Zaid Khan

Responding to Complexity with Humility: A Systems-oriented Approach to Strategic Communication

Systemic design has emerged as both a theory and a practice that integrates design thinking and systems thinking to work with complex issues. It acts as a platform for design disciplines to develop and evolve according to the scope of complexity that needs to be addressed.This Major Research Project (MRP) looks at how systemic design influences an organization’s communication practice. It explores how the practice of strategic communication – the planned process of delivering a relevant message to a specific audience to achieve an objective – can be adapted to help organizations better reflect and respond to the real-world complexity of their issues (wicked problems) and stakeholders.Using a case study focused on the Canadian news media ecosystem, a strategic communication plan is developed to reflect and respond to the interconnected problems and stakeholders across business, technology, regulatory, and cultural contexts.The paper identifies the first set of learnings on how the principles of systemic design can inform the development of “systems communications” and how this practice is distinguished from strategic communication. It offers future research areas to explore systems communications further and discover the potential value for organizations.

“The complexity of our issues don't fit the media we use to make sense of them. Weird isn't it? So what if we rethink how we communicate about complex issues? What if we take a different orientation; one that humbly invites people to create a shared understanding? What if we acknowledge what we don't know? What if we recognize the limits of our cognitive ability? Doing so could completely reimagine how we communicate about complex issues; ones that have no solution, and require us to appreciate multiple, multiple, perspectives. In essence, we'd communicate with humility of that which we don't know.”