Outcomes & Systems: From Predicted Goods to Emergent Cohesion

Critical summary – the single through‑line of the essay

The paper argues that in contemporary, highly complex systems it is no longer viable—or even desirable—to manage by prescribing fixed end‑states (“predicted goods”).  Pre‑defined targets collapse diversity, concentrate power in goal‑setters, and leave systems brittle in the face of uncertainty.  What matters instead is cultivating the conditions under which coherent, desirable futures can emerge from within the system itself.

Achieving this requires a wholesale pivot in design and governance logic:

• From outcome delivery to capacity building – The strategic unit of work becomes “agentic capacity”: the distributed ability of diverse actors to sense, interpret, act, and learn together.

• From vectorised control to relational development – Rather than forcing every actor along a single trajectory, governance must steward the quality of inter‑agent relationships so that coordination, innovation, and course‑correction arise organically.

• From static plans to rotating attractors – Provisional goals and KPIs still serve as near‑term scaffolds, but they are explicitly treated as temporary, revisable orientation points rather than final destinations.

• From central authority to hybrid, multi‑horizon stewardship – Institutions must operate simultaneously on (i) today’s compliance‑driven realities, (ii) transitional infrastructures that enable reflection and adaptation, and (iii) long‑horizon investments in sensing, feedback, and trust infrastructures.

Ultimate point: Success in complex systems is no longer measured by hitting a pre‑set target; it is measured by the system’s increasing relational maturity—its capacity to host diversity without fragmentation, to reconfigure in response to feedback, and to generate evolving coherence without external command.  Governance therefore shifts from enforcing outcomes to stewarding the emergence of futures that are continually negotiated, contextually grounded, and collectively owned.

1. The Legacy of Predicted Outcomes

In much of 20th-century institutional design and strategic thinking, outcomes were conceived as fixed goal states—desired futures to be planned, modeled, and delivered through rational coordination. This orientation treats the outcome as a known good, a finality that can be forecasted and then pursued through centralized action.

This mode of thinking underpins much of modern policy, planning, and organizational logic. It is embedded in linear program design, logic models, theory of change frameworks, and command-and-control management structures. The logic is simple: define the desirable end state; chart the pathway; engineer the system to get there. This is what we might call the predicted good paradigm.

Yet, this paradigm rests on a set of implicit assumptions:

• That the environment is stable or at least predictable enough to define a desirable end.

• That the definition of “good” is broadly consensual and not contested.

• That it is legitimate to centralize the definition of goals and outcomes.

• That the system being governed is sufficiently closed, knowable, and controllable to follow the engineered pathway.

These assumptions begin to collapse under the conditions of complexity, multiplicity, and uncertainty that define today’s systemic landscapes—climate change, social fragmentation, geopolitical flux, techno-social transformation.

In these conditions, the very act of predefining a goal space risks collapsing the diversity, adaptability, and latent intelligence of the system. A predicted outcome, in such contexts, becomes not a guide but a constraint—reducing the system’s capacity to sense, evolve, and respond.

We must also acknowledge that predicted outcomes often function as instruments of projection and control. They encode power asymmetries: whose future is being predicted? Who decides what is desirable? Whose epistemology shapes the end state? The very act of goal-setting can erase plurality, nuance, and emergent potential.

This critique is not to suggest that goal-setting is inherently flawed, but rather that in complex, adaptive systems, goal spaces cannot be static, centralized, or fixed in time. Instead, goals must be provisional, situated, and subject to continual renegotiation as the system evolves.

Hence, we are witnessing a paradigmatic shift—from predictive control to generative emergence. This shift reframes outcomes not as products of strategic foresight alone, but as emergent expressions of systemic coherence—a state in which distributed actors align, adapt, and self-organize toward shared but evolving purposes.

This reorientation calls into question many of the institutional forms, evaluation mechanisms, and decision-making architectures we currently rely on. It demands a new approach, where goal space itself is a living, co-evolving field, not a fixed point on a map.

2. Systems as Distributed Provisioning Mechanisms

If we abandon the premise of a singular, predefined outcome, we must also rethink what it means for a system to function and perform well. In this view, a system is no longer a machine designed to deliver a target output, but rather a living field of interrelations, where value is co-produced, contested, and distributed across agents, spaces, and time horizons.

A complex system, to remain viable, must sustain distributed and decentralized provisioning of value—not a singular provision of “the good” from a central actor, but a continuous negotiation across difference. In other words, it is not the presence of a unified good that defines a system’s health, but the system’s ability to host diverse expressions of good simultaneously, and to maintain coherence amid divergence.

