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Month: May 2024

TB871: A Systems Thinking in Practice (STiP) heuristic

Posted on by Doug Belshaw

Note: this is a post reflecting on one of the modules of my MSc in Systems Thinking in Practice. You can see all of the related posts in this category. 

There are three core activities with Systems Thinking in Practice (STiP):

  1. Understanding interrelationships (uIR)
  2. Engaging with multiple perspectives (eMP)
  3. Reflecting on boundary judgements (rBJ)

These three activities can be translated into a learning system, or ‘heuristic’ which is presented in the module materials in the following way:

A heuristic diagram for Systems Thinking in Practice with a cyclical flow of five stages indicating a process for dealing with complex situations, involving understanding interrelationships, engaging with multiple perspectives, and using conceptual tools. Two silhouetted figures of people face the diagram.

Unlike TB872, this module doesn’t have such great diagrams. I’m not so good at making them, but I can’t live my life looking at this one repeatedly! So I’ve recreated it:

The same diagram as above, in a different illustrative style

There is a video associated with this task (Activity 1.13) which refers to the three areas of this diagram as:

  1. Events
  2. People
  3. Ideas

This is perhaps a more intuitive and easy-to-remember way of referring to the parts labelled Situations, People, and Tools. Here’s an extended quotation from the transcript to the video which helps explain the STiP heuristic:

Real world situations are often rendered intuitively as systems, such as the health system, or the financial system, or an ecosystem. Such renderings as systems can be a useful means for then engineering change. So for example, messy financial affairs might be more formally rendered as a budgeting system, which has clear inputs and outputs that might be more easily managed.

The danger is in fooling ourselves that such rendered systems are the actual reality. It’s confusing the map as a system for the actual territory, the reality of the situation. Like any map, much is left out.

[…]

A starting point for a systems thinking approach is working with complicated and complex issues. So systems thinking might be regarded as an endeavour to render complicated, complex, conflictual situations into bounded, conceptual construct, that is, systems for analysis and design, or more specifically, using systems for making strategy. The Systems Thinking in Practice heuristic, or a STiP heuristic as we will call it from now on, is one such learning system; a mental model or idea used as a device for learning about situations of interest and making a strategy to transform them into something better.

(Open University, 2020)

The rest of the video goes on to explain the difference between ‘complicatedness’ (which I don’t think is an actual word?) and ‘complexity’ and also defines a ‘wicked problem’. I’ve summarised these below:

  • Complicatedness refers to situations that have many parts that need to be arranged in a certain way. Although it might be tough to solve, it can figure be figured it out with enough expertise or detailed analysis. For example, fixing a broken car is complicated because it requires specific knowledge about the car’s parts and how they work together.
  • Complexity relates to a situation is one where everything is interconnected and changes can happen unexpectedly as a result of these connections. Small changes or actions can have big, unpredictable effects. For instance, the stock market is complex because many unpredictable factors can affect stock prices. See also the butterfly effect.
  • Wicked problems are tough issues that are difficult to solve because it involves incomplete or contradictory information and changes depending on how people perceive it. These problems are tricky because they are not just hard to solve; they are hard to define. For example, climate change is a wicked problem because it involves many factors and opinions, and solutions are not straightforward.

In addition, a mess is when several complicated and complex issues are all tangled up together, making it hard to see where one problem starts and another ends. Messes are chaotic and hard to sort out because solving one problem might affect another part of the mess. A city’s transportation system can be a mess because it involves roads, traffic laws, public transportation, and the behaviors of thousands of people.

I’m composing this in my local library, run by Northumberland County Council. It’s housed within the new leisure centre. Earlier this week, I was at a Design Sprint session as part of the Thinking Digital conference which was run by members of the digital team at the council. The situation we chose to address as a team was library provision, with visitor numbers going down.

Right now, as I’m trying to work, there is a group of older people meeting in the study space as part of a social group. They’ve having coffee and tea, which is not usually allowed in this space. Given the noise, I’ll probably end up decamping to a coffee shop and may not return on a Friday. This could be seen as a small example of a ‘mess’ which would also involve opening hours, underfunding, and even popular conceptions of what libraries are for.

In fact, come to think of it, this might be a good topic to focus on for my assessments for this module. I shall ponder that further… 🤔

References

Weeknote 19/2024

Posted on by Doug Belshaw

I held off posting this weeknote because I thought I’d be accompanying it with an amazing photo of my own of the aurora borealis. We didn’t stay up on Friday night because, living in the north east of England, we’ve been burned too many times with news that the northern lights “may be visible tonight”.

