Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey has gods, monsters, storms, battles and one man spending a very long time trying to get home.
Perhaps not the obvious place to look for lessons in systems thinking, but exactly the kind of story we look for at Miova.
Beneath the spectacle is a story about trying to act purposefully in a world that refuses to behave predictably. Odysseus knows, broadly, what he wants. He wants to return to Ithaca. What he does not have is a reliable route. Other people have intentions of their own, powerful forces sit beyond his control, and the choices he makes alter the conditions he subsequently has to navigate. Things that appear successful in the moment create consequences much later.
By the time he eventually reaches Ithaca, neither Odysseus nor the place he left behind is the same.
Looked at this way, The Odyssey begins to feel remarkably familiar to anyone who has tried to create change in a complex human system.
There is also an important warning in using a story like this to think about complexity. The Odyssey has something our real systems do not: an author. Homer knows which events matter, he knows where the story is going, and looking backwards we can see the connections and understand why one event led to another.
Odysseus cannot. And neither can we.
That distinction turns out to be one of the most important systems lessons in the whole story.
1. Have a direction, not a fixed route
Odysseus has remarkable clarity about his intention: he wants to get home to Ithaca.
What he does not have is a plan capable of surviving contact with the world.
Winds change. Ships are blown off course. New threats appear. Potential allies have motivations of their own. Decisions made by his crew alter what becomes possible. Every new situation requires Odysseus to interpret what is happening and decide what to do next.
If his journey had been governed by a conventional project plan, somebody would probably have marked it red within the first week.
But perhaps the problem would not have been the delivery. It would have been our assumption that this kind of journey could be planned in that way in the first place.
This highlights at an important distinction between complicated and complex problems and situations.
A complicated problem can be extraordinarily difficult, but the relationship between cause and effect is stable enough that expertise, analysis and planning can take us a long way. Building a bridge is complicated, but we can calculate loads, specify materials and sequence the work.
Complex situations behave differently because the elements interact and adapt. People notice what other people are doing. They learn, resist, imitate, reinterpret, form new relationships and change their behaviour. Yesterday’s intervention becomes part of today’s environment.
In these conditions, the future is not difficult to predict because we lack enough data. The future is being created as people interact. That changes what strategy means and can look like. A common systems response is to say: be clear about the destination but flexible about the route.
That is useful, but complexity theory pushes us a little further. Sometimes the destination itself should be open to revision.
Dave Snowden’s work on complexity emphasises the importance of directionality rather than assuming that we can define an ideal future state and work backwards towards it. We may know that one direction is preferable to another without pretending that we can specify in advance exactly where we should end up.
This matters in public services.
“Create a more active population” sounds like a clear destination until we ask what that means for different people, places and communities. Increased participation in organised sport may matter in one context. Safer streets, social connection, accessible transport or confidence to leave the house may matter more in another. The deeper we engage with a place, the more our understanding of the destination itself may change.
So perhaps the lesson is not simply to hold tight to purpose and loosely to the plan. It is to maintain enough direction to act, while remaining open to discovering that our original conception of the destination was incomplete.
Odysseus wants to return to Ithaca.
But the Ithaca he eventually finds cannot be the Ithaca he imagined when he left Troy, and he cannot control what version of Ithaca he will find when he gets there
2. Adaptability is more than having lots of tools
Odysseus survives partly because he is extraordinarily adaptable. He observes, negotiates, disguises himself, fights, waits, retreats, deceives, builds alliances and changes his approach as circumstances change.
There is a useful connection here with Ross Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety, one of the foundations of cybernetics.
Put very simply, only variety can absorb variety. If the environment can produce a wide range of disturbances, a regulator needs sufficient variety in its responses to cope with them.
At first glance, Odysseus appears to embody this perfectly. He survives because he has more than one response available. But Ashby’s idea is subtler than simply saying that adaptable people need lots of tools.
An effective system also finds ways to reduce the amount of variety it has to deal with.
Odysseus does this repeatedly. He conceals information so opponents have fewer options. He changes his identity. He uses alliances rather than confronting every threat alone. Sometimes he avoids confrontation altogether.
In other words, he does not simply become infinitely adaptable in response to an infinitely complicated world. He also alters the conditions around him so that fewer possible situations have to be managed.
When complexity increases, our instinct can be to build more processes, create more meetings, gather more information and ask people to become ever more responsive. Sometimes that is necessary. But sometimes a better question is whether the conditions themselves could be changed so that less complexity has to be absorbed in the first place.
That might mean giving frontline staff greater autonomy, improving information flows, reducing unnecessary handovers or connecting people who currently have to coordinate through layers of bureaucracy.
Requisite variety is not just about becoming better at responding.
It is also about creating conditions in which sensible responses become easier.
