management.

That’s systems practice.