- Acknowledge the messy complexity of the world.
- Embrace the web of messy interrelationships in any given system as part of what makes life and our world what it is.
- Practice periodically zooming out to see the “big picture” to consider the dynamics between interconnected elements
If you are like me, finding your life balance may feel like a never ending puzzle. I am constantly adjusting the system components and noticing the patterns that make up my life. I juggle how to be a present wife, stay connected and close to family and friends across the world, meet the objectives of my job, get enough sleep, and prepare myself nutritious food. Every week I co-manage our household finances and other “adulting” tasks while also trying to stay spiritually connected, have some fun, and contemplate how to serve a higher purpose with my actions. Like a busy chef, some of those things regularly get moved to the back-burner while I sautee the main course of the moment. Sometimes the back burner’s contents boil over from not watching them for a while, and I have to pause the whole operation for a moment in order to clean up and reorganize the kitchen. Adulting is not easy and many tasks are musts rather than options, so when things become challenging, this is when it is most important to remember to not stress the mess.
Similarly, if you watch me scramble through a day as a learning leader, you might witness a blur of meetings, classroom visits, Zoom calls covering programs, standards, professional development, assessments, alignment, data, strategies, and more. I am constantly striving to design systems in order to cause the most purposeful learning, but at the end of each day, the amount of interconnections can feel like more of a foe than friend. This is yet another moment to call in “don’t stress the mess. ”
“Don’t stress the mess” can be there for us in the complexity of our lives and careers, and fortunately it can also serve us in the collective work we do as systems thinkers around local and global sustainability. Sustainability work is more challenging than ever before. It is messier than the chef scene from any of our lives or jobs due to its scope and scale. As you may know, today’s youth (and many adults, myself included) have unprecedented levels of eco-anxiety. It is possible you or your students have perceived an increase in narratives about how humans are not interacting harmoniously with earth systems and each other. When faced with the sheer quantity and gravity of the sustainability problems, it can be challenging for anxiety to not turn into complacency, climate doomism… or even worse, the mindset, that humans can no longer do any good and somehow deserve an unlivable future on the planet. This is the most critical place to use our habits of mind, in order to move forward with hope and agency. Not stressing the mess allows us to seek to understand the challenges around us, and find our leverage points in order to positively contribute to them in ways that are within our reach.
Although practicing this habit of mind is not easy for me, here are some connections I have.
Pay attention to and prioritize what is most urgent and important
From that non-stop day in my the life as an educator-leader, sometimes paying attention to what is most important has meant letting emails stack up for a couple days in order to have time to focus on creating systems-level policies. From my years working in a sustainability club with students, this once meant pivoting from collaboration with the cafeteria to reduce plastic to focusing on peer education because student actions with the cafeteria utensils was threatening the cafeteria’s commitment to staying single use plastic-free. What is most urgent can change from week to week, so being flexible about priorities is vital to reducing threats in the present, while not neglecting investments into the future of any project or plan. For me, the Iceberg tool helps me keep crescent systems, and mental models that have more impact on a sustainable future than events alone.
Practice habit-of-mind and tool stacking
To get maximum benefit as systems thinkers, we can pair “don’t stress the mess,” with other habits of mind and systems thinking tools. Each year I worked with students to identify the most needed and potentially impactful sustainability projects might be the school community– a greenhouse? Campaigns on waste reduction? Meatless Mondays? This generative phase usually created a larger-than-practical list. To not stress the possibilities of all the things that could be tackled, you can rely on other habits of mind. What might it mean to “ get perspective” in this situation? We frequently asked members of the parent community, maintenance staff or the DEI committee for input on what is best and why. We often used surveys to further broaden that perspective. Now we sometimes even yse AI to consider another perspective. Once we get our top ideas, we use a Compass to with our ideas on it to “look for loops,” or use an Iceberg to “imagine the possibilities” of innovating new systems and mental models. If you have experienced the magic of one tool or habit alone, then you can understand how stacking them can feel like a big jump in clarity and strategy. Working through Compass Education’s Pyramid Lite brings home this point about how using multiple tools and habits of mind together can create more sustainable reality from an initial vision.
Avoid the trap of perfectionism
“Don’t stress the mess” reminds me to not act as a perfectionists, nor seek perfection in others or within systems. Even if we employ every Compass tool, our personal lives, our relationships, our jobs, and our roles as agents of sustainability change, they are going to keep being messy, non-linear, and containing many things we can’t control. This may be intimidating, and although we may not get everything perfect, we can always try our best and continue our learning. For many years in facilitating youth in sustainability work, I feared what might go wrong as they implemented their ideas, especially within large, public-facing events. What I learned is that the opportunity to try things and even discover how imperfect our planning was, pushed us all to learn more and understand all the interconnections more deeply while also growing greater trust for each other in our interconnectedness. I stopped needing to try to manage everything to perfection, and as they grew in their ability to work as a team and solve problems together on the spot, I became a true facilitator for them and the work itself became more sustainable.
Systems work isn’t meant to live in theory. It exists to empower us to take the most appropriate actions we can each day for ourselves, and to share that empowerment with our communities. In the course of writing this article, I found myself feeling very stuck and was precisely stressing a mess. I thought about quitting and wondered why I even signed up to tell people about “don’t stress the mess” when I have such a hard time with it myself. But the next day after a bit of rest, my question became my answer. I ended up laughing at myself at the realization that I’m writing this article because it is precisely what I need to remember to do, and because we all won’t get better at this habit of mind if we give up on it when things get hard.
So whether you are about to tackle your own finances, or a school compost project, “don’t stress the mess” is there to ground you with the idea that a complex challenge won’t be easy to solve, but you have strategies and tools as systems thinkers that can always help you to sort things out.
Author

Britta McCarthy
Britta is a nature-lover from Flagstaff, Arizona currently located in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia serving as the Learning Director of the American International School of Jeddah. Prior to that, she lived and worked in Latin America for 12 years.
Britta has been a long time champion of sustainability work as part of her education career as a science and social studies teacher. She began her Compass journey in 2017, and now considers it one of her main tools for learning about and solving complex problems in the academic curriculum and as part of school leadership.