Systemic by Design™ Principles - Overview
1. Setting Boundaries
‘How high do you fly how low do you go?’ Determining the boundaries of your scope and zooming in and out of complexity to understand the causal relation between different parts of the system.
2. Small Hinges Open Big Doors
Small changes and interventions can create a significant impact on every level of the system. Identifying leverage points and opportunities for change.
3. The Business Case for Humanity
We need to evolve our metrics of ‘success’ away from the bottom line and towards more sustainable and impactful futures. How might we come closer to aligning business objectives with societal planetary goals?
4. Red Teaming for the Future
Understanding alternative futures and understanding unintended consequences. ‘Hacking’ your product for unforeseen weaknesses and adjust accordingly.
5. Systems are Personal
Seeing yourself in the system and recognizing the power and privilege you have and where you can help address change. We have good intentions, but we can easily cause harm if not thoughtful.
6. Ego-System to Ecosystem
The need for transdisciplinary teams and perspectives. The recognition that designers, in addition to users, stakeholders, engineers, policymakers, etc. need to be included in designing for sustainable futures.
1. Setting Boundaries
‘How high do you fly how low do you go?’ Determining the boundaries of your scope and zooming in and out of complexity to understand the causal relation between different parts of the system.
1.1. Determining your Focal Range
Viewing the situation holistically and determining the scope of your intervention and where you can make the most impact.
Rather than reacting to individual problems that arise, it helps inquire about its relationships to other activities within the system, look for patterns over time, and seek root causes. Determining the type of impact you wish to make within the system, as it pertains to desired outcomes and identifying points of leverage, you either intervene at smaller structures of the system, like the goals, or go towards shifting mindsets paradigms. You use a micro to macro lens when choosing the different levels of interventions. Problems are interconnected. Your role is to define the boundaries of the system you are working in and embrace not knowing the whole picture. It is also about embracing convenient abstraction; “All models are wrong, but some are useful” (Box, 1976). You and your team must define the level of zoom that is the most meaningful and helpful for your project.
1.2. Nested Complexity
Viewing the system from a single touchpoint and expanding more broadly to view an ecosystem, every level layered additional complexity and elements.
Designing for exponentially nested ecosystems requires tackling complexity by moving between layers. You will have a single touchpoint nested within a multi-channel service. That multi-channel service is an order of magnitude more complex than the single touchpoint. The business ecosystem, which might have several services, is more complex again [than the multi-channel service] and [that] sits inside this whole thing. The most crucial thing is to be aware of the complexity and be able to zoom in and out of it. There are levels of nested relation to recognizing while designing. They may take many forms, but for example, you are thinking of COVID-19, you have to think about: individual, family, work, economy, healthcare system, global pandemic. You cannot separate those from each other, and it is a mistake to think you can.
1.3. Mindset over Method
Having a ‘Systemic Mindset’ is more important than having a perfect ‘Systemic Toolkit’.
The complexity of the systems we are designing are rising, due to its interconnectivity. Designers need to evolve their mindset from a myopic view of humans in the center, to humans in the middle of a complex system. We need to shift towards a systemic approach to dealing with challenges.
1.4. Problem Setting
Design is not problem-solving; it is problem-setting. How do we set up the project to be mindful of the potential consequences, intended or unintended?
A responsibility of designers is to do our due diligence. To understand the needs of the business, the needs of humans, and the systems we are impacting. We must always challenge assumptions and reframe questions to orient towards root causes. You must also be aware of the capabilities of your clients and their hunger for change. It’s not about getting your client for 0 to 100; it’s about meeting them where they are and working within their constraints, to create impact.
2. Small Hinges Open Big Doors
Small changes and interventions can create a significant impact on every level of the system. Identifying leverage points and opportunities for change.
2.1. Leverage Points
Since all parts of a system are interconnected, an intervention on one element may significantly impact a seemingly different part of the system.
Core to Gestaltism, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts and changing the parts may radically alter the whole. Leverage points are places within a complex system [a corporation, an economy, a living body, a city, an ecosystem] where a small shift in one thing can produce significant changes in everything" (Meadows, 1999).
As you are designing touchpoints, you constantly have to evaluate 'how does the change to this touchpoint affect the entire ecosystem?' Additionally, if the entire ecosystem shifts slightly, how does that cause a ripple effect on the other touchpoint and the business [system] as a whole? Nothing comes from thin air, and changes never occur in isolation.
3. The Business Case for Humanity
We need to evolve our metrics of ‘success’ away from the bottom line and towards more sustainable and impactful futures. How might we come closer to aligning business objectives with societal planetary goals?
