Natural resource management is becoming increasingly complex. Many rural landscapes are already in transition, driven by a range of socio-economic and ecological factors. Climate change adds further complexity and uncertainty to these dynamics. Resilience thinking offers one approach for dealing with complexity and a number of regions around Australia have already adopted a resilience or systems-based approach to planning. A major criticism of the resilience approach is that it fails to deal well with multiple, dynamic futures and the large amount of change expected with climate change. To this end, we have trialled the integration of climate adaptation pathways thinking with a resilience-based approach. The adaptation pathways approach has a deliberate focus on exploring significant change and differing futures. We will report on the initial efforts to bring these approaches together through a series of stakeholder workshops that have explored issues from biodiversity conservation, irrigation infrastructure management and food security. Workshop participants report that the process brings new insights and, unexpectedly, a sense of optimism and agency for thinking about future challenges.