Re-organisation: a complex systems view of innovation
Most approaches to innovation assume that value shifts through new ideas, force, persuasion or the right plan. But systems rarely change because someone wants them to. They change when the conditions that select and stabilise behaviour are reorganised.
This course reframes innovation as a relational and compositional practice; the strategic reconfiguration of constraints through which new possibilities emerge. You will learn practical patterns for disrupting familiar arrangements, reconfiguring conditions and designing new models of value across products, services, policies and organisations.
Meaningful change does not come from doing the same things better. It comes from reorganising the conditions of possibility.
Strategies for reconfiguration
Participants will learn thinking and intervention patterns, such as:
Recomposition: Breaking systems apart and recombining elements, including atypical or unrelated ones, to construct a new underlying logic.
Emphasis Shifting: Changing what carries weight or importance so different features, values, or forces drive meaning and action.
Reordering and Reversal: Re-sequencing, ranking, or inverting roles, flows, assumptions, or goals to fundamentally alter outcomes.
Subtraction and Addition: Removing elements or norms to simplify or destabilise existing patterns, and adding new material or constraints to extend what the system can express.
Provocative Distortion: Deliberately deforming reality through abstraction, translation, provocation, or random entry to disrupt habitual logic and surface new possibilities.
We will learn how to change the rules of the game, rather than just playing harder.
Change-in-Degree (Not this course)
Efficiency & Optimisation
Doing the same things better
Incremental gains
Change-in-Kind (This course)
Reorganisation & Composition
Doing entirely different things
Systemic transformation
Students will have a structured approach to:
Read system logic: Identify the constraints and forces shaping action
Creatively rework conditions: Target novel problems, not just symptoms
Surface the unquestioned: Expose assumptions and points of leverage
Disrupt norms: Unsettle habits and governing relations to enable change
Experiment laterally: Run safe-to-fail probes through unusual connections
Unlock the adjacent possible: Design within context so change can take root
Connect isolated domains: Link people, knowledge and resources across silos
Design across levels: Align strategy, operating models and lived practice
Amplify small moves: Trigger disproportionate impact over time
A four week course
Each week blends theory, real examples and practical exercises, treating innovation as a process of reconfiguration.
Week 1: Introduction to configurational innovation
We begin by challenging familiar ideas about creativity and innovation. Rather than treating innovation as invention or inspiration, this week reframes it as an emergent, distributed and evolutionary process shaped by context. Drawing on complexity science, process philosophy and creative practice, we explore how systems enable and limit what can emerge.
The inherited view of creativity as individual genius, ideas and brainstorms
Innovation as configuration: relations, assemblages and systemic agency
4EA cognition and thinking as embodied, situated and enacted
Evolutionary emergence and change in kind
Futures thinking and speculative prototyping as ways of working with uncertainty
What you gain:
Practical shift in how you understand creativity and innovation. You learn to see novelty as shaped by context, constraints and relationships, and to recognise when reframing the system matters more than generating better ideas.
Week 2: Evolutionary innovation strategies
This week explores innovation through an evolutionary lens. We focus on how learning, variation and recombination drive adaptive change, and why novelty often emerges through unexpected connections rather than planned solutions.
Evolutionary change, including punctuated equilibrium and drift
Coupling, niche construction and fitness landscapes
The role of redundancy and diversity in resilient systems
Co-evolutionary problem framing
Exaptation, recombination and the adjacent possible
What you gain:
A set of evolutionary principles you can use to shape strategy and experimentation, helping you work with adaptation, uncertainty and emergence rather than trying to control outcomes.
Week 3: Working with Constraints
This week reframes constraints as the sources of coherence in complex systems. We’ll explore how shifting constraint regimes reshapes the space of possibilities through which change can emerge.
How constraints shape action, coordination and meaning in complex systems
Causation as constraint, not force
Stability and transformation through shifts in constraint regimes
Scaffolds, frameworks, and affordances
Mapping constraints
What you gain:
Learn to see and influence the constraints shaping outcomes, recognise when systems stabilise or shift, and understand why some interventions transform while others only optimise. You gain the ability to create change in kind by reconfiguring conditions rather than forcing results.
Week 4: Recomposition strategies
The final week brings everything together through practical strategies for reconfiguration. We focus on deliberate moves that disrupt familiar arrangements and open space for new possibilities to emerge.
Destabilisation as a condition for change
Recomposition moves such as blocking, reversal and deletion
Abductive reasoning and futures thinking under uncertainty
Oblique and indirect strategies for shifting systems
Integrating insights into a personal practice for ongoing work
What you gain:
A practical set of recomposition strategies you can apply to strategy, design and collaboration, enabling you to intervene in complex systems with greater sensitivity, creativity and effect.
Who it is for
This course is for people who need to create new strategies, propositions and models of value, you might be:
Working in innovation, strategy or transformation
Senior leader developing ground-breaking propositions
A designer wanting to strengthen your strategic judgement
A conceptual creative wanting to learn more design-friendly, hands on ways of working
A manager who wants teams to think and work differently
No prior expertise is required.
Details
When: Tuesdays, 6:00 to 8:00pm AEDT - 11 August to 1 September 2026
Time commitment: 4 sessions, 8 hours total
Where: Online via Zoom, with recordings
Cost: $749 AUD
Materials and reading
Course handouts and readings are distributed electronically.
There are no prescribed texts for this course. Some referenced works include:
Context Changes Everything: How Constraints Create Coherence By Alicia Juarrero
Assemblage Theory by Manuel DeLanda
Assemblage Theory and Method by Ian Buchanan
The Act of Creation by Arthur Koestler
Frame Innovation by Kees Dorst
Niche Construction: How Life Contributes to Its Own Evolution By John Odling-Smee
The Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition Edited by Albert Newen, Leon De Bruin, and Shaun Gallagher
Ways of Worldmaking by Nelson Goodman
Lateral Thinking by Edward De Bono
Facilitator:
Steven Sullivan
Co-founder at House of Complexity
A strategic designer, educator and complexity practitioner helping organisations navigate change through transdisciplinary inquiry. Drawing from design, philosophy and science, his research and consulting approach translates complexity theory into practices that help organisations sense, adapt and evolve within dynamic systems.
Steven is also a Casual Academic at the University of Technology Sydney, where he teaches Futures Thinking in the Transdisciplinary School, supporting learners to engage creatively with uncertainty and long-term transformation.
Before founding House of Complexity, he led strategy and innovation projects, accelerators and labs for clients at Google, Optus, ING, KFC, DNSW, Uniting, ReachOut, BaptistCare and the Australian Medical Association. His work invites organisations to think, act and design with the relational intelligence that complex worlds demand.