3.1. The Need for New KPI’s to Track Impact
Human-centered design has focused too myopically on only end-users and key stakeholders interests. We need to take into consideration all of the actors and elements that constitute a complex system. They are not all equal, but they need to be understood.
As a business, you should aim to create virtuous cycles where it is beneficial (to your bottom line), be more sustainable and socially conscious, ESG (Environmental, Social and Corporate Governance)- and build those cycles into your business model.
3.2. Making the Business Case for Humanity
Traditionally, businesses have an obligation to shareholders that usually take the form of an efficiency play, which leads to cost reduction, or a customer growth play that leads to increased revenue. A way to initially motivate clients to have a vested interest in sustainability is to speak their language and show them data about how sustainability, systemic design, and risk mitigation will increase revenue or cost reduction. Meet them where they are, and then push them to do more.
Designers need to take care of their agreed-upon obligations to the business while also mitigating risks to communities, the environment and the planet. Designers also need to be brought into the process of designing and redesigning business models. Despite designers' best intentions, they will always be stopped within the business model's constraints and paradigms they are designing under. If you are designing within a highly exploitative capitalist system, your designs will always be aligned to those systems' goals. It's challenging to change things from the bottom, only- there needs to be the incorporation of a top-down approach.
3.3. Systems Thinking in Business
Seeking to uncover the business value of incorporating a systems thinking mindset into the design thinking process. A prominent example of how this applies to business would be to think about how to build resilient supply chains using Systemic Design.
The business case for Systemic by Design is one of risk-mitigation. Risk mitigation is not the ‘end goal’, but a natural side effect to this approach due to its nature of zooming in and out to identify potential risks.
3.4. Short-termism vs Long-term incentives
Preventative measures are often cut short due to a lack of time, resources, and negligible incentive structures benefiting short-termism.
The business impact of thinking this way [Systemic Design] is building long-term viability into organizations favoring longer-term thinking over short term optimization.
3.5. Capitalism
Exploitative business models fuel the paradigms of the systems for which we live and work, and those business models influence the types of interventions that occur. Design in this situation becomes neutral- if you design in a system that prioritizes capitalist incentives, then the interventions will align with the system's capitalist goals. When the goals prioritize increased profit, growth, and mass exploitation, there is no real way to create change unless we challenge the paradigms and mental models that constitute these systems.
4. Red Teaming for the Future
Understanding alternative futures and understanding unintended consequences. ‘Hacking’ your product for unforeseen weaknesses and adjust accordingly.
4.1. Future Thinking
It is the responsibility of designers, team members, and the business, to account for unintended consequences of launched products and services.
Red teaming is the practice of rigorously challenging plans, policies, systems and assumptions.
Leverage points can be used to find potential risk and significant opportunities for impact, inside a complex system, and how they might affect the system. There is a lack of accounting for risk and cost when confronted with substantial potential benefit. In addition to cost to the business, we need to keep in mind cost to communities, society, the environment, etc.
4.2. Designers Hippocratic Oath
Design ethics and moral responsibilities.
5. Systems are Personal
Seeing yourself in the system and recognizing the power and privilege you have and where you can help address change. We have good intentions, but we can easily cause harm if not thoughtful.
5.1. Your Role in the System
As designers, there has been a long period where we've seen ourselves as somewhat at arm's length from the problems that we're working on. It's important to see yourself in the system and recognizing the power and privilege you have, and where you can help address change. We have good intentions, but we can easily cause harm if not thoughtful. Nothing comes from thin air, and 'today's problems are often yesterdays solutions'.
6. Ego-System to Ecosystem
The need for transdisciplinary teams and perspectives. The recognition that designers, in addition to users, stakeholders, engineers, policymakers, etc. need to be included in designing for sustainable futures.
6.1. Transdisciplinary Approach
The need for transdisciplinary teams and perspectives. The recognition that designers AND users, stakeholders, engineers, policymakers, people on the front lines, etc. need to be included in designing sustainable futures.
Addressing unintended consequences requires the incorporation of multiple voices and perspectives when solving problems.
6.2. Moving from ‘me’ to ‘we’
Shifting away from a myopic view of humans in the center, to humans in the middle of a complex system. Designing for the ‘collective good’ rather than the benefits to one small group of people.
6.3. Facilitation
The future of design is more strategic and facilitation based. Thinking about ethics, outcomes, behavioral economics.
Our role shifts from 'traditional designer' to a facilitator in a system's context. It is to facilitate the revealing of the system and empower that change.