Organizational Communication: Systems Thinking in Action

July 28, 2025

When people hear "Organizational Communication," they picture someone trained to run meetings, take notes, or manage office logistics. I studied something far more intricate: the architecture of connection. I learned how information flows (or doesn't), how invisible forces like power shape interactions, and how culture emerges not from slogans or values statements, but from rituals, silences, and design choices.

That program became my first structured introduction to systems thinking. It taught me to see organizations not as charts or checklists, but as living ecosystems of interaction where friction, feedback, and alignment shape outcomes just as much as budgets and deadlines do.

My journey to systems thinking wasn't linear. I started college as a Biology major, but early on, I felt drawn to the social sciences others in STEM paths insisted were "soft." My first social science course was Introduction to Sociology, and that class cracked something open. Human systems, I discovered, were every bit as complex and interesting as chemical evolution, the development of antibiotics-resistant strains of bacteria, and populations of animals and plants that had been geographically isolated from their parent species and eventually, over generations, become something uniquely adapted to their new surroundings.

As the semesters passed, I found myself drawn to social science courses wherever I could make them fit in as electives. History, Sociology, Anthropology—I devoured them all. Having spent a decade in the corporate tech world before going back to school as a non-traditional student, it wasn't long before I began applying my new knowledge to the organizational systems in which I'd functioned in the past. I learned of a degree path that focused on the study of human organizational systems. Even better, it also focused on the development of strong writing and web content development skills. I knew I'd found my niche. I transferred earlier science credits into a Science minor and powered through the courses I needed to complete my bachelor's in Organizational Communication. I even managed to hit my original goal of graduating in four years.

The year after graduation, I snagged a gig writing UX copy for Samsung's Bixby AI and developed curiosity about a new kind of system: Artificial Intelligence. Designed to mimic the function and outputs of the human brain, it felt like a natural extension of my previous work studying biological and social systems. While working in my next technical writing role, I enrolled in a master's degree program in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. It wasn't just intellectually rigorous, it also felt deeply personal to my neurodivergent brain, which has always lived in the liminal space between human and technical logic.

This framing transformed the way I write and design technical content, and it helped me beef up the coding skills I hadn't flexed much since my high school courses in Visual Basic and Web Design. Unless you count the markup languages I used every day as a technical writer, anyway—I always say no word processor will ever beat the flexibility of HTML!

I also design documentation and content with accessibility in mind, not just for neurodivergent developers, but for the whole disability spectrum. Not only is accessible design best practice, an estimated 25% (and rising) of the worldwide population have disabilities, translating into millions of people just in North America who may need some type of accommodation to be able to do their best work. I consider designing accessible content with predictable formatting, scannable reference sections, screen reader support, and accessible color schemes and fonts the least I can do for my colorblind, dyslexic, vision impaired, and Hard of Hearing colleagues.

Understanding systems—human, technical, or somewhere in between—is central to how I write, design, and communicate. Whether I'm building knowledge base content, adapting legacy policies to meet current regulatory controls, or mapping team collaboration patterns, every project is an opportunity to model clarity at scale.