Amid rising political instability and a volatile global landscape, businesses face unprecedented uncertainty. Shifting markets and rapid change make decision-making increasingly complex, threatening even the most resilient organisations.
We sat down with Thomas Lim, the Dean of the SIM Centre for Systems Leadership, to answer burning question raised at the recent SIM Learning & Leadership Festival 2025.
Q: From your perspective, what are blind spots of traditional leadership models that holistic or systems leadership seeks to address today?
Thomas: Traditional leadership models tend to see organisations as predictable machines, things that run smoothly when driven by authority, control, and straightforward cause-and-effect thinking. But that way of looking can blind leaders to how different parts of the organisation are actually interconnected, how feedback loops work, and how unintended consequences can pop up. These models often focus on optimising individual parts or departments, which can lead to a focus on short-term efficiency at the expense of long-term adaptability. They also tend to overlook the human, cultural, and systemic factors that really drive how organisations behave in the real world.
Holistic or systems leadership tries to fill those gaps. It shifts the perspective to see the organisation as a living, changing system built on relationships, learning, and ongoing adaptation. It encourages leaders to look beyond just immediate results and instead understand the underlying patterns, structures, and mental models that shape those results. This way, they can make more intentional decisions that support sustained growth and resilience over time.
Q: What does “wholeness” in leadership look like? How can leaders balance empathy and accountability whole navigating systemic pressures?
Thomas: Wholeness in leadership is about being able to live out the five roles of a systems leader, like a Theory Builder, Designer, Steward, Coach, and Teacher, all at the same time, as parts of a single, integrated practice. A whole leader knows that working with complex systems isn’t just about ideas; it’s also about connecting with people on a deeper level.
Striking a balance between empathy, listening with head, heart, and gut, and maintaining accountability means leading with both compassion and a strong understanding of the system’s structure. The Coach helps nurture people’s growth and encourages them to develop systemic thinking, while the Teacher helps uncover underlying assumptions and creates shared understanding. It’s about leading with both care and clarity, all at once.
Q: Why is it so difficult for humans and organisations to reflect on oneself and we are rather keep ourselves busy fixing things “out there”?
Thomas: One possible answer is that humans and organisations struggle with reflection because it demands slowing down; something counterintuitive in today’s systems that has been wired for productivity and control.
Reflection exposes uncertainty, emotion, and blind spots, which can feel inefficient or uncomfortable. Fixing external problems provides quick validation; introspection does not. Many leaders therefore stay busy doing, mistaking activity for progress, because reflection challenges identity and assumptions rather than processes. Systems leadership taps on systemic approaches that help to mitigate the ill-effects by building safe containers for generative conversations so that folks can look ‘in there’ without the apprehension of being judged.
Q: In a BANI world, how do we develop effective leaders?
Thomas: Developing effective leaders in a BANI world requires moving beyond traditional notions of competence and control. Leaders must instead cultivate adaptive capacity, the ability to stay grounded amid ambiguity, connect patterns across systems, and act with clarity even when certainty is impossible. This begins with inner development: building emotional regulation, reflective awareness, and systems literacy.
Practically, developing such leaders means reshaping both the learning architecture and the mental models around what leadership means. Programmes must emphasise experimentation with iteration arising from causal loop diagramming, generative conversations over instructions, and purpose over procedure.
Q: What are some challenges in applying the use of system thinking in an organisation?
Thomas: Applying systems thinking faces three main challenges. First, mental model inertia, where people default to linear, blame-based thinking instead of seeing feedback loops and interdependencies. Second, organisational silos: structures, KPIs, and reporting lines often reward local efficiency rather than systemic outcomes. Third, time horizon bias, whereby leaders seek quick wins without mitigating unintended consequences, while systems thinking emphasises long-term learning and delayed effects.
Overcoming these requires leadership commitment to reflective practice, cross-boundary collaboration, and patient experimentation. Building common systems vocabulary and capacity across the organisation can overcome some of the inherent challenges faced by companies today.
Q: Can you give an example of practical system thinking?
Thomas: One of SIM Centre for Systems Leadership’s clients, a regional tech company, faced challenges after a recent acquisition. They dealt with issues like different company cultures, duplicated processes, and conflicting goals. Instead of forcing a top-down structure, their leaders used the Nested Hierarchy of Choices to align strategic, tactical, and operational decisions around a shared purpose. This helped break down silos and created a more unified way of working, leading to better overall results.
They also used Systems Mapping to visualise how different parts of the company depended on each other. This revealed bottlenecks and feedback loops that kept divisions apart. By working together to build these maps, teams developed a shared understanding and redesigned workflows to focus on system value rather than just departmental success. The outcome was a shift from strict control to overall coherence, creating a more flexible and effective way of working.
Q: How do organisations balance systems thinking implementation vs time to market and efficiency in the decision-making process when time is money?
Thomas: Organisations can balance systems thinking with speed and efficiency by changing how they see agility. It’s not about slowing things down, it’s about preventing quick, reactive decisions that result in rework later on. The trick is to match the level of analysis to the situation: using quick, light tools like causal loops or decision trees when time is tight, and diving into deeper systemic analysis when the stakes are high.
