Reflecting on Anne Leslie's Thoughts About Finish Lines and Paths to Get There
Newsletter # 435 - March 16, 2026
Heidi Burgess and Guy Burgess
In Newsletter 428, we wrote about three recent articles that we found particularly insightful and important in the context of hyper-polarized intractable conflict. All focused on the pressing need for — and actual progress being made — in forging a "new civic future" or "new civic path" (as Rich Harwood calls it).
We also mentioned that there was a fourth, somewhat different article that we planned to highlight later, entitled "Rethinking sovereignty in practice: directions of travel over finish lines" by Anne Leslie, a cybersecurity expert with IBM. We met Anne in conjunction with a project we were all doing on hybrid warfare. In her work on protecting information systems, we found that Anne has been struggling with the same complexity-related issues that have been a big focus of Beyond Intractability. We have long been impressed with Anne's creative thinking and this post on the surprising topic of estuarine mapping — (a concept she gleaned from Dave Snowden) is no exception. While she applies the concept to cybersecurity, the same ideas also relate to depolarization, visioning, and the creation of a new civic culture.
This article got us thinking about many of the things we've been writing lately — our first "Big Picture" article on visioning the "Terms of the Grand democratic Bargain," Newsletter 426 on ChatGPT's "Vision of a Power-With Democracy," and Newsletter 428 which highlights many other thinkers on the need to have a vision about what this new civic future would look like. Anne suggests in her post that thinking in terms of outcomes (or, goals, it would seem), is unhelpful given the nature of complex systems. Better, she says, to think in terms of directions of travel.
So, we wondered, what did this imply about our notion of visioning? Are we wrong to think it is useful? Important, even? We include the relevant sections of Anne's article here, applying the ideas to hyper-polarized political dysfunction instead of cyber-security. We then bring up Kenneth Boulding's notion of peaks and mesas, which also relates to outcomes and goals.
Anne Leslie: Rethinking Sovereignty in Practice: Directions of Travel over Finish Lines
Anne starts out her essay by writing that
I’ve spent a lot of time trying to move the digital sovereignty conversation away from endless debates about definitions and toward something more outcome-focused. That felt like progress at the time — more pragmatic, more operational, less abstract.
But over the past months, I’ve realised something uncomfortable: in complex environments, outcomes can become just another trap.
They give the illusion of clarity, but they collapse nuance. They risk turning rich, evolving landscapes into binary success/failure narratives. And too often, they become targets that distort behaviour rather than illuminate reality.
This realisation prompted me to look again at my assumptions and refine how I navigate this space.
A lot of that shift has been influenced by learning from Dave Snowden and his thinking on complexity, especially Estuarine Mapping. For those unfamiliar with his extensive body of work, here’s the essential insight that I'm finding very helpful:
In complex systems — systems that shift, swirl and refuse to sit still — you cannot define an end‑state and march toward it. The ground moves. The constraints move. You move. So instead of pretending the future is stable, you start from where you actually are and ask:
Given this reality, what directions of travel are genuinely open to us?
This, Anne, wrote "This has been a clarifying lens for me as I think about digital sovereignty."
What, we wondered did this mean about hyper-polarization and our hope for a better civic future? Certainly the social, economic, and political systems that we are talking about are complex adaptive systems. We've been writing about that for a long time. (See here, here, and here.) And, as those and other writings suggest, we completely agree with the notion that complex systems cannot be addressed the same way that complicated (but designed) systems can. You cannot predict the result of inputs or changes to complex systems. You have to take your best guess about what might be helpful, try it, monitor the results, and change if necessary. Given the scale and chaotic nature of social systems, the best one can usually do is nudge society in a more positive direction.
But we never went so far as to say (or think) that you cannot "define an end state and march toward it," though, after reading Anne's article and a bit of Dave Snowden's work, we completely see why they say this.
Still, we stand by the belief that, as Heidi frequently told her students in her class on reconciliation, "You can't get someplace (some imagined better future, aka, "reconciliation") if you don't know where or what that is." Maybe as a nod to Anne and Dave, we'll add the word "approximately." If you don't have any idea about what "reconciliation" is, how it might work or, or what goals you are trying to achieve, you'll just be wandering around aimlessly trying whatever feels good for whatever reason at the time. You need a pretty clear image of where a society is going wrong and what would be better. You then can consider different paths toward "better." Without this, you have a lot of contradictory efforts working at cross purposes with one another — producing something we call societal fibrillation.
That is, perhaps, where our image and Anne/Dave's images intersect. Anne suggested a more fruitful avenue of inquiry was "Given this reality [the nature of complex systems], what directions of travel are genuinely open to us?" We would add, and which go in a direction that most of us would like to go?