There was some talk of another display being visible on Saturday, so we spent from 22:30 to 00:30 driving around the Northumberland trying to hunt down a place without cloud cover. We failed, just like the legions of people sitting in the dark in their cars in car parks up and down the coast.

Stylized photo of paint swatches on a wall in a lounge

Anyway, I’m happy to report that the photo above no longer represents our lounge. As I mentioned last week, the previous owners were fond of feature walls, including a blue one in the lounge. I’d like to get rid of that fireplace as well, but one thing at a time.

That bookcase in the corner also won’t last long. It’s all a work in progress. For work, I’m currently holed-up in the utility room, stuck between the garage and the kitchen. In terms of a home office, we haven’t decided between extending over the garage, dividing up the garage, a garden pod, or including an extra room when we extend out the back for a new kitchen.

This week, I have not been in the best of moods. I’m tired, partly from not having a chance to relax much after moving house, and partly because I haven’t got enough work on at the moment, which makes me feel less successful in life than I actually am. When it boils down to it, many things are about confidence and attitude; I can jump 105cm onto the plymometric boxes at the gym pretty easily, but sometimes I look at them and think “of course I can” and other times I think “I can’t”. And you know what, it always turns out that I’m correct.

On the positive side, I went to a great Systems Innovation Network open space session on Tuesday evening. It was the first one of its type that they’ve run and was, I would say, a success. Our breakout room focused on building a systems thinking consultancy and featured representatives from five continents! Then, on Wednesday, I had my first tutorial for the next module I’m doing as part of my MSc in Systems Thinking in Practice. I’ve managed to do a bit of studying this week, but my routine hasn’t been as solid as usual.

The temperature has slowly crept up this week, until today was positively warm. Our new house seems to be extremely well-insulated, which is great given the amount we spent on heating in some of the places we’ve lived before. So of course, I’d booked the Nest Pro engineer to fit a Google Nest thermostat when we won’t need the heating at all for a few months. C’est la vie.

I had a couple of interesting chats with people this week, including John Willshire, who pointed me towards some useful resources relating to strategic design. I posted a few other things over at Thought Shrapnel, and also here for TB871, the MSc module I’m currently studying.

Feeling a little sad and lonely in my home office, and with Laura and Anne away, I saw that tickets for the Thinking Digital Conference next week were still available. So I bought one. This event, which is right on my doorstep, used to be one of my favourite. I didn’t have such a great time a couple of years ago, but perhaps it’s got its groove back. We’ll see.

Other than that, I’ve got some work for the DCC, business development to get done, and some MSc study. Routine is everything for me, so I’m going to try and ensure mine, conference notwithstanding, is as good as it can be.

TB871: Avoiding traps in conventional thinking

Posted on by Doug Belshaw

Note: this is a post reflecting on one of the modules of my MSc in Systems Thinking in Practice. You can see all of the related posts in this category. 

There are some really useful spray diagrams in the module materials. However, they all look very similar, with blue boxes and lines. I rely quite a lot on colour to help remember and differentiate things, so I’ve recreated them in Whimsical to help with that.

I’ve listed the three traps to conventional thinking below, along with systems approaches which were designed to counter these tendencies. The five systems approaches mentioned are described in a previous post.

A flowchart titled "Trap 1: Reductionism" illustrating the consequences of simplifying complex situations into fewer variables.

[Trap 1] is a concern about having a limited understanding of a situation because of silo thinking or narrow-mindedness. The two approaches that have traditionally addressed this are System Dynamics (SD) and the Viable System Model (VSM).

The Open University (2020), my emphasis/reformatting
Flowchart diagram illustrating "Trap 2: Dogmatism" in conventional thinking with a circular arrangement of purple nodes connected by arrows, outlining the cycle of adopting conformist perspectives leading to self-righteousness and reduction in perspectives, which results in fear, anger, and alienation, reinforcing the cycle.

[Trap 2] is a concern about the restrictive practice of ‘engaging’ through ignoring other perspectives of the situation. The two approaches that have traditionally addressed this issue are Strategic Options Development and Analysis (SODA) and Soft Systems Methodology (SSM).

The Open University (2020), my emphasis/reformatting
Conceptual diagram of 'Trap 3: Holism and Pluralism', showing flow between system holistic and pluralistic approaches to reductionism, dogmatism, and a central idea of complex situations with many perspectives. Arrows illustrate a cycle of thought reinforcing beliefs in holism and pluralism.

[Trap 3] is a concern about avoiding responsibility for boundary judgements often made in situations without awareness (e.g. focusing on road transport rather than all means of transport) by making them explicit with systems thinking in practice. The approach that has addressed this issue is Critical Systems Heuristics (CSH). 

The Open University (2020), my emphasis/reformatting

References

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