In such systems:

• Value is contextually defined, contingent on perspectives, local intelligences, and evolving needs.

• Provisioning is polycentric, meaning there is no central node through which all decisions or goods flow.

• Coordination emerges, not from pre-imposed control structures, but through local adaptations, signals, and inter-agent feedback.

This moves us from a vision of the system as a vectorized delivery apparatus (one designed to move from point A to point B), to a vision of the system as a relational field, in which multiple goal vectors interact, sometimes aligning, sometimes competing, but ultimately contributing to an emergent cohesion.

Critically, outcomes in this view are not produced for the system by external designers, but emerge within the system as coherences of sense, orientation, and action. They are the product of agents negotiating with each other, within the constraints and possibilities of their local contexts.

This reframing has profound implications for design, governance, and strategy:

• We no longer aim to enforce a shared provision of good but to build conditions under which multiple agents can provision good for themselves and one another.

• The role of strategy becomes less about directing toward a singular future, and more about enabling distributed sense-making, responsiveness, and reconfiguration.

• Governance shifts from enforcing alignment to holding and supporting productive tensions, and stewarding coherence without uniformity.

In this context, the outcome is not a goal to be delivered, but an emergent property of a system’s internal diversity and its capacity to maintain generative interrelation. A system becomes functional not when it achieves consensus on a single end, but when it creates space for evolving coherence across plurality.

This leads to a deeper appreciation of system stewardship as capacity building: cultivating the conditions, capabilities, and infrastructures that allow a system to evolve toward coherence—not through central enforcement, but through distributed emergence.

3. Agentic Capacity as the Engine of Transformation

If outcomes are no longer to be centrally defined and delivered, but instead emerge from within the system as distributed coherence, then the central task of system transformation shifts: from delivering the outcome to enabling the conditions under which coherent outcomes can emerge. This reframes the core responsibility of systemic design as the cultivation of agentic capacity—the ability of agents within the system to perceive, interpret, respond to, and transform their environment.

What is Agentic Capacity?

Agentic capacity refers to the power of agents—individuals, communities, institutions, ecosystems—to act meaningfully within a system, to shift its direction, to contribute to its evolution. It is not merely the freedom to choose, but the situated ability to sense, decide, and intervene in a way that is structurally consequential.

Building agentic capacity involves expanding:

• Sensing Capacity: The ability of agents to detect signals from their environment—across social, ecological, technological, and affective dimensions—and to interpret these signals meaningfully.

• Fielded Intelligence: Not intelligence as individual cognition, but as a collective and spatially distributed capacity to understand the system from multiple vantage points.

• Feedback Infrastructure: Mechanisms that allow agents to learn from the consequences of their actions, and to update their models and behaviors accordingly.

• Resource Access: Material, institutional, and cognitive resources that allow agents not just to imagine alternatives, but to act on them.

• Decoherence from Legacy Structures: The permission and means to detach from inherited roles, identities, and institutions that may inhibit responsiveness.

• De-territorialization and Recontextualization: The ability to operate beyond fixed localisms—to move across boundaries, adapt to new logics, and recompose meaning in unfamiliar contexts. (With acknowledge to David Snowden for this)

Together, these dimensions enable a system to move from repetition to transformation—to reorient itself not through central commands, but through the differentiated activation of distributed agency.

From Capacity to Coherence

When agentic capacity is sufficiently developed across a system, something powerful emerges: goal spaces themselves begin to cohere and evolve. Instead of being declared in advance, they take form through a process of iterated relational construction. Coherence becomes a function of the system’s internal capability to make sense of itself and act accordingly, rather than an externally imposed telos.

In this framing:

• The outcome becomes the expression of system coherence, not its destination.

• Transformation becomes a property of the system’s ability to recursively reconfigure its own internal architecture.

• Design and governance become less about alignment to a goal, and more about enabling recursive loops of sensing, feedback, and reorientation across all actors.

Implications

This orientation fundamentally alters the strategic stance:

• Design for emergence replaces design for delivery.

• Investment in capacity replaces investment in control.

• Transformation through presence replaces transformation through planning.

• It also redefines success: not the achievement of a singular goal, but the system’s increasing ability to host, hold, and respond to multiple futures simultaneously.