Given the highly polarized nature of the American social, economic, and political system, finding short paths to immediate or even quick consensus agreements on a way out of our troubles is not possible. And perversely, the easiest, widest paths are the ones that make things worse. It is easier to cling to our fearful/hateful views about the other, our sense that "our way" is the "right way," and "their way" is the "wrong way." It is easiest to keep working, as we always have, as advocates out to fight for our side and beat the "bad guys" either into submission, or political irrelevance. This might, for example, involve implementing new election rules that, in the name of "fairness," would effectively disenfranchise political opponents.
Heidi often used to have students do a version of Elise Boulding's future visioning exercise, in which Elise asked her students to "imagine a world without militaries." Heidi asked her students to imagine a country (the U.S. or other nation) without deep divisions, without hyper-polarization or actual or threatened political violence. Since most peacebuilding graduate students tend to be politically left, they usually came up with an image of a country that fully embraced the progressive political agenda with respect to climate, race, gender, and other issues.
When Heidi asked how they'd "get there," the assumption was either that conservatives would either decide that they were wrong and that they should join the progressive side, or alternatively, or they might imagine a world in which conservatives would routinely be outvoted and overpowered. Or perhaps they would just leave or otherwise disappear.
"Do you really think such an ideological transformation is possible? Do you really think that defeated Republicans will just slink away and be quiet?" Heidi would ask. "Will they leave the country?" "Well, no," her students admitted, then coming to the understanding that their imagined future is highly unlikely and, if it were to come to pass, would not be one of peace, but rather one of continued struggle. Putting it in Anne's terms, there were no open paths to get to where they wanted. So Heidi would send her students back to their desks to come up with an image of a future in which everyone would want to live — a future in which there would more likely be available paths to get there. The resulting essays were very different and much more feasible!
Coming back to Anne's essay, she went on to write that the distinction between end goals, or "finish lines" as she put it, and directions of travel helped her think about digital sovereignty differently.
It’s helped me see why definitions are unsatisfactory (because they force false binaries), and why outcomes are unsatisfactory (because they imply predictability where there is none). What we need instead is a more honest way of navigating, one that reflects the shifting tides we’re actually operating within.
What does this mean in terms of de-polarization, a new civic path, or reconciliation? We still think it is useful to understand what reconciliation could mean. Heidi always taught that reconciliation was a continuum, not a dichotomy. Societies could be farther or closer to reconciliation (on one side) or civil war (on the other). None, likely, would be totally reconciled — especially if you define reconciliation as the absence of conflict. But we were always careful not to do that, because conflict scholars and many practitioners realize that conflict is both inevitable and beneficial, provided that it is carried out constructively. Guy has always said that "conflict is the engine of social learning." It arises when somebody has an idea for making things better and others disagree (or are, at least, not yet convinced). Without conflict, societies get stuck in ruts (or worse) and are unable to improve upon the status quo or adapt when inevitable changes occur.
So, is focusing on outcomes "a trap," as Anne says in her essay? It is, if one assumes the outcome is an end state to be reached and then all is well (indeed, sort of like "finish lines" in a race, after which you are done.)
But "outcome" can also be seen more as a horizon or what many people call a "North Star." Both signify something we use as a reference point to guide us in the general direction that we are aiming toward, But in the case of horizons, we know we'll never get there. We may get to a point that we can see on the horizon right now but, just as Anne says, "the ground moves. The constraints move. You move." The horizon moves. Obstacles pop up along the way and we need to change course. But we are not aiming in a random direction. We know, generally, where we need to go.
A related distinction is the one we make (adapted originally from John Burton) between conflicts and disputes. Conflicts are the long-running tensions that pervade all societies and disputes are the episodes that occur within the context of such conflicts. (For instance the current Israel-US-Iran war is one dispute within the much longer running conflict between the same three countries.) While it may make sense to think in terms of a desirable outcome for a specific dispute, that's not the same as imagining a world in which the underlying conflict disappears. That is seldom a path that is open to us, nor would it be a desirable one, if one believes that, as Guy says, "conflict is the engine of social learning."
Let's look at Anne's thoughts about what this approach means. First, she says,
We should think of directions, rather than destinations. Destinations imply a singular, definitive endpoint. Directions acknowledge movement in a volatile landscape.
That makes sense in our notion of horizons. We know roughly the direction we want to move toward, though we don't necessarily have a firm destination in mind. We certainly don't have a "finish line" after which our work is done, though ideally, we will have milestones that we hope to reach along the way. Peacebuilding work or civic renewal work is never going to be done. Even if we happen to meet all the challenges we have identified now (highly unlikely), there will be new challenges that come up. So the race or walk or journey never ends. Life is what happens to us as we walk on our chosen path.
