Seeing the wood, and the trees: How System Thinking can help companies design for a connected world.

-"When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe."

-John Muir

In recent years, there has been a renewed surge in interest in System Thinking, and how it relates to the design of products and services. As the pace of technological and social change accelerates, and we see the behaviour of businesses, products and people shifting in response, we can no longer approach design and innovation without taking a System Thinking approach.

In this article, I'll give a short overview of this design approach, some of its key principles, and show examples of how ignoring System Thinking can trip businesses up, while embracing it can drive huge social and business growth.

Design Thinking vs. System Thinking

Firstly, what's the difference between System Thinking and Design Thinking? While Design Thinking (often called Human Centred Design) was developed as a way to generate a deep understanding of the user before designing anything, System Thinking takes a more holistic view of all contextual factors (social, technological, cultural, business, environmental and behavioural, to name a few) that will influence how a product will be used, and how it will impact its environment. To do this, it prioritises more expansive tools such as Mind-Maps, System Blueprints and Causal Loop Diagrams over Design Thinking stalwarts such as Empathy Maps, User Journeys or Prototypes.

System Thinking will not replace Design Thinking, but it does supplement and advance the field of design. It takes the view that everything we put out into the world has consequences: nothing exists in a vacuum, and a product will fail unless its wider environment is considered. As one researcher put it: "people embracing Systems Thinking position themselves such that they can see both the forest and the trees".

Key principles of System Thinking

System thinking is complex discipline, and any summary article such as this risks oversimplification. However, as with Design Thinking, System Thinking is also very much a mindset, as well as a set of tools and methods. As this article is just an overview , I won't go into detailed methods, but I will list a few System Thinking principles:

1. Devote time to considering the first and second degree consequences of your actions, both in the short and long term.
2. Look at the big picture: don't get tunnel vision and look solely at products or users: consider the contexts in which they operate.
3. Always question your assumptions, and be aware of how shared prejudices can limit your view of the world: consider and include multiple perspectives of a design or issue.
4. Take a data-driven approach: Use data and empiricism to test which small actions drive larger results. Hunches can be useful, but make sure you test them.
5. See complexity as an opportunity, rather than a challenge: complex systems lend themselves to iterative, scaled improvements, if well understood.

These points alone won’t make you a system thinker, but they are a good start on the path to shifting your mindset when approaching problems. For a more extensive look at the constituent principles, this article is a good starting point.

System Thinking Done badly, and well: Playpumps vs. DHIS2 and Community Health

So, what does successful System Thinking look like in practice?

In the late 90s, the University of Oslo's Health Information Systems Programme was looking at how they could support health systems in developing countries.

They had to be careful: development history is littered with examples of well-meaning innovations that had negative impacts. To take just one, an organisation called PlayPumps International had proposed installing playground merry-go-rounds over water boreholes in Zambia. The idea was these devices would pump up water as children played on them. Despite much hype, PlayPumps was a colossal failure: the devices were hard to push, and less efficient than standard hand pumps. Children soon stopped playing on them, and their installation and maintenance costs were high, leaving communities saddled with an extra financial burden. In a failure of System Thinking, secondary and tertiary impacts were not considered, leading to significant business losses, and negative social impact.

The University's approach was different: how might they develop something that benefitted the whole ecosystem? What they ended up with is a transformative example of how System Thinking can drive huge growth and impact.

Their aim here was not to attempt to develop a product that would solve an individual problem - instead, the targets were more systemic issues: scaled data management, interoperability, and health system integration in developing countries. Data management and interoperability may not be the sexiest phrases you'll hear this week, but they are immensely important.

What they ended up with was DHIS2 (District Health Information Software 2), a health information management platform aimed primarily at countries in the developing world. It allows governments and NGOs to build workflows, manage data and run analytics quickly and easily. All data is interoperable with other health systems, meaning new developments on the platform easily integrate with existing architecture. 

The team also took a forward view of the potential effects of adding a new information management system into an already crowded space. Wanting to avoid adding another skeleton to the graveyard, the platform was designed to be open source, which reduces the burden on any single organisation to maintain it. Each country has its own instance of the platform, so health ministries can make their own developments based on their knowledge of local demand.

Today, DHIS2 is the world's largest health information management platform, in use by NGOs in 28 countries, and by governments in a further 72 low and middle-income countries, covering a total population of 2.3 billion people. It has even expanded beyond health: covering routine reporting for education, water and sanitation, agriculture, and more.

DHIS2 is a shining example of how System Thinking can aid organisations to identify and act on opportunities where there is massive potential for scale, and ensure the products and services they produce are relevant to users, and to their wider ecosystems.

For a more in-depth discussion on System Thinking, and some further examples of how and when it has been used, see this article by Firat Toroglu and Michelle Mulvey from Fjord: Accenture's Design Agency.

Nick Valenzia

All opinions above are my own and not necessarily those of my employer, Accenture.

Resources cited

1. John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra: And Selected Essays. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1990. Print.
2. https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198785392.001.0001/acprof-9780198785392-chapter-2
3. https://hbr.org/2018/09/why-design-thinking-works
4. https://www.designkit.org/human-centered-design
5. https://iseesystems.com/resources/articles/download/lets-just-get-on-with-it.pdf
6. https://thesystemsthinker.com/%EF%BB%BFa-new-path-to-understanding-systems-thinking/
7.  https://www.dhis2.org/about
8.  https://medium.com/design-voices/system-thinking-for-designers-e9f025698a32

Photo Credits

Photo 1 by Charles Deluvio on Unsplash

Photo 2 by Josh Gordon on Unsplash

Photo 3 from Pinterest, Saved from improveinternational.wordpress.com by Robin Shepard