3. Today’s solution changes tomorrow’s context
The encounter with the Cyclops, Polyphemus, gives us a wonderful example of feedback.
Odysseus faces an immediate problem: he and his crew are trapped with a giant who intends to eat them.
His solution is ingenious. He gets Polyphemus drunk, tells him his name is “Nobody”, blinds him and escapes by hiding beneath the Cyclops’ sheep.
Viewed at that point in the story, the intervention is spectacularly successful. The immediate problem has been solved.
But then pride gets the better of Odysseus. Sailing away, he reveals his real identity. Polyphemus now knows who has humiliated him and calls upon his father Poseidon to take revenge.
The solution has changed the wider conditions of the journey.
This is one reason systems thinking pays so much attention to feedback. When we intervene in a complex system, the system does not passively receive our intervention and carry on unchanged. People respond, resources move, relationships alter and expectations change.
A new service can create new demand. A performance target can alter behaviour around the target. Investment in one part of a pathway may create pressure somewhere else. A successful pilot can shift relationships between organisations before anyone has decided whether to scale it.
The intervention itself becomes part of the context.
So rather than simply asking whether something worked, systems thinking encourages us to look more widely and over a longer period. What happened next? What did the intervention make more likely, or less likely? What changed elsewhere as a result?
Even that, though, needs some caution.
The Cyclops story gives us something that real complexity rarely provides: a clean causal narrative. We know Odysseus revealed his name, we know Polyphemus appealed to Poseidon, and we know Poseidon’s anger shaped what followed.
Real systems are rarely so obliging.
If physical activity rises six months after a new programme begins, the programme may have mattered. But so might the weather, transport changes, school policies, employment patterns, social relationships, another local initiative, or something that had been developing quietly for years.
Complex causality is often entangled.
This creates one of the great traps in understanding complex systems: retrospective coherence. Once we know what happened, we become very good at constructing a story explaining why it happened.
The danger is assuming that because the path makes sense looking backwards, we could have predicted it looking forwards.
Usually, we could not.
Hindsight can make complexity look much more orderly than it actually was.
That has practical consequences. Rather than placing all our confidence in one large intervention based on a supposedly correct theory of change, complexity approaches often favour multiple small, coherent experiments. We try different things, watch carefully for emerging patterns, amplify what appears promising and reduce or stop what produces undesirable consequences.
The important point is not simply to “learn and adapt”. It is to avoid pretending that yesterday’s explanation has become tomorrow’s formula.
4. Zeus’ Law and the power of constraints
One of the most interesting ideas running through The Odyssey is Zeus’ Law, connected to the ancient Greek principle of xenia.
At its simplest, xenia describes reciprocal obligations between host and guest. A stranger arriving at your home should be offered hospitality and protection. In return, the guest owes respect to the host.
To modern eyes, this can look like a social custom. Within the world of The Odyssey, it is much more important.
Travel is dangerous. Formal institutions are limited. Strangers regularly find themselves dependent upon people with whom they have no prior relationship. Hospitality therefore creates a mechanism through which cooperation becomes possible.
The interesting systems point is that Zeus’ Law is not simply a mental model or even an unwritten rule. It can also be understood as a constraint.
That word can sound negative because we tend to think of constraints as things that restrict us, but complexity theorists such as Alicia Juarrero use the idea more broadly. Constraints do not only stop things happening. They also shape the field of possibilities from which behaviour can emerge.
Think about the rules of football. They constrain what players can do, but those constraints are also what make football possible. Remove every boundary and you do not create infinite creativity. You stop having a game.
Zeus’ Law works in a similar way. It does not determine behaviour, and Polyphemus proves that, nor does it guarantee that every host will behave well or every guest honourably. What it does is change what people can reasonably expect of one another. It creates obligations, reputational consequences and possibilities for reciprocity.
In complexity terms, it behaves something like an enabling constraint. Rather than prescribing every action, it creates conditions within which certain kinds of social behaviour become more likely.
This distinction has important implications for systems change.
We often try to create change through governing constraints: targets, specifications, contracts, procedures and performance frameworks. Sometimes those are necessary.
But complex human systems also depend upon enabling constraints, conditions that shape behaviour without dictating every action. Trust can work in this way. So can professional norms, shared purpose, funding arrangements or the way information moves between people.
The practical question therefore becomes less about how we get everyone to behave in the way we want, and more about what conditions might make more useful patterns of behaviour easier to emerge.
That also gives us a slightly different way of thinking about the familiar systems iceberg.
Events remain useful. Patterns remain useful. Structures matter. But we should be cautious about imagining that beneath every visible event sits a hidden mental model which, if discovered and changed, will solve the problem.