Ultimately, growing agentic capacity is not a side task—it is the transformation. It is through this distributed upgrading of the system’s sensing, acting, and learning capacities that coherence without centralization becomes possible, and that emergence becomes not an accident, but a cultivated condition.

4. Hybrid Governance: Outcome Rotation and Systemic Capacity

We are currently operating in a transitional epoch—caught between two governance paradigms.

On one hand, legacy systems continue to operate under outcome-driven, directive logics: plans, targets, KPIs, and programmatic delivery. These remain dominant in funding models, bureaucratic procedures, and performance cultures. On the other hand, the complexity of contemporary conditions—polycrisis, socioecological entanglement, technological acceleration—demands a move toward capacity-led, system-oriented governance, where outcomes emerge through adaptive coordination rather than predefined trajectories.

In this in-between state, governance itself becomes hybrid: a negotiation between rotating outcomes and growing systemic capacities.

The Nature of the Hybrid

In practice, this hybrid manifests as:

• A tension between fixed intentions and emergent responsiveness.

• The use of provisional goal statements (e.g. “net-zero by 2040”) not as fixed end-points, but as scaffolds for coordination—temporary attractors that orient distributed action without prescribing every move.

• A recognition that goals will rotate, shift, dissolve, or deepen as systems evolve, and that governance must support this rotation, not resist it.

• Simultaneously, a demand to invest in the enabling conditions—capabilities, infrastructures, and institutional architectures—that allow such evolution to take place.

We might call this form “Outcome Rotation Governance”: governance that treats the goal as mobile, adaptive, and revisable, while anchoring effort in the growing of systemic coherence and agentic infrastructure.

Building for Both Horizons

This dual requirement—to hold short-term orientation and long-term capacity—requires governance to operate on multiple horizons:

• Horizon 1: Anchoring action in current urgencies and institutional realities (e.g. targets, reporting cycles).

• Horizon 2: Creating transitional infrastructures and processes that allow for learning, reframing, and adaptation.

• Horizon 3: Investing in the latent capacity of the system to self-organize around emergent futures, not yet nameable or programmable.

Thus, governance becomes not just a control function but a stewardship function—curating temporal bridges, scaffolding participation, and facilitating transformation.

Process, Context, and Capability as Design Primitives

In a hybrid paradigm, the work of governance shifts toward designing:

• Process architectures that support reflection, deliberation, divergence, and re-alignment.

• Contextual infrastructures that embed decision-making within meaningful ecological, cultural, and epistemic realities—escaping abstract metricization.

• Capability ecosystems that distribute learning, sensemaking, and risk-holding across a plural network of actors.

In short, the governance of a system becomes less about aligning everyone to a single plan and more about building the ground conditions through which plural agents can generate evolving coherence.

A Governance of Becoming

This demands a move from governance as enforcement of intentions to governance as attunement to emergence. It is a governance that:

• Recognizes the partiality of any singular outcome.

• Accepts the contingency of all present knowledge.

• Relinquishes the fantasy of full control.

• Redistributes the work of decision, interpretation, and accountability across networks of capable agents.

In this view, outcome governance is no longer about delivering futures, but about cultivating the conditions for futures to become possible—through distributed intelligence, ongoing reconfiguration, and a commitment to systemic learning.

5. From Vectorization to Relational Development

One of the most significant shifts in the governance of complex systems is the move from vectorized orientation—in which systems are organized to move toward fixed, externally defined goals—to relational development, in which systems evolve through the deepening of inter-agent relationships and the emergence of shared coherence from within.

The Logic of Vectorization

In the vector model:

• A target state is predefined (e.g. “Net-Zero City by 2040”).

• The system is organized to move toward that target in a straight, optimized line.

• Resources, attention, and accountability are structured along a single trajectory.

• Deviations from the target are treated as inefficiencies or failures.

This model is powerful in systems where:

• The environment is stable.

• The pathway is clear.

• The agents are aligned and controllable.

• The system is largely closed.

But in open, dynamic, and entangled systems, vectorization collapses under the weight of complexity. Trajectories fragment. Interventions have unintended consequences. Goal states themselves are unstable, evolving, or contested. Worse still, vectorization can suppress alternative possibilities, foreclose emergent futures, and erase the plural epistemologies that give systems resilience.

The Turn to Relational Development

Relational development begins from a different premise:

• That a system’s true potential lies not in its ability to deliver on predefined goals, but in its ability to cultivate and maintain generative relations across difference.

• That coherence emerges not through enforced direction, but through the ongoing negotiation, reciprocity, and adaptation among agents.

