Tools and Processes for Systems Work
(This is part two of a write-up of my experience and learnings from UnSchool Christchurch. It focusses on tools and processes I found particularly useful. Here’s more about the general setup of the week)
I have found processes and tools a useful support when working in an emergent, uncertain environment—whether that’s the content of the work (we don’t know more until we’ve tried something) or the environment (funding based on results and findings).
Process gives me something to hold on to. It provides a further step to seek more information, and certainty, when I don’t have any idea of what to do next.
Filling out a canvas like the value proposition one or doing some user interviews are something to fall back on when we don’t have enough information or certainty to proceed.
Below are some snippets from some of the sessions at UnSchool that I found particularly useful in regards to systems mapping and interview. And—surprise—I’ve compiled a list of tools and steps to follow at the bottom.
Three Types of Systems
Systems fall into three different and related categories:
- The social system — cultural, intangible (eg community, language, law, religion, gender)
- The industrial system — the physical manifestations of social systems (eg prison, justice, school, academia)
- The ecosystem — the natural side of things(eg tides, the weather, the body)
As an example, religion would be a social system, whilst physical places of worship would be the industrial equivalent. Similarly, the law is a social system, whilst the court falls under industrial. It would be equivalent for learning and schools; status and celebrities; conflict and war; knowledge and academia etc. The ecosystem includes things like the weather, geology, tides etc.
The main reason this differentiation is useful, is because it helps work out whether we need to shift mindsets (social) or their physical manifestations. It became clear to me that the social system often seemed more powerful (and challenging) as a point to intervene.
Spheres of Influence
Spheres of influence are the areas in our lives that we have ability to influence. It could be the message we spread amongst our group of friends, what we choose to buy (or not) as a family, if I make a submission to a council hearing, my social media circles, my fashion industry knowledge and connections, my social entrepreneurship community, my sports team or my professional area of expertise. This sphere might vary if I’m an academic, sports person, teacher, mayor, CEO, grassroots organiser etc. For a CEO it might be the ability to implement a company-wide policy (everyone must take all their holiday leave every year), whereas a community organiser might have the influence to mobilise people to come to an event or protest (a beach clean-up day). Or as another example, someone who sits on the parent committee for a local primary school might have more ability to influence what’s happening at the school than someone who isn’t on the committee/someone who can’t relate to the experience of having a young person in their care attend a school/someone who doesn’t live in the neighbourhood/someone who didn’t attend school etc.
Mapping out spheres of influences can be a helpful starting point for working out where to start when it comes to making a positive difference. What do you know more about than someone else? The local transport system, how Politics works, where our clothes come from, what it costs to cater nourishing meals to people?
Systems mapping
One UnSchool afternoon, the cohort split into two groups to hear from two different members of the community from Addington, an inner-city Christchurch suburb, as part of an observation and research exercise. I was part of a group that went to the Court Theatre, tasked to listen intently, make notes of the macro (weather, setting etc), meso (What is in the area? Who do we see?) to the micro (What are people wearing? Are they talking in a particular way?). Listening to the director of the theatre Phil, we heard the story of the temporary location of the theatre, displaced in the 2011 earthquake. The other group heard from a Council staff member who spoke about the water quality of a local river, the runoff (pollution) from the local industry and other challenges to improve the state of the river.
Following our respective kōrero, we met back at our headquarters and the groups mapped out their observations. It was a quick and dirty exercise of writing down anything of note, no matter how minute, and then start making connections between them. Interestingly, the two stories started connecting. The Court Theatre, as a large business in the area, was inadvertently part of the group of industry players contributing to local pollution. The exercise demonstrated the effectiveness of observation, and the importance of sharing thoughts and details to work out the links.
We explored another way of mapping a system when we explored the role of gun violence.
Drawing a large circle, the idea was to write the contributing factors around the outside of the circle. In our instance this was anything from racism to fear, protection, mistrust, masculinity, constitutional rights, the patriarchy and about 20 more (again, something based on our own biases and what we respectively think are the contributing factors to the issue). We then drew lines between the different words which we felt had a connection to each other (eg protection to patriarchy, isolation to fear, death to accidental death, to toddler, to family). Once we couldn’t think of more lines to draw, we looked at the web we’d created and tried to identify the clusters of lines overlapping. The idea is that the most overlapping parts hint at a number of interrelated parts, which might point towards a point of leverage (mechanically or emotionally or culturally) which could be further explored.
