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Article 6: Attending to Our Attention

Estimated reading: 4 minutes 137 views Contributors
This is the sixth article in my 8-week series exploring foundational systems thinking concepts, written for the 2025 RE-AMP Systems Thinking Academy. Whether you’re following along with the series or diving deep into systems practice, this article explores Adaptive Action — a simple but profound rhythm for engaging with complexity. Learn more about the Academy and register here.
Originally published in my blog

Attending to Our Attention: Adaptive Action

As social system mappers, we’re always immersed in complexity. Every map we co-create is embedded in living networks — patterns that evolve, surprise, and resist control.
If we cannot predict or control these systems directly, the question becomes: how do we participate meaningfully in them? How do we notice, interpret, and act in ways that support coherence without slipping back into habits of force or oversimplification?
One practice shows up again and again: Adaptive Action — a rhythm of inquiry, interpretation, and choice that helps us move wisely within the living systems we’re mapping and engaging.

The Essence of Adaptivity in Complex Systems

Because human systems are Complex Adaptive Systems, the way we work with them must also be adaptive. For mappers, that means treating maps as living feedback tools — not static pictures.
Adaptivity asks us to:
  • Stay contextually sensitive to shifting dynamics and signals in the network
  • Use continuous adjustment — mapping, testing, and refining in loops rather than fixed designs
  • Bring responsiveness and flexibility to surprises and instabilities
  • Center learning and evolution, treating every visual and every insight as a probe
  • Embrace uncertainty, letting go of the illusion of prediction and engaging maps as invitations into living questions

The What → So What → Now What Cycle

Adaptive Action offers a deceptively simple cycle that applies directly to system mapping practice:
What? → So what? → Now what?
  • What? — What are we noticing in the map, the relationships, or the network dynamics? How might we widen our lens beyond default filters?
  • So what? — What meaning or significance might these patterns hold? What tensions or dynamics might the map be surfacing?
  • Now what? — What small, safe-to-try shift could the network make? What next step might help us learn more or gently shift a pattern?
In mapping, this cycle keeps maps alive — not as static diagrams, but as evolving sensemaking tools.

Interrupting the Cascade

Maps often surface our assumptions — sometimes reinforcing them. Adaptive Action interrupts that cascade, slowing the automatic rush from “what we notice” to “how we act.”
For social system mappers, that means:
  • Pausing before locking in interpretation
  • Widening collective perception through map debriefs and multiple perspectives
  • Letting meaning evolve as the system reveals itself
  • Choosing next moves that are probes, not predictions
When applied with groups, this cycle helps networks shift from static conclusions to ongoing learning — turning a map into a living field of collective inquiry.

Why This Matters for Working with Networks

Adaptive Action offers system mappers more than a method. It’s a rhythm for using maps not just to represent complexity, but to engage it.
Practiced intentionally, it helps us:
  • Interrupt default interpretations and create space for new insight
  • Reclaim our collective attention, expanding what we notice in the map and in each other
  • Create shared space for learning, beyond assumptions of certainty
  • Act coherently, aligning network choices with emerging dynamics
  • Re-pattern systems through repeated practice, weaving insights into the relational field
Ultimately, Adaptive Action is how we bring living maps to life. It helps us embody systems thinking — not only in our heads or diagrams, but in how we notice, sense, and move together.

The framework of Adaptive Action and the inquiry cycle of What? So What? Now What? described above are drawn from: Adaptive Action: Leveraging Uncertainty in Your Organization by Glenda Eoyang and Royce Holladay (Stanford University Press, 2013).

Next week: Article 7 explores Pattern Spotting — a practice for noticing and sensing emerging patterns in Complex Adaptive Systems.
Article 6: Attending to Our Attention - PreviousArticle 5: Navigating Complexity — The HSD Theory of ChangeNext - Article 6: Attending to Our AttentionArticle 7: Pattern Spotting

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