Houda Boulahbel, PhD
Fellow of the Schumacher Institute
I began my career as a postdoctoral cancer researcher at leading institutions in the UK and Denmark, trained to go deep and narrow into the molecular mechanisms of cancer.
I later spent thirteen years working in pharmaceutical communications, designing and delivering medical education programmes intended to support clinical practice, and documenting the trends and challenges of the industry.
Across these very different settings, I kept encountering the same pattern. Zooming in at the molecular level, zooming out to the pharma industry, or working with clinicians in medical education, the problems looked different, but the dynamics were similar: silos between disciplines, solutions that work for a while and then fail, and problems that keep coming back despite sustained effort to solve them.
I learned that those kinds of problems are systemic and cannot be solved with one targeted solution.
I found myself asking the same question in every project:
How can we help individuals and organisations become better at recognising the systems they are already part of, and acting more intelligently within them?
I still think and work like a scientist, even years after I left the bench.
The Notebook is where I develop and share practical applications of Systems Intelligence. It is continuously evolving as a result of experimentation, real-world practice and collaboration.
You are invited to use the work, with attribution, reflect on it, and build on it.
And if you do, get in touch. I’d love to know what you discover.
About this notebook
Today, I help organisations develop the ability to recognise relationships, interdependencies and patterns, and to use that understanding to act more collaboratively in complex environments.
I call it Systems Intelligence.
I am particularly interested in the application of Systems Intelligence in education: how tools such as case studies, stories, conversations and artificial intelligence can make it part of everyday practice.