Behaviour emerges through relationships between people, incentives, histories, resources, identities, physical environments, information and constraints. There may not be one underlying belief waiting to be uncovered.
This matters because organisations can become very enthusiastic about changing “mindsets” while leaving the conditions that continually reproduce existing behaviour almost completely untouched.
Sometimes people do not need a different mindset.
They need a different set of possibilities.
5. The system is not “over there”
There is a phrase that often appears in systems work: “We need to understand the system.”
It sounds sensible, but it hides a problem.
Which system?
Where does it begin and end, and who decides what belongs inside the boundary?
Any map of a system necessarily includes some things and excludes others. That is not a flaw in mapping. It is unavoidable.
Paul Cilliers argued that our knowledge of complex systems must always be limited because we cannot capture every relationship and interaction simultaneously. Peter Checkland’s Soft Systems Methodology makes a related point about human situations: different people can legitimately construct different understandings of what the “system” is because they experience the situation differently.
Our maps, then, are not the territory. They are ways of looking.
That becomes even more important when the people doing the mapping are also participating in what they are trying to understand. Odysseus cannot step outside the world of The Odyssey and observe it objectively. Neither can we.
Councils, funders, consultants, NHS organisations, charities, community groups and residents are not external observers looking down on a system. Their presence changes relationships. The questions they ask matter. Where money goes matters. Who convenes a meeting matters. Who gets described as having a “problem” matters.
Even mapping a system can change it, simply by creating relationships between people who had not previously spoken.
So rather than saying that we need to understand the whole system, a more honest position might be that we need useful, partial ways of seeing what is happening, while remembering that every way of seeing reveals some things and hides others.
That is less satisfying than producing a beautiful map containing everything.
But it is probably closer to reality.
6. Agency is not the same as control
Odysseus is clever, experienced and influential, but he is very definitely not in control.
Poseidon has power. Athena intervenes. Zeus establishes boundaries. His crew make choices. Penelope and Telemachus have agency. Kings and strangers decide whether to help him. Weather changes. Monsters behave like monsters.
Odysseus operates within the situation, rather than controlling it.
This matters because much of our conventional language of leadership assumes control. We talk about driving change, delivering outcomes and implementing strategy, and we put governance arrangements in place in the hope that the system will move in the desired direction.
Those ideas make sense where authority is relatively clear and cause and effect are reasonably predictable. But many of the outcomes we care about, healthier communities, reduced inequalities, stronger neighbourhoods, greater physical activity and improved wellbeing, emerge from interactions between thousands of people and organisations. No single organisation controls them.
That does not make leadership irrelevant. It changes what leadership means.
Instead of asking how we can make the system do what we want, we can ask how our participation might alter the conditions from which different possibilities emerge. That could involve changing information flows, connecting people who are currently disconnected, shifting resources, removing barriers, creating space for experimentation or questioning an assumption that has become embedded.
This connects with Donella Meadows’ influential work on leverage points, places where a relatively small shift might produce wider changes in system behaviour.
But Meadows also offered an important warning that is sometimes lost when leverage points are turned into a managerial toolkit. Intervention requires humility. We are part of the situation we are trying to influence, and our understanding of what needs changing may itself be incomplete.
The most powerful shift may not be persuading everybody else to adopt our preferred way of seeing the world.
It may be becoming capable of questioning our own.
7. Not everyone has the same agency
There is another complication that systems diagrams sometimes flatten out: people within a system do not possess equal power.
Odysseus is not simply one node among many. He is a king. Athena is a goddess. Penelope’s room for manoeuvre is different from Odysseus’. Servants, slaves, soldiers, kings, strangers, gods and suitors occupy very different positions.
Their ability to shape what happens next is unequal.
This is important because systems language can occasionally become strangely apolitical. We draw networks showing organisations connected to communities, public bodies, funders and voluntary groups. Every circle looks roughly the same size and every arrow looks like a relationship.
But in lots of ways, relationships are shaped by power.
A council, an NHS organisation, a local charity and a resident may all be participants in the same system, but they do not enter the conversation with equal resources or authority. Some control funding, some hold statutory responsibilities, some have access to information that others do not, and some carry far more of the consequences when decisions go badly.
That means “bring everyone around the table” is not enough. Being present does not mean having influence.
It also complicates the question of purpose. If we say the system needs a shared destination, whose destination is it? Who had the power to define it? Who benefits if we arrive, and who absorbs the cost?
Modern systems practice has to take these questions seriously. Complexity does not make power disappear. If anything, it makes understanding how power shapes interactions even more important.
8. We never return to the same system
There is something else interesting about Odysseus’ determination to return home. The Ithaca he is trying to return to no longer exists.
