Working for Health 2030 2025 – 2026 WHO and NHS Seminar Series: Embracing Complexity: Systems Thinking for Health Workforce Strengthening

I would like to thank the WHO and NHS for the opportunity to be part of this panel and to present on the value of the complexity sciences for healthcare workforce strengthening.

 

I would like to specifically thank Cris Scotter, (Unit of Health Workforce and Health Services) and Danielle Mason and team in Global Health Partnerships, NHS England for the opportunity to present.

 

I would also like to thank my colleagues who presented, for an excellent discussion: Leila Reid, Malixole Percy Mahlathi, Naja Hulvej Rod with Wendy Reid.

 

 

OVERVIEW OF MY KEYNOTE

My  WHO–NHS session introduction to the complexity sciences was based on The Atlas of Social Complexity. It rested on a claim that still meets resistance in workforce policy circles: many of the most persistent failures in health workforce planning are not technical problems waiting for better optimisation, but systemic mis-specifications that optimisation cannot fix.

 

Health workforce systems are complex socio-ecological systems. They are case-based rather than law-like; adaptive rather than stable; shaped by power, inequality, governance, and psychology as much as by headcounts and demand curves. They evolve, self-organise, and operate within nested structures—from teams and organisations to national policy regimes and global labour markets.

 

When these conditions are treated as noise rather than structure, linear causality, average effects, and single “best” projections do not merely simplify reality—they mislead.

 

The value of the complexity sciences, as I argued, is not that they replace existing methods or offer panaceas—they do neither—but that they provide a grammar for working with systems as they actually behave.

 

Case-based complexity foregrounds configurational causality (equifinality, multifinality, causal asymmetry), trajectory thinking, and cross-scale analysis, making visible why similar pressures produce divergent outcomes, or why very different contexts converge on the same failures. It also destabilises categories that workforce models routinely naturalise—roles, professions, demand assumptions—showing how these shift under political, institutional, and ecological strain.

 

For workforce planning, this means abandoning the fiction of a single correct forecast. Health systems are better understood as ensembles of situated cases, where responses must be assembled rather than imposed. Complexity, in this sense, is not an analytic complication to be managed away; it is a place-based, contextual truth that policy must learn to work with or continue reproducing the problems it seeks to solve.

 

 

 LINKS

 

Here is a link to my PowerPoint Presentation

 

Here is a link to the paperback version of The Atlas of Social Complexity

Here is a discount code until the end of 20255

The code is TASC15, and it offers a 15% discount.

Here is a link to the map of the complexity sciences

Here is a link to PRSM (Online Participatory Systems Mapping) Platform

Here is a link to Barbrook-Johnson and Penn’s Open-Access Systems Mapping Book

Here is a link to COMPLEX-IT, the online R-Studio platform allowing non-experts in computational modelling access to these tools, all through a social complexity framework.