Systems Thinking workshop at Service Design Fringe Festival 2018
In October, Anastasia and I held a session on ‘Systems Thinking for delivering Service Design’ at Service Design Fringe Festival 2018. Thank you to those who came along :)
We’d like to share a recap of this session, including four key lessons so far from our research and practice, and some of our thoughts on what’s next.
Systems thinking for organisational change
I talked about my experience and learnings from working on a digital transformation project, and how some systems thinking tools can be useful for service designers involved in such kind of projects.
Lesson 1: Empower your digital team to understand systems
“Digital is not just a thing that you can buy and plug into the organization. It is multi-faceted and diffuse, and doesn’t just involve technology…It requires mixing people, machines, and business processes, with all of the messiness that entails.”
Harvard Business Review published an excellent article on why digital transformation fail. The article makes a point that digital transformation is not about creating a flashy digital product, but it is about organisational change that involves with adopting this digital product. Digital teams who work in large organisations need to understand not only about digital services but the complexity of implementing them within an organisation — and this is not easy at all!
Tools: Systems & Ecosystem map
Mapping as a way to understand and visualise complexity
Systems Thinking has various mapping tools to help your team to visualise the complexity around your digital service. It’s easy to get lost in the complexity, so it’s crucial to uncover the complexity together, to be on the same page.
Most service designers are familiar with mapping services. Systems mapping enables you to take it further by helping you to consider the system that the service exists within. Once you map the system, you can then ask which ecosystem does all or part of your system sits within.
Service < System < Ecosystem
In future, the digital self-service tool my team and I ran a pilot of, may be part of the system of financial advisory service. Each part of this financial advisory service belongs to a bigger ecosystem. A team of financial advisors belongs to an ecosystem of ‘product distributors’. Customers will belong to different communities — and an ecosystem of communities combined.
Lesson 2: Experiments (pilots) allow you to play safely within a system
Systems are something that a human brain cannot fully comprehend. Human brains are made to understand cause and effect, but are not good at understanding non-linear events, with multiple cause and effect. Computers are better at doing this.
However, what humans are good at, is experimenting — doing by learning. (Sure, computers are also good at that too — but only the experiments between computers). In order to create a digital service that will impact the organisation positively, you need to experiment within, at a small scale to understand the potential impact of changing the organisation.
Input Output Analysis
Tool to identify how to experiment within a system effectively
Even a complex system can be broken down to inputs, outputs and feedback loop. In the example of digital self-service tool, inputs may be customer information, product data and financial expertise, and outputs may be product, loan and interests if we simplify. Inputs are provided by suppliers, and outputs are received by recipients.
Experiments, or pilots are a rapid way of doing the input-output-feedback cycle at a small scale. Running experiments can feel daunting, but if you can map what you’re trying to achieve at different stages of inputs and outputs, that will be a good starting point.
Input-output analysis tool can help you shape your experiments, by helping you to think about how you can change the system for better with your digital service. It helps you to do so without forgetting about the purpose, key inputs and outputs of the system. This tool also helps you to understand the type of feedback you need in order to improve the service.
Systems thinking for designing for futures
Anastasia talked about her experience and learnings from designing services for cities and how systems thinking tools are essential when designing new services from scratch.
Lesson 3: The purpose is the direction-setter of the system
Donella Meadows, a systems scientist and ecologist highlights the problem of not setting the correct purpose that can impact the whole behaviour of a system.
“Systems are like three wishes in the traditional fairy tale, they have a terrible tendency to produce exactly and only what you ask them to produce. Be careful of what you ask them to produce.”
Why is setting a ‘true’ purpose of the system important?
- Purpose sets the evaluation metrics.
- Purpose defines the structure of the system.
- Purposes can live within purposes — keep the sub-purposes and overall purpose in harmony
Purpose sense-checking questions
Tool to identify the true purpose of a system
- Try to involve all stakeholders in the process.
- Let everybody to voice what they think is the purpose of the system.
- Agree collectively on the overall purpose.
- Priorities one to three sub-purposes that support and benefit overall purpose.
Lesson 4: Designing for different futures
If you design for 2 year timeframe compared to 5 years, your vision, purpose and structure might be different. Computer based tools are used to build models of complex dynamic systems, allowing one to simulate different future scenarios. However, there are also thinking tools that we can use to play around with variables to start considering different future scenarios.
Behaviour over time diagram
Analysing dynamic behaviour of system’s components
This tool helps to hypothesise the future. Unlike traditional behaviour over time model, this is based on preferable behaviour not on real data.
Behaviour over time diagram is good for considering dynamic behaviour of systems. As an easy way to see a potential future, you can pick a component that is crucial for the system, and draw a graph to visualise how the component is expected to behave over a set time. Based on this, you can examine if current design of the system would facilitate and sustain the potential change.
One of the crucial questions that is often dismissed, is the expected lifespan of the system itself. It might depend on various things such as available funding, ownership, changing cultural or political trends. It is important to be realistic, and remember that even short-lived systems could achieve an impact if designed well.
Summary of lessons and tools
- Empower your team to understand systems — System & Ecosystem map
- Experiments allow you to play safe with systems — Input Output Analysis
- The purpose is the direction setter of the system — Purpose sense checking questions
- Design for different futures — Behaviour over time tool
- Embrace the complexity
Workshop activity
At the end of the session, the participants had the opportunity to explore the systems thinking tools that we introduced and discuss with each other about how they could use systems thinking and tools for their work.
What’s next?
We are currently iterating the workshop and tools based on the feedback we received. We are planning to do another session soon, so watch this space!
