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.
Attending to Our Attention: Adaptive Action
Working within Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) means working inside living fields of entanglement — systems that evolve, surprise, and resist control. As facilitators, network weavers, and participants in systems change, this is the environment we inhabit.
But if we cannot predict or control these systems directly, how then do we participate meaningfully? How do we learn to influence patterns without falling back into the habits of force, certainty, or oversimplification?
One key practice rises again and again: Adaptive Action — a living rhythm of inquiry, interpretation, and choice.
In this article, we’ll explore how conscious engagement with the Adaptive Action Cycle gives us a way to move with complexity — cultivating not control, but coherence. Through small, intentional moves, we become more skillful participants in the emergence of change — even at the deep level of paradigms themselves.
Adaptive Action is not a tool for managing systems from the outside. It is a way of listening, learning, and living from within them.
The Essence of Adaptivity in Complex Systems
Because human systems are Complex Adaptive Systems, our approaches to influencing them must also be adaptive. In this context, adaptation means that experience guides change in the system’s structure, enabling it to make better use of its environment over time.
This reminds us: influence in living systems comes not through force, but through feedback. To work with such systems, we must move from control toward coherence — and from certainty toward curiosity.
Adaptivity, then, is not just a strategy. It’s a posture. A way of orienting. It calls for:
- Contextual sensitivity — noticing shifts and signals in our environment, and being willing to respond in kind
- Continuous adjustment — acting, sensing, and adjusting in iterative loops, rather than following a fixed plan
- Responsiveness and flexibility — adapting with agility, especially in moments of surprise or instability
- Learning and evolution — treating every action as a probe, every result as feedback, every cycle as a chance to learn
- Embracing uncertainty — releasing the myth of prediction, and instead engaging systems as living questions
Adaptive Action brings these qualities into practice. It helps us engage complexity without collapsing into confusion — or grasping for control.
The What → So What → Now What Cycle
At the heart of Adaptive Action is a simple rhythm of inquiry: What? → So what? → Now what?
This rhythm mirrors the familiar mental movement we explored in the Cascade of Inference — from perception to meaning to action. But where the cascade rushes forward unconsciously, shaped by habit, Adaptive Action offers a pause. It slows the current, invites us to sense more deeply, and creates space for intentional choice.
- What? — Begin with presence. What is happening right now? What are you noticing — in yourself, in the system, in the relationships around you? This isn’t just about collecting facts. It’s about widening your attention beyond habit or assumption to gather new signals from the field.
- So what? — Sense into meaning. What might this pattern be revealing? What dynamics or tensions are surfacing? What assumptions are at play — and are they still useful? This is a place for reframing and connecting.
- Now what? — Choose an intentional next step. What small, safe-to-try action could you take to learn more, shift a pattern, or support coherence? Here, action isn’t about control — it’s about probing the system gently and seeing what emerges in response.
Then the cycle repeats: back to What? again. In complexity, learning is iterative. Wisdom accrues through cycles.
Interrupting the Cascade: How Adaptive Action Differs
As humans, we naturally move from perception to meaning to action. But without awareness, that movement becomes automatic. The Cascade of Inference, as we explored earlier, is the mental rush from “what I noticed” to “what I believe” to “how I act” — shaped by filters we rarely question.
Adaptive Action interrupts that rush. It doesn’t stop the cycle, but slows it down — making it conscious.
Where the Cascade of Inference carries us swiftly through pre-existing grooves, Adaptive Action invites us to pause at each stage: to widen perception, deepen reflection, and make more intentional choices. In doing so, it becomes not just a method, but a practice of re-patterning.
Especially at the “What?” stage, we reclaim agency over our attention. We open our lens. This expanded noticing shapes the “So what?”, allowing interpretations to evolve. From there, “Now what?” becomes not reaction, but response — grounded in relationship and readiness, not certainty or control.
When we do this together, the potential expands. Adaptive Action practiced in community turns individual awareness into collective insight, and personal shifts ripple outward into system-wide change.
Why This Matters for Working with Networks
The Adaptive Action Cycle offers more than a method. It offers a rhythm — a way of being with complexity that is conscious, relational, and alive. When we engage this rhythm with intention, we:
- Interrupt the default, creating space for insight to arise
- Reclaim our attention, widening what we notice beyond habitual focus
- Create space for learning, opening to what the system is revealing
- Act with coherence, aligning our choices with what is emerging
- Shift systems through practice, especially when engaging the cycle together
Ultimately, Adaptive Action is how we bring systems thinking to life. It helps us live the shift — not just understand it.
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 seeing and sensing emerging patterns in Complex Adaptive Systems.
- Invitation to the 2025 RE-AMP Systems Thinking Academy
- Article 1. Systems Thinking Starts in our Minds (Yes, Really!)
- Article 2: Systems Thinking and Paradigms: From Personal Shifts to Unleashing Systemic Shifts
- Article 3: Complex Adaptive Systems: Patterns & Paradigms Naturally Shifting
- Article 4: The Stacey Matrix — Understanding Contexts for Creating Generative Conditions
- Article 5: Navigating Complexity
- Article 6: Attending to Our Attention
- Article 7: Pattern Spotting