Leaders can also weave systemic checks into their regular processes instead of adding new ones. This might mean quick reflection pauses during sprint reviews, sharing dashboards that visualise feedback loops, or using decision protocols that test how one action might impact other parts of the system. It’s important to understand the mental models that sustain existing systemic structures within the organisation. When done well, systemic agility becomes a real competitive advantage, something that sets organisations apart.
Q: How can leaders cultivate systems thinking connecting social, economic, and environmental wellbeing, without losing focus on day-to-day operations?
Thomas: One way leaders can cultivate systems thinking, especially when they’re balancing social, economic, and environmental wellbeing is to see these as interconnected parts of a bigger system, like a nested set of layers. It’s about recognising that every decision or action, even day-to-day ones, are part of a larger ecology. When leaders adopt this mindset, they can craft strategies where financial success, community impact, and sustainability support each other instead of conflicting.
Practically speaking, this means adding triple-bottom-line metrics into their existing KPIs, making reflection a regular part of team routines, and aligning purpose-driven goals with operational reviews. Leaders who actively ask questions like “How will this decision impact our system tomorrow?” help sustain both high performance and a sense of purpose. They stay focused on efficiency, but also act responsibly within the broader system they operate in, ultimately balancing results with long-term impact
Q: If holistic systems leadership thinking is important, how can we integrate it into the SME setting, considering that many SME leaders are unaware of these topics?
Thomas: For small and medium-sized enterprises, adopting systems leadership doesn’t have to start with big, abstract ideas. It can begin with small, practical steps, helping your leaders see the business as a connected ecosystem rather than just separate departments. Instead of diving into complicated models, focus on mapping out actual workflows, customer journeys, and supplier relationships. This helps reveal hidden connections and opportunities for improvement in a way that’s directly relevant and easy to understand.
Working with a training provider like SIM Academy through a hands-on, real-world approach, where you tackle actual organisational challenges, can be a great way to kick-start this journey and build that systemic thinking from within.
Q: Fractured time also applies to the Social Services sector. How can the board apply systems thinking to lead the senior management team? And within the board itself, how can directors apply systems thinking when making decisions?
Thomas: In the social services sector, fractured time: the pressure to meet urgent needs while shaping long-term impact makes systems thinking essential. Boards can approach this by seeing the organisation as part of a bigger social ecosystem and understanding its unique role in the broader national agenda. This helps focus efforts by balancing immediate service delivery with systemic change. For example, aligning strategy around a shared purpose, mapping out feedback loops between policy, funding, and frontline realities, and using data to spot where interventions can make a lasting difference.
On the board level, systems thinking encourages a shift from just transactional governance to a more active, collective way of making sense of complex issues. Practices like causal loop mapping, structured reflection using different perspectives, and running “what-if” scenario reviews can help foster coherence and reduce fragmented decision-making, ensuring the board’s actions are aligned and impactful.
Q: Solutions still needs to be simple. However the journey from complex thought to simple solutions is often quite challenging. Many leaders prefer simple solutions, much less complex thought. How to encourage support for simple solutions rooted in complex understanding?
Thomas: The key is to respect simplicity without ignoring the underlying complexity. Leaders can see that simple solutions, when rooted in deep systems thinking, tend to be more resilient than quick fixes. It all starts with visualising the complexity, using maps, feedback loops, or storytelling, to make the connections clear and visible. Once those patterns are understood, teams can distill them into guiding principles or leverage points that seem simple on the surface but are actually grounded in solid systemic insight.
To build support, it helps to reframe complexity as a process of sensemaking, rather than seeing it as something complicated or overwhelming. Encourage short, structured conversations that help surface shared understanding before jumping into action. This way, you’re fostering clarity and buy-in, all while respecting the full picture of the system.
Q: Whether it is BANI or VUCA, these are slogans to provide a view of “uncertainty” in uncertain times. Why talk about systems leadership now when we have already been living in a system with constant chaos? What is the purpose?
Thomas: The purpose of talking about systems leadership now is not to dismiss the chaos but to lead within it consciously. BANI and VUCA describe the turbulence; systems leadership equips people to navigate it. While we have always lived amid interconnected forces, today’s acceleration and interdependence make the traditional approaches such as those of command-and-control or prediction obsolete.
Systems leadership is about seeing the bigger picture, identifying patterns rather than just fragments, so leaders can act with coherence even when certainty is lacking. It shifts the focus from managing isolated parts to stewarding the whole organisation or system. It’s about connecting purpose, learning, and adaptation across boundaries, and cultivating the ability to think long-term while making sure short-term actions are aligned with our future goals.
Q: Everything is connected hence most changes tend only to be small changes. Is it really possible to solve polycrisis/ wicked challenges? If not, will the small tweaks we can muster ever amount to anything?
Thomas: Wicked challenges rarely yield to grand solutions, but that does not mean they are unsolvable. In complex systems, small, well-placed shifts ~ when aligned and reinforced over time can cascade into meaningful transformation. The key is not magnitude but leverage: identifying where and when that thoughtful intervention alters the feedback loops that have been sustaining the problem. Systems leadership focuses on these leverage points, amplifying their effects through alignment, learning, and persistence.
Progress in a polycrisis world looks less like solving and more like evolving. Each thoughtful adjustment builds adaptive capacity, shifts norms, and reshapes relationships.
Keep an eye out for part 2 of this series coming to you on 21 November 2025.
