Systemic systems methods practice for systems practice

Dry runs for learning a craft

This resource grew from repeated requests by apprentices during my teaching with SCiO on the level 7 Systems Thinking Practitioner apprenticeship. They wanted simple exercises, worked examples and answers so they could try out methods and check their understanding.

Systems practice is learned through application in the real world, supported by teaching, workshop exercises, examples and work with others. A dry run can develop technical skills and reveal a misunderstanding. It does not reproduce the purposes, relationships, uncertainty or consequences of working in a real situation.

Use these exercises as preparation for practice, or to revisit a technical point. Getting a model or answer right is useful. It must not become the purpose of systems practice, or be mistaken for the practice itself.

All 26 practice areas

Choose the approach and depth appropriate to your learning. The apprenticeship does not require completion of every page. Some exercises rehearse a defined part of a fuller methodology.

Foundations

• Systems concepts: make your boundary inspectable
• Systems laws: test variety, feedback and local optimisation
• Transposing theory: move up to a pattern and back down

Core methods

• Soft Systems Methodology: build a model that follows its purpose
• System Dynamics: build, calculate and challenge a queue model
• Viable System Model: diagnose functions and channels
• Critical Systems Heuristics: inspect all twelve boundary categories
• Confrontation Analysis: separate positions, options and credibility
• INFORMED Group Dynamics: investigate the distinctions behind a decision
• Interactive Management: construct a small interpretive structural model
• Interactive planning: design the service you would choose now
• Mosaic transformation and bubble strategy: sequence changes you can sustain
• Multi-methodology: justify the move from one method to another
• Patterns of Strategy: model dependence, fit and timing
• Socio-Technical Systems: redesign the work and technology together
• Syntegration: test the communication structure before the event

Systemic intervention

• SODA: build a means-ends map without erasing disagreement
• Fractal Enterprise Model: alternate processes and the assets they depend on
• Critical social learning: build a learning relationship across boundaries
• Service systems: follow demand and distinguish activity from resolution
• Participative inquiry: test who your evidence leaves out
• Futures and probes: test robustness without pretending to predict
• Ethics and power: make an intervention's authority and effects explicit
• Evaluation and reflexivity: test the claim you are tempted to make
• Systemic constellations: use a spatial representation as a hypothesis
• Systemic conversations: expose inference and repair a broken commitment