New Community of Practice

Join Stewarding Complexity

Because navigating complexity requires community.

The central challenge facing boards and executive teams today (and really, anyone trying to effect change in an organization!) is simple to name but hard to navigate: How do you steward institutions in environments that refuse to hold still? How do you lead strategically when the ground keeps shifting beneath your feet?

Most governance and corporate strategies still assume a world that no longer exists — a world where predictability, control, and linear cause-and-effect can be relied upon. We still inherit planning tools built for stable conditions: if–then logic, linear theories of change, fixed goals, long cycles, and tidy impact metrics designed to freeze outcomes in place.

But the reality leaders face is dynamic, adaptive, and full of surprises.

Our systems are complex.

Our tools and approaches are not.

Stewarding Complexity exists to bridge that gap.

Sign up Today

Join a confidential community of peers who are done performing certainty and ready to make sense of complexity together.

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Hosted by Charley Johnson (Untangled) and Aarn Wennekers (Super Cool & Hyper Critical), this private, confidential gathering space invites boards, executive teams, and organizational leaders to step outside formal governance structures, speak candidly with peers, and practice making sense of complexity — together.

No performative certainty.

No pressure to already know the answer.

Just honest, generative dialogue among people who carry similar responsibilities — and similar burdens — and who understand that navigating complexity requires community.

Each session begins with Charley and Aarn framing a concept, tension, or shift connected to complexity. Midway through, we open the floor for participants to surface a real-world challenge they are confronting — and we puzzle through it together.

What This Community Offers

A trusted space for high-level, peer-to-peer reflection

Discuss governance dilemmas, strategic uncertainty, and organizational tensions that rarely fit neatly inside board packets or leadership meetings.

Guidance on navigating technological change — especially AI

Explore the implications of generative AI for risk, legitimacy, accountability, and decision-making at the institutional level.

Tools for governing in complexity

Move beyond linear plans and prediction-based strategies toward approaches grounded in adaptivity, relational thinking, and systems understanding.

Support for institutional stewardship

Learn from peers wrestling with similar questions around uncertainty, risk posture, power dynamics, and organizational coherence.

A community that treats uncertainty as the real terrain of leadership

A place to build leadership capacity — individually and institutionally — to navigate complexity with clarity, humility, and courage.

Who This Is For

This community is designed for leaders who:

Serve on a board of directors or executive leadership team, stewarding resources, setting direction, or shaping institutional futures.
Are facing rapid political, social, and technological change and need space to interpret its implications at the governance level.
Feel the growing mismatch between traditional planning tools and the dynamic reality of their operating environment.
Want a candid, confidential space to think through uncertainty without performing confidence.
Believe institutions evolve not through stricter control, but through clarity, coherence, and adaptive leadership.

If you are responsible for guiding an organization through complexity — or simply want to deepen your ability to understand and work with it — this space is for you.

How It Will Work

We will host 8–12 free sessions across 2026, each designed to help you:

Release the assumption of linear cause-and-effect. Influence conditions, not illusions of control; look for patterns over predictions.
Expect systems to evolve, not stabilize. Lead with the assumption of continual adaptation, not eventual equilibrium.
See interdependencies, patterns, and feedback loops as central.Understand decisions through the relationships and flows that shape outcomes.
Accept not knowing as the starting point for meaningful change. Trade performative certainty for humble inquiry, shared sensemaking, and adaptive action.

All sessions are confidential and operate under Chatham House Rule.

Community Stewards

Charley Johnson has spent the past 20 years leading and stewarding multi-stakeholder systems-change efforts across sectors, including directing the Public Technology Leadership Collaborative, Disinformation Action Lab, and Center for Digital Development at USAID.

Charley now coaches and advises leaders across the private sector, government, nonprofits, and philanthropy how to align technology with their vision of the future (not the other way around!), find clarity in complexity, and facilitate change — in their system, and in themselves.

He has formal training in complex adaptive systems from The Cynefin Company and the Santa Fe Institute for Complexity, and holds a master’s degree from the Harvard Kennedy School.

Aarn Wennekers has more than 25 years working at the intersection of governance, strategy, risk, and leadership across complex organizational ecosystems. His experience spans boardrooms and executive teams across energy, government, post-secondary education, and not-for-profit sectors, where he has supported leaders making high-stakes decisions under conditions of uncertainty and ambiguity.

Aarn works with boards, executives, and leadership systems to move beyond performative control and compliance toward genuine adaptive capacity, coherence, and sustained value creation. His work centers on helping leaders make sense of complexity, recognize and interpret weak signals, and govern in ways that strengthen long-term strategic resilience rather than short-term optics.

He holds an MBA and is a Certified Internal Auditor (CIA) and Certified Risk Management Auditor (CRMA). He brings deep, practical expertise in governance, strategy, enterprise risk, and complex adaptive systems to his advisory work.