Twenty years have passed. His son Telemachus has grown from a baby into a young man. Penelope has spent years navigating uncertainty, pressure and political manoeuvring. Relationships have changed, the household has adapted to Odysseus’ absence, and Odysseus himself has changed. There is no reset button. This is path dependence.
Complex systems have histories, and what happens today changes what becomes possible tomorrow. A restructuring leaves memories. A failed partnership affects trust when the next partnership is proposed. Funding one organisation changes its relationships with others. A crisis creates behaviours which may persist long after the crisis has passed. People remember who listened to them and who did not. The system carries its history forward.
That is why language about “getting back to normal” is often misleading. We cannot rewind a neighbourhood, organisation or partnership to an earlier configuration. We can only work with what now exists.
History also shapes how people interpret what happens next. The same intervention introduced into two apparently similar places can produce very different responses because those places carry different relationships, memories and experiences.
Context, in other words, is not background noise around an intervention. It is partly constitutive of what the intervention becomes.
So when Odysseus finally reaches Ithaca, his challenge is not really to restore the old world. It is to discover how to live and act within the world that now exists.
9. Keep options open for longer
One of Odysseus’ most interesting characteristics is that he does not always reveal everything he knows or commit immediately to one course of action.
He disguises himself, watches, tests loyalties, gathers information and sometimes delays action until he better understands the situation.
There is a useful complexity principle here.
Under uncertainty, committing too early to a single explanation can be dangerous. If we decide immediately that low physical activity is fundamentally a motivation problem, we begin designing motivational interventions. If we frame it as a transport problem, we invest in infrastructure. If we frame it as a community safety problem, we do something different again.
Each framing directs attention and resources, but each also risks making other explanations less visible.
Snowden describes one danger in complex situations as premature convergence: settling too quickly on an interpretation or solution before enough possibilities have been explored.
A more appropriate response is often to create multiple small experiments based on different hypotheses, keeping them small enough that failure is survivable and useful enough that we can learn something from the response.
Some will fail. Some will produce results for reasons we did not expect. Some may reveal possibilities that were invisible when we began.
The aim is not endless experimentation or an excuse never to commit. It is to avoid betting everything on our confidence that we already understand what is happening.
There is a big difference between indecision and deliberately preserving optionality. Odysseus is often doing the latter. The journey changes the traveller.
Perhaps the deepest systems lesson in The Odyssey is that there is no neat separation between the person making the journey and the world through which they travel.
We often talk about systems change as though “we” stand outside a system and intervene in “it”. But there is no outside.
The organisations trying to create change are part of the patterns they are trying to influence. Commissioners, funders, councils, charities, communities, leaders and consultants all bring assumptions, histories, resources and power into the situation.
Our actions affect what happens, and what happens affects us.
We discover that an assumption was wrong. Someone we considered a barrier turns out to understand something we did not. An intervention fails but reveals a possibility we had not previously noticed. A relationship changes our understanding of the problem. What initially looked like resistance starts to make sense from another perspective.
Sometimes the change goes deeper still and we discover that the outcome we originally set out to deliver is not quite the outcome that now seems important. This is one reason complexity requires humility. We have to act without knowing the full story, and unlike Homer we cannot turn to the final page.
The future emerges through interactions that have not happened yet. We can influence those interactions, change constraints, create connections, experiment, notice patterns and try to move in a more desirable direction.
What we cannot do is know in advance exactly what will emerge.
Perhaps that is what an odyssey really is.
It is not following the perfect route towards a predetermined destination, or standing outside the world with a map that explains everything.
It is acting with intent while accepting uncertainty; maintaining direction without becoming trapped by our original destination; paying attention to feedback without assuming that hindsight gives us foresight; and creating conditions in which better possibilities have room to emerge.
It also means staying alert to power and to whose definition of “better” is shaping the journey, keeping options open long enough to learn, and recognising that if we genuinely engage with a complex system in an attempt to change it, then our own assumptions, relationships and sense of purpose should be open to change as well.
The Odyssey has an author. Our systems do not. We have to act before we know what the story will turn out to have been.
And perhaps that is why The Odyssey is such a useful story for systems thinkers.
It reminds us that complexity is not something we solve from the outside. It is something we participate in.
We can have a clear sense of what we are trying to move towards without knowing exactly how we will get there. We can pay attention to what the system is telling us, experiment rather than assume, change the conditions around us, and remain willing to revise our understanding as we learn.
We can act with purpose without pretending to have control.
At Miova, that is what we mean when we talk about systems thinking as a way of working, not simply a way of understanding. The value is not in producing the perfect map of a complex system. It is in helping us make better decisions within uncertainty, notice what is changing, and create the conditions for different futures to become possible.
Odysseus never gets the map.
Neither do we.
But we can still choose how we travel.
