Systems and Futures

Systems Thinking, Week 13

After 12 weeks of concepts about systems thinking, the astute reader may be wondering if the content is ever going to directly relate to the purpose of the Masters program: to help imagine and explore possible futures. Systems science is an interesting sister discipline to foresight, and its ideas are definitely relevant in understanding problems, but what makes this more appropriate than, say, a class on urban design or the history of science? Big buildup, but this week is the payoff.

So where exactly can systems thinking and concepts be applied in futures work? You may not be surprised that the answer is “everywhere!” There are plenty of points of a standard foresight project that could benefit from systems. I’ll list a few examples below.

• Domain mapping: as an alternative to the standard process of creating a mental map of the domain of interest by breaking it down into conceptual categories and subcategories, you could ask “how does the domain work today?” and sketch out a systems map with the top 12-20 elements and their connections. The key categories can then be extracted from this diagram¹. This could also be used to compare to diagrams from later steps.

• Current assessment: when looking into the recent past, it might also be helpful to draw diagrams of how the system used to work, as a way to demonstrate that today's systems, no matter how permanent they seem, will change in the future.

• Scanning: the potential changes from inputs could be described in terms of how they are changing the system: are they just changes of values in the system, new/broken connections, or entirely new elements?

• Drivers: drivers are bundles of future inputs that describe a force of change in the domain, so it should be possible to draw each as a system that affects the variables we care about.

• Scenarios: scenarios are stories that take place within a set of “logics”, or a consistent set of propositions about how the world might work in alternate plausible futures. Hodgson and Sharpe recommend representing each of these as a very simple system with one reinforcing loop and one balancing loop²; PepsiCo does something more in depth. This can serve as a double-check that the scenario itself is capturing and communicating the essential elements of each alternative.

• Implications: when looking at signals of possible change and imagining what might happen as a result, a sketch of the system can ground your work and give you a starting point for ideas.

• Building strategic options: systems and sustainability pioneer Donella Meadows lays out a hierarchy of leverage points in systems, from the easiest but least effective up to the fundamental but violently opposed. At the former end of the spectrum are the parameters a system directly controls (tax rate, production targets, etc) and the amount of buffer (stock) relative to variability (flow); at the latter end are the goals of the system and the paradigm that led to the creation of the system in the first place³. In addition, options can be explicitly designed to give client organizations more of the characteristics of complex adaptive systems due to their resilience.

Slightly short one today as I'm largely heads-down on my final assignment. If you've used any of these systems techniques in your futures work, I'd love to hear about it - leave a comment below.

1. Don't expect a 1:1 correspondence here if you're drawing casual loop diagrams. Because these focus on variables, they need another level of organization (physically clustering, color-coding, etc) to reveal the relevant actors or conceptual categories.

2. This method seems especially applicable when the scenario logics are built using a 2x2 approach, because then the core differences of each scenario will be pretty simple.

3. Meadows privileges above even these the ability the ability to transcend paradigms by recognizing them as mental games we play to organize the world in the pursuit of goals.