Secondly, Anne says we should think in terms of vectors, rather than outcomes. Vectors, she explains, "give you direction + speed + momentum — the shape of movement. Outcomes give you a checkbox." Yes, this corresponds to our notion of moving toward the horizon, but I don't know if you can predict your speed and your momentum, as these depend on the amount of power you have (which is constantly changing) and the number and type of obstacles you encounter. We think it makes more sense to think in terms of a series of vectors separated by course corrections. That said, we agree that the image of direction is much better than a check box or a finish line.
Thirdly, she says you should think of "conditions and dispositions, rather than end states. ...End‑states pretend you can “finish” complexity. Dispositions help you shape the system so it tends toward desirable behaviours."
We agree, and would add that focusing too much on end states can also prevent you from changing direction when it becomes apparent that your earlier goals are no longer so desirable or attainable. So, for instance, we can engage in bridging activities that help increase the trust in the system (which might be considered a "disposition"). Or one can change the system structurally (for instance by utilizing open-primaries to increase access to voting), or any of hundreds of other "tweaks" to the system. None of these are end states. All are vehicles to help us get toward our hoped for horizon which is greatly reduced hyper-polarization, increased security, well being, effective governance, or however you want to define your primary goal or North Star.
Anne ends her essay by saying:
What I find incredibly helpful about Estuarine Mapping is that it gives us evocative language, a powerful metaphor and a discipline for this kind of thinking. It’s not about being vague or lowering ambition. It’s about being honest about the environments we’re operating in, and designing movements we can actually sustain.
It’s helped me shift away from the comforting simplicity of “closing the gap to a vision” and toward something more grounded:
- Start from a clear-eyed view of the present
- Choose real directions based on current constraints
- Nudge the system through small, safe-to-fail probes
- Track vectors, not promises
- Adjust as reality shifts
These all are excellent principles that can be applied to civic renewal work. So while we are not willing to give up on our notion of goals or the need to identify them, we think that Anne's caveat that they cannot be written in stone and seen as unchangeable is key. Everything in complex systems is not only changeable; it changes. We need to keep that in mind.
A Related Idea: Kenneth Boulding’s Peaks and Mesas
Another idea that seems worth sharing here is Kenneth Boulding's notion of peaks and mesas and his related saying "The best is the enemy of the good." The idea is that you can think about the problem of deciding what the future should be, or what your goal for society should be, in terms of a peak. So you're trying to find the penultimate best — a place where everything is, finally, perfect. Everyone has all their interests and needs met, everybody gets along well with everyone else, the proverbial "and they all lived happily ever after" point.
Or you can think of the humanity's choices more as a mesa. What you really don't want to do is to fall off the cliffs at the edge of the mesa, where conditions are dangerous and hostile. This suggests that the focus should be on getting everyone on top of the mesa and then giving people the freedom to find which particular place on the mesa top that they find most attractive.
This suggests that our top priority should be to focus on things that could go really badly and fix those first, so we don't fall off a cliff. And right now, many people seem to agree that we are sliding down the slippery slope toward a very big cliff. One of the things that we've written about is "failures of the imagination." That was the line that was used after 9/11, when nobody had imagined terrorists would fly airplanes into buildings. Right now, we're not imagining what could go wrong with the current political catastrophe with anywhere near the realism that we think is required. And, if we had a better sense of how bad things could get, maybe we would quit worrying about all the little things that currently upset and divide us, and start working on the big things.
Now, of course, both sides will likely say "that's what we are doing!" because the cliff is destroyed democracy, so "saving democracy" is the big thing and we're working as hard as we can on that, either by trying to decisively beat Trump/MAGA or the Dems in the next election. But alas, many of those folks seem to be thinking in terms of pushing the other side off the mesa, rather than finding a way in which we can all peacefully live together on the mesa top.
That's where we really need to better understand the system we are in, and the paths that are open to us. The traditional path of power-over, I'll fight you for it rules" is big, open, and easy to follow. And it is leading us to ruin. We need to follow, instead, a series of narrower, twistier paths that will lead us up toward a more power-with society. We don't know where, exactly, those paths go, or what obstacles will be in our way. But we know the big power-over path is leading us off the cliff. Let's try to climb back up the slippery slope to the top of the mesa. And to do that, we need to know where that mesa is in relation to the cliffs and what direction we need to walk, in order to get there.
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Two or three times a week, Guy and Heidi Burgess, the BI Directors, share some of our thoughts on political hyper-polarization and related topics. We also share essays from our colleagues and other contributors, and every week or so, we devote one newsletter to annotated links to outside readings that we found particularly useful relating to U.S. hyper-polarization, threats to peace (and actual violence) in other countries, and related topics of interest. Each Newsletter is posted on BI, and sent out by email through Substack to subscribers. You can sign up to receive your copy here and find the latest newsletter here or on our BI Newsletter page, which also provides access to all the past newsletters, going back to 2017.
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