How narrative and co‑creation move complex systems: Lessons from Australia’s plant biosecurity system

This piece is a collaboration between Plant Health Committee (with the support of the immediate past and current Chairs, Mike Reid and Vince Lanoiselet) and Nous Group (Stephen Petris, Principal, and Sally Higgins, Director).

Most strategies fall short of expectations not because they are wrong, but because they are undeliverable by design. This is especially true of system strategies, those intended to shift outcomes across multiple organisations, jurisdictions, and sectors, where authority is shared and success depends on coordination rather than control.

System strategy has risen in prominence because the problems leaders are facing today increasingly do not sit within neat institutional boundaries. Risks are more interconnected, pressures are intensifying faster than systems can adapt, and responsibility is dispersed across many actors with different incentives, capabilities and constraints. In these conditions, traditional strategy approaches – plans owned by one organisation and executed through hierarchy – are no longer sufficient.

As a result, system leaders are grappling with a new challenge: how to design strategy that creates alignment, legitimacy and momentum across a distributed system.

Biosecurity provides a clear illustration of the opportunity for "system strategy". Those who work in the system understand that, as biosecurity risks intensify, preventing and managing the harms caused by pests and diseases depends on everyone with a stake in the biosecurity system – industries, communities, governments at all levels, Traditional Owners – playing their role and working together. In short, achieving a stronger, more resilient biosecurity system depends on a system-wide approach.

This was the starting point for the Plant Health Committee’s (PHC) recent work to articulate a shared strategic narrative for sustainable investment in Australia’s plant biosecurity system. The task was not to design a new operating model or funding mechanism. It was to reposition the system in the eyes of governments, industry and partners around a clear, credible and future-focused story about value, risk and collective responsibility.

This article shares a joint PHC and Nous perspective on that work. While grounded in plant biosecurity, the insights are deliberately broader. They speak to any leader responsible for shaping strategy in a complex system where success depends on alignment before authority, and design before delivery.

System wide strategies often fail for a familiar reason: they try to solve complexity with plans rather than alignment. In national systems where responsibility is distributed, incentives differ, and funding is finite. Success depends less on the elegance of the strategy and more on whether people see themselves in it, trust it, and are prepared to act on it together.

This perspective is grounded in Nous’ experience developing system strategies across agriculture, emergency management, water and environmental systems, contexts where authority is shared, trade‑offs are unavoidable, and outcomes depend on alignment rather than control.

Drawing on the example of the case for sustainable investment in national plant biosecurity (but informed by wider experience across emergency management), we approach the work by:

1. Crafting a compelling case using Nous' strategic narrative framework
2. Building broad-based support through iterative engagement 
3. Giving sufficient attention to the implementation challenges

In distributed systems, authority is often shared and action is voluntary. Strategy therefore travels through meaning, not mandate. Rather than starting with actions or funding asks, the PHC adopted a narrative-based approach to impose discipline on the strategy conversation.

This distinction between a strategic narrative and a strategic plan matters. Compelling stories that engage people, that people can see themselves in, help to drive change. A strategic narrative typically focuses first on shared meaning – a common understanding of the problem, why it matters now, and the shift the system must make together – before turning to activity. In complex systems, this sequencing is critical. Alignment must come before action.

Nous’ approach to crafting compelling strategic narratives brings this discipline to life through five parts, adapted from Richard P. Rumelt’s Good Strategy, Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters. We adopt a structured way to move from context to case for change, to a unifying direction, to a focused set of priorities, and finally a vision that articulates what becomes possible if the priorities are delivered. 

1. The set up is the place to define the operating context and underline its importance. This is often the place to highlight recent key achievements and to recognise (and validate) the work to date. 
2. The case for change simplifies what is a complex operating environment, highlighting the key drivers that are shaping the system. This helps the reader understand the rationale for the strategic response that follows. 
3. The key shift aims to help galvanise people around a guiding or overarching direction. It is effectively the key strategic response to the case for change and helps to channel action. 
4. The strategic priorities highlight where effort and resources will be focused to deliver the key shift. They signal what will receive more attention, not a comprehensive list.
5. The vision finishes the narrative, counterintuitively, by articulating what becomes possible if the priorities are delivered. It describes the future state the system is working toward and the measures that will be used to track progress, anchoring ambition in observable change rather than aspiration alone.

For plant biosecurity, this played out in several deliberate ways. 

• The narrative began by explicitly framing Australia’s plant biosecurity system as an essential national asset. It explicitly positioned the system as protecting environmental, economic, cultural and social value. This was not rhetorical framing. It anchored the strategy in public value and legitimised the contribution of the many actors who operate the system every day. Importantly, the narrative defined the system broadly, moving beyond traditional agricultural stakeholders to include downstream processors, freight and trade operators, and tourism partners who both contribute to, and are exposed to, biosecurity risk. This widened system definition was foundational to building shared ownership of the problem.
• The narrative then named the pressures facing the system with discipline. Rather than cataloguing every challenge, it focused on a small set of reinforcing pressures: intensifying risk, escalating response costs and constrained public budgets. The key move was simplification. By showing how these pressures were challenging the system, the narrative created a shared diagnosis the system could agree on. This helped shift the conversation from defending individual roles to recognising a collective problem.
• From this diagnosis came a clear, unifying strategic shift: the system must evolve from a narrow focus on eradication to a broader focus on impact minimisation, resilience and long‑term recovery, while still deploying eradication where it delivers value. This was the strategic heart of the narrative. It reframed what success looks like, created space for new conversations about investment and performance, and signalled a genuine step change in the system’s default way of operating, including a different posture from government.
• Finally, the narrative signalled focus through a small number of strategic priorities, not a comprehensive action list. They were a clear statement of where collective effort and resources should concentrate. In system strategy, signalling what matters most is as important as defining what will be done. The priorities focused explicitly on the few areas where collaboration would unlock the greatest system benefit: less about doing more activity, and more about how the system can work together, share capability and coordinate for impact. 

