1. We live in systems: Becoming aware of what surrounds us
We live in systems.
A few hours before the turn of the decade, my best friend was in Merimbula on the south coast of New South Wales, trying to make a judgment call about whether to stay or evacuate.
Bushfires had cut off the Bega Highway, but the Snowy Mountains Highway was still open. If the wind didn’t change, It might be possible to make a break for it.
On the one hand, the risk of staying in this small coastal town with overstretched supplies: no petrol, no food in the supermarket, and the risk of losing power and phone reception.
On the other hand, the risk of being on the road if the winds changed direction and the fires suddenly crossed the highway.
The fires had come down overnight from the Clyde Mountain, faster than any weather model had predicted. The speed of the burning was the result of the extreme heat and the huge build-up of fuel.
The fuel build-up had come about because the fire service had not carried out planned burns to reduce fuel loads — partly because the government had cut the fire service’s budget (by a third), but mostly because 2019’s record temperatures and severe drought made it unsafe to do even controlled burns.
The drought was caused by the natural ENSO cycle in Australia, exacerbated by the mismanagement of Australia’s river systems. Since the early 90s, a complex system of water trading meant that businesses upriver are able to siphon off water to sell it back to the community, leading to parched rivers and mass fish die-offs.
The unusual heat was the result of the warming climate, global warming caused by greenhouse gas emissions — to which Australia’s fossil fuel exports are a major contributor.
The failure of Australia’s government to address these issues, despite the popularity of climate action among the Australian population, is the result of a system of lobbying and special interest campaigning that goes back decades.
So: weather systems, logistical systems, economic systems, political systems, social systems — all these factors overlap and interact in complex ways, and the result is a family watching the smoke approach on the horizon on new years eve, having to make the decision: stay and face the firefront, or make a break for it?
The bushfires over new years 2020 hit my home hard. Friends were evacuated, people I love lost houses, hundreds of millions of animals burned to death. Now I’m writing this in June 2020, during the 2020 coronavirus epidemic, amidst riots in the USA and escalating state violence in the Philippines.
These events are not unrelated, and they are not going to stop. As Dan Hill put it in his Slowdown Papers:
‘In fact, the disasters were designed by us. And so they were normal. Or perhaps, there is no normal. These events were bound to happen. Effectively, horribly, they were planned for, albeit accidentally. Whether conscious or not, they are the outcomes of the systems that we have designed, working precisely as they should.’
So it feels like a moment to examine these systems, to take stock of them, and to change them. But to change them, we first have to be able to see them. So maybe one task for us at this moment is to build our ability to see the systems we’re embedded in.
I’m writing this in June 2020. At this moment — like all moments — the future is uncertain.
Whatever else it has done, Covid-19 has knocked our global society out of its previous state and into a whole other regime. No matter how long we wait, the world will not return to where it was.
At this moment, no-one knows what the outcome of this change will be. We are still very much in that period of shock and transition — which may either stabilise into a new paradigm, or else usher in a prolonged emergency of shock upon shock.
At this moment, we need tools and frameworks that can help us manage complexity and cope with ambiguity.
My practice
I’m a playwright, storyteller and game designer. For the last decade and a half, I’ve worked with government, business and research institutions to model complex systems and future scenarios.
I turn these models into rich experiences for people to engage with, using narrative, design and interactivity.
Presented as games, performances and workshops, these models are designed to help people understand the systems they’re part of, to help them make better decisions, and to train useful skills.
What follows are my notes and observations towards a way of model-building that captures some of the richness of human experience. These narrative models work alongside data-driven models, not separate or in opposition to.
In this series, I look at the science of systems, the practice of systems modelling, and how that has played out in my projects: via ants nests, koalas, music festivals, Swedish forests, murdered boy band members, Indigenous narratives, utopian governments, approaching typhoons and aquarium heists.
Not intended as a textbook, this is more a set of tools and techniques that have worked for me, observations, meditations on things that were successful and other things that failed.
I’m writing in this moment — June 2020 — in the spirit of reflection, considering what this abrupt shock might have to teach me about my own practice, and where to next. This is writing as discovery, and I hope you take it in that spirit.