• That transformation is not a linear journey to a finish line, but a continuous unfolding of new capacities, meanings, and configurations.

Here, development is not defined by what is produced, but by how relations evolve, how meaning is made, and how possibilities are held open.

In this view:

• The goal space is emergent, discovered through participation and presence.

• The role of intervention is not to direct, but to enable new forms of interdependence and mutual intelligibility.

• The system is not optimized for a singular output, but cultivated for coherence, adaptability, and depth of engagement.

System Growth as Relational Maturity

This reframing positions growth not as expansion or efficiency, but as relational maturity—the ability of a system to:

• Host increasing diversity without fragmenting,

• Sustain feedback without collapse,

• Reconfigure itself in response to emergent tensions,

• Generate internal alignment through dialogue, not enforcement.

Relational development prioritizes:

• Trust-building infrastructures over control architectures,

• Reciprocal intelligibility over centralized clarity,

• Depth of presence over breadth of delivery.

Practical Implications

This shift has profound design implications:

• Systems must be assessed not only by their outputs but by the quality of inter-agent relations, capacities for mutual sensemaking, and potential for self-directed evolution.

• Funding, governance, and strategy must move from milestone-driven frameworks toward ongoing stewardship of system health.

• Indicators must evolve from static performance metrics to dynamic relational signals—attunements to coherence, resonance, and divergence across the field.

This also means letting go of the illusion that transformation can be managed via a single theory of change or scaled by replication alone. Instead, we must learn to design for situated evolution, where each context develops its own form of coherence through relational pathways.

6. The New Goal Space: Cultivating Emergent Coherence

Having moved through the critique of predicted outcomes, the recognition of systems as distributed fields, the centrality of agentic capacity, and the shift from vectorization to relational development, we arrive at a redefinition of what a goal space truly is in complex systems.

We no longer conceive of goals as static end states to be reached, but as emergent attractors—orientations of coherence that evolve as the system itself matures in intelligence, capacity, and relational depth.

Goal Space as a Living Field

The goal space, in this view, is not a destination but a condition—a field shaped by the system’s capacity to:

• Sense across time and space,

• Interpret emergent signals through diverse epistemologies,

• Act in ways that are contextually grounded and collectively generative.

It is a shared sensibility, not a shared objective—a fluid consensus on direction that adapts as the world reveals itself differently over time.

In this model, goals:

• Are not enforced, but arise through emergent coherence;

• Are not universal, but are contextually situated and plural;

• Are not final, but are iteratively reframed as the system evolves.

This is not goal collapse—it is goal evolution.

Deterritorialization and Recontextualization as Enablers

For this evolution to occur, systems must support:

• Deterritorialization: The ability of agents to unhook from inherited roles, fixed categories, and place-bound logics.

• Recontextualization: The capacity to reassemble meaning in new settings, to recombine insights across boundaries, and to build coherence through difference.

These capacities are essential for systems to host emergence—to allow for the unexpected, the anomalous, the transformative to enter into the shared field and shift what is possible.

Without these, systems become rigid: over-identified with inherited goals, unable to adapt, and increasingly fragile.

From Hypothesized Goals to Systemic Potentials

In this frame, a hypothesized goal—e.g., “achieve net-zero emissions by 2040”—still plays a role, but it is now subordinate to a deeper function: to grow the distributed agentic capacities of the system such that more intelligent, equitable, and regenerative futures can emerge.

Thus, the true goal becomes the development of the conditions for systemic emergence:

• Expanding the capacity for agents to participate meaningfully in shaping shared futures,

• Building infrastructures that support long-term coherence across difference,

• Investing in the evolution of relational, institutional, and ecological intelligences.

This reframing shifts the emphasis:

• From achieving fixed ends to stewarding systemic becoming,

• From defining success as delivery to defining success as coherence, transformation, and generative potential,

• From certainty and control to responsiveness and resonance.

The Outcome as Emergent Presence

In this final understanding, the outcome is not a thing to be delivered, but a presence to be cultivated—a state of the system in which:

• Differences are held generatively,

• Futures remain open,

• Action is meaningful,

• And sense is co-created.

The goal space, then, is no longer a destination, but a relational, systemic capacity—a living, sensing, evolving field of shared orientation, powered by the capacities, intelligences, and care of those within it.

This is the messy frontier of governance, design, and strategy in a world defined by emergence: to hold space for coherence without control, for futures without foreclosure, and for agency without domination.