Engaging with different actors in the system, with differing views and perspectives, created healthy (and sometimes uncomfortable) tensions, and helped each group to understand and productively manage their differences.

Equally important to the words in the narrative was how the narrative was built. In system strategy, engagement is not a parallel activity. It is a design lever. When done well, engagement promotes a deeper understanding of the different perspectives of a system, helping to weave together stories in ways that build broad-based support. 

Engaging a system requires something different from system leadership: the discipline to open the conversation, and the confidence to invite the whole system into it. That means moving beyond representation by proxy and creating space for diverse perspectives to shape the strategy in real time.

This is the approach the Plant Health Committee took. Rather than socialising a near‑final product, PHC deliberately leveraged its networks across the system and convened whole‑of‑system workshops with senior leaders representing the different parts of the plant biosecurity ecosystem. These forums brought together government, industry, research and supply‑chain leaders to test the emerging narrative, surface points of tension, and build shared understanding of the problem to be solved.

This openness was not without risk. But it was essential. By inviting stakeholders “into the tent” early, PHC shifted engagement from consultation to co‑creation, strengthening the quality of the strategy and building the trust and momentum required for collective action. 

Three design choices proved critical to the effectiveness of the plant biosecurity engagement.  

1. First, the narrative treated the system as the unit of change. Stakeholder engagement was shaped by a clear definition of “the system”: not just formal governance bodies, but industry, researchers, supply chains and communities. This reinforced the idea that the strategy belonged to the system, not to a single institution.
2. Second, the strategy was built iteratively, not revealed at the end. Early versions of the narrative were deliberately tested, challenged and refined through engagement with Plant Health Committee members and system partners. This was not about consultation for acceptance. It was about stress‑testing the logic and sharpening the story.
3. Third, the strategy was explicit about trade‑offs. By focusing on a small number of priorities and a clear guiding shift, the narrative made implicit trade‑offs visible. That clarity helped stakeholders understand not just what the strategy supported, but what it deliberately deprioritised.

These design choices were reinforced by disciplined engagement hygiene. PHC deliberately leveraged existing networks to snowball participation across the system, used workshops designed for open dialogue with accessible, inclusive processes, and consistently closed the loop by sharing clear follow‑up materials that captured outcomes and key insights from each session. 

What made this process different was that the strategy was built with the system, not presented to it. People could see their input reflected as the narrative evolved, which built trust and confidence that this was something we could actually deliver together.

Experience shows that most strategies fall short at implementation, especially in complex systems. This is not abstract theory; it is lived experience for many who work in systems. In whole‑of‑system work, good intent collides with dispersed authority, contested incentives and finite funding. Strategies stall not because leaders lack ambition, but because their design assumes delivery will take care of itself later. 

For the plant biosecurity work, we built delivery thinking into the strategy from the start, rather than adding it later. Three design choices mattered: 

1. Address the derailers up front. We made the authorising environment, accountability, real levers (funding, regulation, coordination, influence) and barriers (capability, incentives, governance) explicit in the narrative, not in an appendix. This prevented false confidence and guided investment toward what would actually move.
2. Focus on fewer priorities. We concentrated attention on the top 20–30 per cent of collaboration opportunities, the points where interoperability challenges are material and alignment unlocks disproportionate value. Focus became an enabler, not a constraint.
3. Clarify who helps hold the system together, without creating a new layer of control. Instead of setting up another control point, we defined stewardship as a set of practical jobs: bringing people together, helping the system agree on priorities, making sure organisations can work together, and keeping sight of the public good. That way, it’s clear who is responsible for what, but people on the ground still have room to act and innovate.

The narrative is now being used as a collaboration tool.

Put simply, it gives leaders a compact logic for what matters and how to move together.

For the Plant Health Committee, this approach helped shift the conversation – from defending the system as it was to positioning it for collective action and sustainable investment into the future.

Three lessons stand out for leaders working in complex systems:

1. Narrative is not “soft”. It is strategic infrastructure. In systems where authority is shared and action is voluntary, a collective narrative does the work that mandates cannot. It creates alignment, legitimises trade‑offs, builds consensus, and gives people a shared frame for decision‑making when pressure rises.
2. Engagement is a design tool, a process that brings different voices to the table, not a communications exercise. Iterative engagement does more than build acceptance. It improves strategy quality by exposing assumptions early, resolving contested issues before they harden, and ensuring the strategy reflects how the system actually works, not how it looks on paper.
3. Credibility is earned at the point of implementation. People back strategies they believe can survive contact with reality. When a strategy shows focus, names constraints and clarifies stewardship, it signals seriousness. That signal matters more than polish.

For other leaders facing system‑level challenges, the message is simple: Do not start with activity. Start with meaning. Win the story, earn the support, and design for delivery from day one.

Get in touch to discuss how a shared strategic narrative can help align your system, build support for change and turn complexity into collective action.

Connect with Mike Reid, Vince Lanoiselet, Stephen Petris, and Sally Higgins on LinkedIn.