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WHAT IS the ComplHEXity Deck?

ComplHexity is a sensemaking tool designed to help change leaders, facilitators, and teams navigate the uncertainty of complex change. Built around a set of hexagon-shaped cards, the deck helps you map the patterns, narratives, and interactions that influence how change unfolds in real organizations.

Each card captures a real-world insight—whether it’s an observable behaviour, a systemic tension, or a commonly held belief—and prompts reflection, dialogue, and strategic action. By arranging the cards visually, you can surface hidden dynamics, explore interconnected challenges, and co-create more adaptive approaches to change.

Whether you’re making sense of past initiatives, exploring current dynamics, or planning your next intervention, the ComplHexity Deck gives you a flexible, tactile way to work with complexity—one interaction at a time.

Card Categories

  • Anti-Patterns

    Anti-patterns in change management are commonly used behaviours, approaches, or solutions that may appear helpful on the surface but consistently lead to poor outcomes over time.

    They are recurring responses to complex change that reflect underlying assumptions, outdated mindsets, or system constraints—and while they may be well-intentioned, they often reinforce resistance, misalignment, or inertia.

    Identifying anti-patterns helps change agents recognize what’s not working, uncover systemic dysfunctions, and shift toward more adaptive and effective practices.

  • Patterns

    Patterns in change management are recurring behaviours, practices, or system dynamics that consistently support alignment, adaptability, and progress during change.

    These patterns often emerge over time as effective responses to complexity, helping individuals and teams navigate uncertainty, build trust, and sustain momentum.

    Recognizing positive patterns allows change agents to amplify what’s working, reinforce healthy dynamics, and replicate success across the organization.

  • Narratives

    Narratives in change management are the shared stories, beliefs, and assumptions that shape how people interpret and respond to change.

    These aren’t just formal messages from leadership—they emerge from conversations, past experiences, and the informal ways people make sense of what’s happening around them.

    Narratives influence behaviour, trust, and engagement. By listening for prevailing narratives, change agents can surface underlying mindsets, uncover sources of resistance or momentum, and introduce new stories that shift how people see the change and their role within it.

  • Interactions

    Interactions in change management are the observable exchanges between people—conversations, decisions, behaviours, and moments of collaboration—that reveal how change is actually unfolding on the ground. Unlike plans or intentions, interactions show what’s really happening in the system.

    By paying attention to interactions, change agents can spot alignment or disconnects, uncover informal dynamics, and identify leverage points for influencing behaviour and shifting patterns in real time.

  • Big Ideas

    Big ideas are the 'philosophy' around change. Mental models, conceptual, and high-level.

  • Change Agent Stance

    Stances refer to how you see change, how you see your role in change, your attitude towards change, and the stance you take in situations. Common stances are mentor, coach, teacher, facilitator, and manager.

  • Tools & Practices

    The tools, templates, frameworks, and models that we use.

  • New List Item

    Description goes here

Why Hexagons

Hexis are method for considering the connections between ideas and finding the nuances in those connections. When you place an idea on a hexagon, it has six sides where connections could be made to other ideas. 

The discussion about where to connect what will be different every time. Given the same card choice, do you think you’d get the same webs of interconnected hexagons? Would the people explain the connections in the same way? 

That’s the beauty of hexagonal thinking. It provides an artifact for a diverse and creative discussion around the complexities of change. When you give a small group hexis and ask them to connect them however they choose, every group will come up with a different web for different reasons. Along the way they’ll hopefully question each other and dig deep into the concepts on the cards, arguing about which idea connects more to an important concept, etc.