In an earlier post, we looked at what classroom complexity might look like if we peeked in to a typical school. I introduced some of the many scenarios that play out in schools and how some might be connected through the myriad intersections that comprise the current classroom context.
In this post, I’m providing a way through it. I’m not providing specific answers (I don’t have them, nor do I know of any that are worth pursuing as a matter of policy). Instead, I’m drawing on what we know about strategic design and how it can address issues of complexity. This brings together the features of strategic design like systems (complexity) and design thinking, behavioural science, and evaluation.
Identifying and recognizing complexity is the first step toward understanding the problem. In doing so, we can begin to imagine what alternatives might look like, and how we might design for something better. Now let’s take a look at how we might do that.
Understanding the Complexity Landscape
I want to first look at the classroom through the lens of the Cynefin Framework to help place what’s going on in context.
The Cynefin Framework is a sensemaking framework that enables us to understand the nature of a situation; it’s not about what is known about the situation. By addressing the nature of the problem, we can avoid the pitfalls of designing solutions that are ill-fit and focus on what’s possible, not just what we want to be true.
If we take the classroom situation, we begin to see signs of complexity that include:
- Overlapping interests that are often misaligned or prioritized. Schools are now being “hired” for more reasons than just education. Student needs go beyond education. Teacher’s capacities and their needs for support go beyond teaching. Many parents and caregivers look to schools for much more than a place to educate and prepare the children in their care.
- Diverse inputs that yield outputs and outcomes that are highly dependent upon other conditions that are often unstable. Students come from highly diverse families, home life conditions, and personal situations. Teachers are working with their own technology (educational assists), and that of what students bring (phones), and the myriad social and cultural influences that interject into the classroom in real time.
- Dynamic relationships between the inputs, outputs, and outcomes that are highly sensitive to conditions and inconsistent in their manifestation (i.e., the same thing produces different results depending on very slight variations). One example is how technology can distract, enable learning for some, disrupt a classroom, and serve as a lifeline for some remote schools. It can do it all, together, in the same place and time.
- Highly emergent outcomes that will vary based on conditions and situational variables. See the previous example.
- Timescales that will influence the emergence of new patterns in unpredictable ways. We saw the COVID-19 pandemic upend school life, which has carried over into students’ entire journey through grade school, post-secondary education, and post-graduate life.
The initial purpose of the school (historically) was to educate, train, and prepare students for the world through instruction in a classroom, principally through the lessons of a teacher, based on some agreed-upon, set curriculum for each specific subject. This has evolved significantly since the modern school was developed in the 1800’s. Schools were designed with this in mind, but that’s not how they exist today. The current design is mismatched with the nature of the problem for which schools and modern education exist.
That problem, stated in the language of complexity, is this: The classroom context is a complex adaptive system in attractor crisis — where the agents have diversified beyond the system’s designed range of tolerance, feedback loops are amplifying rather than dampening dysfunction, and the governing model lacks the requisite variety to respond.
In more simple, plain language terms, we can describe the problem this way:
This model once served the purpose (although there’s debate about this), when the nature of the problem was more constrained by social norms, institutions, and demographic and economic conditions.
Designing With Complexity In Mind
Returning to the Cynefin Framework, we can look at this situation and clearly see patterns that reflect both an ontological and epistemological situation that reflects complexity. So what do we do? How do we design for these conditions.
The answer is: experimentation, attention, learning, and iteration. In complexity terms, we often refer to this as ‘probe-sense-respond’ cycle of activity.
This approach is highly consistent with the way we approach design and innovation more broadly.
Experimentation
Complexity requires we assess patterns in a dynamic context, which necessitates small-scale, focused, rapid experimentation based on action. That means probe-sense-respond. We probe — take some action — pay attention to how that action works with, disrupts, or is rejected by the existing patterns of activity.
This also means having a baseline.
Baselines are critical — they are your starting point. You can influence something if you don’t know what it is that you’re getting into. This is what allows you to understand what effects you might be having through your actions.
Anne-Laure Le Cunff has written extensively about what she calls “Tiny Experiments” which speak to the way to create focused attention and the conditions to learn from small actions. The smallest viable (and sometimes visible) change you can make that has value is what we should aim for. This is a long-established feature of design and innovation, and it’s why a strategic design approach to the problem of classroom complexity has promise.
The tiny part of the experiment is doing something that can create a disruption to the patterns that are manifest in the problem space, or at least influence it, in a manner that we can detect and meaningfully glean something of value from it. For example, adjusting a classroom routine in the morning from one focused on agenda setting in the first ten minutes of class to level setting, where we aim to get students grounded, calmed, and reflecting on where they are at the moment, might be one such experiment.
I’ve tried this very experiment and found that students responded very well to it. The context were two courses that I taught at OCAD University to students in two online-delivered graduate courses: one on Innovation Research Methods and one on Understanding Systems. I’d noticed a considerable ‘weight’ on students this past term, exacerbated by school work, the seasonal darkness of winter, the isolation created by the online course (versus the usual in-person model that one group had been accustomed to), combined by other factors going on in the geopolitical landscape in the first quarter of 2026.
I used a set of groundedness exercises that allowed students to pause, reflect, and focus prior to the start of the formal learning activities.