For my group, this resulted in exploring the role of the adult person in the family feeling the need to protect their loved ones and thus owning a gun. We explored ways to educate those to learn about the likelihood of being shot by a stranger in their home compared to accidentally being killed by their toddler (or toddlers shooting themselves). We came up with a prototype: an envelope that people picked up in bars which picked up on the fear factor (along the lines of ‘are you worried about the safety of your family?’) enticing them to come along to an educational session about the actual dangers and safe storage of guns in the home. It might be a simplistic approach, yet having considered our sphere of influence (in this instance social/cultural rather than legislative) it felt like something we could feasibly do.
Finally the globally renowned Rebecca Mills, ran an awesome session where she shared a bunch of her own practical process-centric tools and insights (which we could use right away). She also introduced us to the Sticky Donut of Planetary Boundaries and the Oxfam-amended version (see left) which lists the implications of those boundaries on humans.
While sharing with us her methods for where to intervene in a system she told us a wonderful story on identifying points of leverage. In her recent work on New Zealand water quality (which is abysmal), she identified (across 18 months of research) that much of the New Zealand knowledge on our land was traditionally not written down, but spread through the myths and stories of the tangata whenua (indigenous people of the land) who have lived in harmony with our rivers for centuries. This insight resulted in an initiative called Voice of the River, which is seeking to spread more of that precious knowledge to empower people across the land to become a kaitiaki (guardian) to regenerate waterways around them.
Conclusion
Following Rebecca’s session and everything else we’d done that week, I came up with an order for the tools and resources I’d picked up during the week:
- Envision the world you strive to create (for example: What would a thriving local economy in Wellington look and feel like? What does an equitable New Zealand look like? What does a workplace without gender bias feel like?)
- Work out what your current sphere of influence is
- Who do you need to work with? (Bec referred to the overlap between people who have the ability to execute, who dream big, and who can make work fun)
- Decide which part of the planetary boundary donut (for environmental work) or the Oxfam-amended version (for more socio-cultural work) you’re tackling
- What are the crisis points/opportunities? (rekindle started as a creative and practical response to Christchurch’s devastating earthquake; Anteater supplies insect-based protein during a time where it takes 15,000L to produce a kilo of beef)
- Do your fair share of analysis and research (desk, quant, action etc). Who’s the best person you can ask who knows most about the subject?(Question courtesy of Nick Gerritsen, one of the other provocateurs)
- Define your scope (say you want to work on isolation as a topic, you may choose to only work with the elderly/young/urban folk, as opposed to everyone; constraints on geography, audience, media utilised etc)
- Work out which system it is you’re seeking to intervene in, and map it
- Identify points of leverage
- Ask yourself: What are the causes, what are the symptoms? What are the patterns of behaviour? What’s the structural relationship creating the symptoms?
- Identify the macro (systems, infrastructure, structure), meso (buildings and business) and micro (human) levels and identify what links these (pathways and symptoms)
- Ideate and prototype based on your research (there’s a ton of resources out there on ideation).
- Iterate
Important notes to help with your sanity
In the end, all systems are connected if you take enough time to connect them. When trying to intervene in one, it’s most useful to limit the scope. This may be around the sphere of influence that the intervening players have or other restrictions — but either way, it’s useful to have one.
Lastly, most radical interventions don’t start big. They start as small projects that grow in influence.
Closing Thoughts
In particular thinking back to the work I’ve done before turning to social impact work (fashion and advertising namely), I have often wondered if and how I should use my knowledge of those industries to shift the distribution of power. Every time we invest days/months/years into a particular industry, we learn more about it than someone who doesn’t. Those learnings contribute to our sphere of influence through the knowledge we acquire, the connections we make and the inner workings that we gain an understanding of.
How do we mobilise our observations, experiences, connections and insights to make a positive difference in the world?
