It’s Not the Strategy. It’s the System.
How Applied Systems Thinking Creates Clarity in Complex Organizations
We Must See Both the Forest and the Trees
Have you ever worked tirelessly with your team, only to realize your efforts feel disconnected from the broader organization? Have you seen a brilliant product launch fail because departments weren’t aligned on what truly matters? In larger companies, have you encountered situations where your team and another—without realizing it—were solving the same problem with conflicting solutions, effectively flushing resources down the drain?
Despite the widespread adoption of agile methodologies and advanced technologies, organizations continue to struggle with clarity, cohesion, and responsiveness. According to a recent Gartner study, about 50% of organizational change initiatives fail, primarily due to misalignment and lack of coordination, while only about 34% appear to be a clear success. Even with significant investment in tools, frameworks, and headcount, companies often solve the wrong problems in fragmented ways. In my experience, this comes down to a widespread failure to communicate in an adaptive, unified way across organizational levels and structures.
My Unconventional Journey to Systems Thinking
My career path has been intentionally broad. I’ve worked across startups, agencies, mid-sized firms, and large enterprises, spanning functions from product and strategy to business development, marketing, and operations. I’ve lived and worked across multiple countries—and most meaningfully, I’ve spent the past decade immersed in Sweden’s collaborative, cross-functional work culture.
Stockholm has shaped much of my thinking. The Swedish work environment emphasizes shared ownership, horizontal alignment, and systems-level coordination. These values, layered onto my diverse career, helped me develop a clear view of recurring organizational challenges and patterns.
Early in my career, I questioned whether my path was too scattered. The system often rewards specialists, and I didn’t fit neatly into one box. But over time, I realized that the breadth of my experience gave me something essential: the ability to see how misaligned, siloed teams—even when composed of incredibly talented people—can unintentionally grind progress to a halt.
The Persistent Problem of Organizational Siloing
Organizations don’t usually fail because of a lack of talent or ambition—they fail because of fragmentation. When teams and functions operate in silos, even the most capable organizations struggle to execute well. As Harvard Business Review highlights, one of the main reasons strategic plans fail is the failure to align execution with strategy across departments and levels.
This isn’t a new insight—but it remains unresolved. Despite a decade of evolving tools and methodologies, organizations still suffer from the same coordination breakdowns. The problem isn’t what we know—it’s how we work together. That’s the gap The Systems Edge aims to help close—by providing a practical lens and toolkit for better alignment, systemic clarity, and more adaptive decision-making.
We see it every day:
Product and tech build for the future, while commercial teams chase near-term goals.
Strategic shifts occur at the top but don't cascade effectively to execution layers.
Decisions stall due to miscommunication, duplication, and unaligned priorities.
Consider the case of Boeing and the 737 MAX crisis. While it appeared to be a product issue on the surface, deeper investigations revealed something more troubling: siloed decision-making, misaligned priorities, and poor communication between engineering, leadership, and regulators. It wasn’t just a failure of execution—it was a breakdown of the system. Even the most capable organizations can falter when alignment and cross-functional clarity are missing. (WSJ)
Systems Thinking for Product Strategy and Business Agility
What’s needed isn’t more roadmaps or faster sprints. What’s needed is a better way to connect the dots—between strategy, execution, user outcomes, and internal capacity. This is where applied systems thinking becomes critical.
Systems thinking in practice means using clear, visual, and real-world tools to map how product initiatives influence customer outcomes, technical feasibility, and strategic goals. It views product development as part of a broader system that includes leadership, commercialization, operations, and end users.
This clarity unlocks business agility across industries:
Aligns product strategy with evolving business context
Bridges long-term goals with short-term execution
Reduces duplication and misfires
Speeds up decision-making and responsiveness
A recent report by PwC found that 74% of business leaders are concerned their strategy isn’t translating into clear, operational actions. The problem isn’t vision — it’s turning that vision into coordinated motion. Alignment isn’t just about making things efficient — it’s about making execution possible. And in my work across Europe and beyond, I’ve seen how much untapped progress is waiting behind that shift.
Breaking Through Hierarchies and Egos
One of the most underappreciated benefits of systems thinking is its power to dissolve hierarchy- and ego-driven gridlock. When decisions are based on rank or personal opinion, alignment becomes fragile. But when decisions are rooted in visualized, objective causality, clarity wins.
Pragmatic systems thinking becomes a shared language—a way for leadership, teams, and cross-functional contributors to see the same system, understand constraints, and align effectively. It reduces ambiguity, minimizes political friction, and builds trust.
Yet systems thinking is still underutilized. Part of the problem is that it’s often presented as academic or overly abstract. The opportunity now is to translate its power into practical, accessible tools—tools that bring this mindset to life in daily decisions across the organization. That’s the purpose behind The Systems Edge—to make applied systems thinking a usable, shared capability across teams and leaders.
A Future of Aligned, Adaptive Organizations
Picture an organization where every product initiative is context-aware—tied directly to business goals, customer needs, and technical realities. A structure where alignment is not enforced through meetings and management layers, but is baked into the way initiatives are framed and shared.
This is the future I believe we’re heading toward: one where organizations are enabled by a unified, systems-based communication layer. A layer that reduces waste, accelerates alignment, and brings strategy and execution into constant dialogue.
Not just in product. Across the entire business.
From Insight to Action
Stay tuned for upcoming deep dives into The Systems Edge—where I’ll be sharing the models and tools that make systems thinking not just accessible, but actionable for leaders, product teams, and organizations facing complexity in motion.
Whether you're building a company, scaling a product, or leading change, the ability to see your organization as a system—and align it without friction—is becoming a core leadership skill across functions in any organization.
The time to evolve how we work isn’t sometime in the future. It’s now. And systems thinking, made practical, is how we begin.
Sources:
Gartner (2025). Organizational Change Management
Harvard Business Review (2015). Why Strategy Execution Unravels — and What to Do About It.
PwC. (2025). Our Leading Insights on Strategy; Strategy&
Additional industry insights and real-world observations from the author’s work across product, strategy, and organizational transformation roles in Europe and globally.