By giving them a moment to wind down, ground, and focus rather than throw them into a busy learning agenda at the start of class, my students were more attentive, communicative, they contributed to discussion more, and were appreciative of what they were learning.
Whatever the experimental change is, you need to make it small enough that you can deliver it and risk it not producing positive results. In the above case, I paid attention to what was happening during the grounding exercises when I did them and what happened during weeks I didn’t begin with a grounding exercise at the start of class. It was small enough that adding it or subtracting it wasn’t going to upend the entire course.
Attention & Learning
Simple, not easy. In the midst of action — or at the heart of the experiment — we need to pay attention to what’s happening. This means that our efforts to shift things within a classroom requires some form of evaluation and evaluative thinking within the design and experimentation. We need to attend to what’s happening.
To use the previous example, I paid attention to what was going on while I did the grounding exercises with students, the feedback I received (and solicited from them), and what the experience was like on weeks when I didn’t employ some form of grounding exercise to start the class. I undertake a reflective practice where I write notes about each class session — simple, quick reflections and comments — and then review them periodically. This was my data for my experiment and could only come from paying attention.
Learning came from the act of noticing, recording, and reflecting, as well as recall. It’s critical to ensure that you revisit the lessons afterward in a timely manner, otherwise you will have lessons taught, not learned.
Iteration, Integration & Implementation
This is where our data translate into design choices which become codified into change. This is where knowledge becomes action. It’s also where change fails. Iteration comes from taking the knowledge and putting it back on the workbench to make any necessary changes. This means the design is not done until it’s put into regular practice.
And even then, it requires continued attention and evaluation as it gets put into use.
For the example above, I’m going to be using the grounding exercise more often. What I learned through iteration and implementation was that the exercises needed to vary and that it was ok — and advantageous — to skip a week here and there. Grounding was welcomed, but it also was easy to habituate into something that could be done without the attention that was required that made it work well.
This resulted in some changes to include adding groundedness exercises mid-class and sometimes skipping them altogether in favour of other activities to connect students to their craft.
Change Failure: Part 1
Designs fail when nothing changes. There is no value created, no shift in behaviour, and no learning that’s acted upon.
This is the lie to the arrogance of knowledge for its own sake. I’ve spent a career working with people to understand and facilitate change and the most significant barrier has always been implementation. It’s not that the implementation was wrong or poorly executed, it’s that it didn’t happen.
This is what happens when we don’t design in design. Leaders create the conditions, but don’t follow through. The strategy is set, not employed. The evaluation is done, the lessons not integrated into programming or practice. The policy is designed, the enactment is done without resources to enable people to follow it.
If we wish to address classroom complexity, it means that teachers, students, administrators, and political leaders need to learn, iterate, and integrate the findings into the classroom. This requires willingness to continue changing. It requires sustained effort to the commitment to learn, improve, adapt, and grow.
This will require time. It means for politicians and administrators: don’t promise immediate mass transformation. For teachers, it means knowing that your curriculum and classroom management will evolve and change over the school year and that you will need the time, space, and attention to do that. For all, it means ensuring that these experiments can take place.
For students, it means being willing to adapt, learn, and provide constructive feedback when asked.
Ideally, this is something that’s done in a co-creative manner with students, teachers, administrators and other members of the school community working together.
Change Failure: Part 2
What is unlikely to work, is a prescribed set of actions that are done without this reflective, iterative, and inquiry-based model built in. Complexity doesn’t respond to this prescriptive approach well. Expertise is often helpful and advantageous in complicated systems, but falters when trying to establish firm, solid boundaries based on past practice, when it’s the current and near-future practice where complexity in the classroom lives. Complexity involves dealing with emergent practice, not best practice (for best assumes we can know what is best and what can be ruled out).
Designing even the most sophisticated strategy based on yesterday’s classroom model will not produce outcomes that address complexity. Nor, will those that are anchored to a specific version of “success”. In situations with complexity, we might have desirable or perceived beneficial outcomes in mind, but we always have to be willing to be wrong or to risk that something might not work as expected.
If we are promising our constituents, families, teachers, or students an outcome on a timeline, we’ll be disappointed. Or, we will engage in the kind of outcome gerrymandering that is both false and ineffective. We’ll also set ourselves up for the kind of conditions for where we design for the metrics, not the outcomes (See both Goodhart’s and Campbell’s Laws). Neither works in creating something substantive and better for creating a healthy learning environment.
Classroom Complexity and The Design Imperative
Classroom complexity will not be addressed by action alone.
It requires new thinking to design in actions and structures that will meet the current context, and be adaptive and amenable to change within the future context. Going back to a model of education delivery and support that is no longer reflective of reality, perhaps more complicated times rather than complex ones, isn’t going to work. This praxis — action and thinking together — is what shapes complex systems wisely.
Sticking more people in the classroom might work, but not if they are simply doing more of what’s already in place. Changing the structure of the class will help, but not if we continue to act as if the problem is one we can solve with more of what once was in place. Education requires re-designing. Strategic design perspectives bring you to appreciate systems, complexity, involvement, engagement, and the value of experimentation and evaluation to support hearling through the act of creating the solutions you seek.
In doing this, we might find a way to leverage our classroom’s complexity from a weakness to a strength.
If that happens, we’ll all learn and become more for it.
Image credits: Author and Declan Sun on Unsplash and Lucas George Wendt on Unsplash