Check 19 - Governments - Systems Thinking

The Hidden Power

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Beneficial change most often results from working with the affected population through the medium of STiP.

Systems Thinking in Practice - or STiP, as we sometimes call it - is, frankly, one of the great hopes of our time. It has the endorsement of the UN, the WHO and the OECD and has proved effective in alleviating difficulties of bewildering complexity by engaging social learning.

This principle takes the fundamental purpose of government - beneficial change - and addresses the patchy performance of governments everywhere. The placating, appeasing, and overall absence of effective action on the part of governments is easily traced to the impossibility of such a tiny cohort being able to contend with the vast complexity of their imagined mandate. The systemic response, the STiP response, is to turn this on its head, and put the mandate where it is needed - at the front line, where life is happening, far from the much-vaunted Corridors of Power.

What is it, to think systemically? What does it look like, in practice?

In this episode we unpack this promising approach to the challenges of our time.

Talking points:

This great hope

Problems are the world's problems

The problems with governments - over-stretched

Laying it all out - "problems", maps, stakeholders, "solutions"

Situations of concern

Extending and containing boundaries

Systems mapping - a picture of the whole system, how the system works

Goulburn-Broken River Catchment - vast complexity

Polarised perspectives: Bawdens World-views

The library at Shepton Mallet

Rich pictures - visual representations and complex communications and humans

Framing and re-framing

Solutions landscapes - homelessness in Vancouver

The design turn - systems thinking in practise is designing

...and is empowering to civil society: Pacific coast tidal wave planning and the pandemic

Individual action and STiP - An art therapist bucks the bureaucracy and frees an agoraphobic

What Why and How - applying learning to your relationship

Links

Systems thinking in practise at the Shepton Mallet Library(slide deck):

https://www.systemspractice.org/resources/attachment/eca09f7f-03f0-4115-9c9a-1ed113670d5c

To beat a pandemic, try prepping for a tsunami (MIT Deep tech podcast)

https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/06/03/1002535/podcast-to-beat-a-pandemic-try-prepping-for-a-tsunami/

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