The parts and the whole
Science is often focused on taking things apart to look at them in isolation. But in the real world, everything is messy, everything is connected. As climate scientist Will Steffen puts it, ‘Once you take a piece of a system out and study it in isolation, you lose something, because it doesn’t behave that way when you put it back.’
Systems thinking is an attempt to understand the parts in relation to the whole.
A system is made up of many simple parts that are connected — ants in an anthill, neurons in a brain, people in a crowd. Systems are made up of smaller sub-systems, like a muscle cell nested within a heart, and a heart within a circulatory system.
There are climate systems, social systems and political systems — and they are all interconnected and linked.
Complicated vs Complex
One useful distinction I learned from Brian Walker is between systems that are complex and those that are merely complicated.
A complicated systems is like a cuckoo clock made up of lots of different cogs and gears: big cogs driven by smaller cogs. There are many parts, but the size and behaviour of each part doesn’t change. The way the system behaves is linear and predictable — it’s a more complicated version of a simple system like a bike with gears.
Complex systems, on the other hand, are made up of different kinds of interacting entities. Each part of the system responds in different ways as conditions change, and the whole system is modified over time. No-one is in control.
Brian uses the example of an insect ecology. The insects interact with each other and the whole system depends on these interactions. But some groups of insects are only loosely connected with other groups, and there are many different types of bugs. Each generation of bugs is slightly different to what came before, and they respond differently to changes.
The systems is self-organising — in the language of systems science, it displays ‘emergent properties’.
Most of the systems we really value are complex systems — farms, businesses, cities, rivers, nations, communities and our own bodies.
Constant change
Complex systems are constantly changing. In your body, cells are constantly regenerating, replacing themselves, you are growing, ageing, learning, changing. You might be healthy one day and run a temperature the next — you’re never completely at rest.
Forum for the Future’s Anna Birney points out:
‘Too often we approach change as a something we are working to prevent. This places us in a position of conflict with living systems, as we try to hold them in their current state. The alternative is to harness the energies of change, like a surfer rides a wave, in order to actively engage and see some order within apparent disorder and uncertainty.’
The humility of systems thinking
Taking a systems view forces us to accept several limitations in our planning. First of all, we can never fully understand complex systems. Unlike the cuckoo clock, we can’t take the system apart to see its inner workings, or carry out tests in a controlled environment. With a complex system, we have to make decisions without all the information we’d like — and still be responsible for the consequences.
Secondly, in complex systems we cannot only do one thing. Whether we want it to or not, any step we take will affect many other things. We must learn to cope with side effects.
In my practice, I work with governments, businesses, research orgs, to find ways to better think about the systems we’re part of. Some of the systems that I’ve looked at include:
- A hundred thousand hectare rainforest in Indonesia
- An outdoor music festival with an audience of 10,000
- A high school facing budget cuts and staffing challenges
- A nature reserve on the southern edge of Stockholm
- A coastal town in south-east Asia facing typhoon threats
- A city government attempting to put in place climate action measures
- A bank with an annual turnover of £500 million facing a set of climate impacts.
These are what scientists might call social-ecological systems — where human systems intersect with natural/ecological systems.
Of course, in the present era, most systems fit that definition. In the Anthropocene, I think we’re all very aware that nothing human exists outside of nature — and nothing non-human has been unaffected by humanity.
What can we see through this lens
So what’s the value of looking at things through the systems lens? What can we do using this approach that we can’t do otherwise?
For me, the thing that systems thinking gives us is an awareness of certain patterns that exist in the world.
Whether ants in an anthill, neurons in a brain, traders in a stock market or web users on the internet, all complex systems seem to behave in similar ways and share intriguing properties.
Some of these properties include:
Thresholds — Social-ecological systems can exist in different states. When a system changes too much it crosses a threshold and it will shift to a new state, often quite abruptly.
Feedback loops — When systems react to their changes, that’s a feedback loop. Positive feedback loops — such as when a microphone is placed too close to a speaker and the signal jumps from speaker to microphone again and again, resulting in a high pitched sound — are powerful drivers of change.
