Conference Closing Is the System the Strategy?

After seven weeks of exploring systems thinking through the lens of leadership, culture, and transformation, the 2025 Cosmic Conference comes full circle with a powerful closing conversation.Professor José Santos, Affiliated Professor of Practice in Global Management at INSEAD, joins Marilyn Zakhour to challenge and deepen the conference’s central idea: Is the system really the strategy?Together, they explore how leaders can move from managing parts to understanding the whole and why seeing organizations as living, interconnected systems may be the most strategic mindset of all.They discuss: 🔹 Why most leaders struggle to see systems and how to learn to see them 🔹 The difference between simple, complicated, and complex systems 🔹 How emergence and interaction shape performance over time 🔹 Why resilience comes from managing relationships, not parts 🔹 How imagination, observation, and time help leaders design better systemsThis closing session is a reflection on the essence of systems thinking, a bridge between theory and practice, between how we lead and how we live.