Prisoner’s dilemmas — Situations where, if everyone would like to do something but, if everyone does it, everyone is worse off, are known as ‘prisoner’s dilemmas’. We see these situations emerge again and again in very different contexts.
Emergence — When vast numbers of components interact in a system with no central control or leader, they display complex collective behaviour that is impossible to predict by looking at the individual components.
On a personal level, I find this really extraordinary. Why do these patterns keep emerging in such diverse settings? Are there universal rules that both birds in a flock and companies in a market are obeying? If so, where do those rules come from?
On a practical level, knowledge of these patterns is a really useful shorthand.
Once we become aware of these patterns, we can plan for them, we can anticipate them and work with them, rather than simply being buffeted by them.
The Waters Foundation lists a series of ways in which understanding the behaviour of complex systems can help us in our daily lives.
Koalas with stomach problems
One of my favourite examples of using the systems lens in practice comes from the Murray-Darling region of Australia a few years ago. Conservationists were noticing koalas in the region were developing digestive illnesses. In order to help the koalas, they needed to understand where the problem was coming from.
- The conservationists determined that the digestive illness was caused by the koalas eating the wrong kind of eucalyptus leaf.
- The reason they were eating these leaves was because there weren’t enough of their preferred kind of trees.
- The reason there weren’t enough of their preferred tree was that farmers were clearing more land for grazing than they had previously.
- The reason they were clearing more land was because they suddenly needed to make greater profits every year.
- The reason they needed to make greater profits was because the banks had raised the interest rates on their loans.
- So to help the koalas, the conservationists went to negotiate with the banks to lower their interest rates for the farmers in the region.
This is a beautiful example of looking at a problem systemically in order to figure out where and how to implement change.
Systems right now
The present moment is an overload in a lot of senses.
A virus, triggered by the expansion of humans into close proximity with animal populations, has jumped from bat populations to ours (probably via an intermediary species). Our tightly connected global travel network has transported the virus to every country on the planet, where it has come into contact with vastly different social and political systems. The result has been death and devastation, mediated by the different conditions in which the virus has found itself.
We’ve seen systems and nations we thought were stable revealed to be utterly fragile, while others have proved their resilience. The situation is profoundly complex and the future is opaque.
In this context, the systems view for me provides a way to begin to grapple with this complexity. It offers a sense of purpose and possibility.
Systems thinking is not the answer to our problems — it’s just a lens through which to see the world. But it does offer the hope that we don’t need to throw our hands up and despair of ever grasping the situation.
We are already making decisions, individually and collectively, that are shaping the world post-covid. At the very least, systems offers us a lens to take into account the bigger picture as we navigate through the complexity of our day to day.
1. We live in systems: Becoming aware of what surrounds us
The disasters were designed by us — cuckoo clocks vs ants nests — the humility of systems thinking — seeing deep patterns — my practice as a writer, theatre artist and game designer, tools & techniques for thinking about the world
2. How to make a model: The art of systems modelling
What is a model? — maps on napkins vs satellite images — as simple as possible but no simpler — Best Festival Ever: modelling a disaster
3. A snapshot of everything: Tools for systems mapping
Mapping a Swedish forest — thousand year old oak trees — resilience assessments — a walk through the woods — Democratic Nature —
4. The future doesn’t exist: Scenarios and prediction
Why bother trying to predict the future? — the practice of creating scenarios — there are four possible futures — CrimeForce: LoveTeam
5. Narrative in systems: How to tell stories about complexity
Are theatre shows systems models? — underdog narratives & police procedurals — perspectives on an Indonesian rainforest in 95 Years or Less
6. Creating an experience: What design and dramaturgy teach us about worldbuilding
Theatre as rehearsal for revolution — dramaturgy & design thinking — tactility in Get The Kids and Run — collective experiences in Gobyerno
7. Don’t play games, make games: Interactivity in complex systems
Games are systems — game theory in Temperature Check — calculating risk in Busy Mayors — skilltesters vs decision-makers in Run A Bank
8. Lessons learned
Final thoughts — steering 9 billion people through a century of climate and global change — working with time instead of against it -
