Sheryl - 00:00:00: Oftentimes it's really hard to see the side effects when you're working on, for example, emerging technology; you only see the benefits when you're within an organization. And so how can you use speculative design to think about the potential downsides or the environments in which your technology will sit in a few years time? I've never seen these two things combined in any sort of formal literature, where it’s like systems thinking and speculative design, but I think it's a really good expression of systems thinking in a way because it really considers the context of the future.

Erin - 00:00:36: This is Erin May.

JH - 00:00:38: I'm John Henry Forster, and this is Awkward Silences.

Erin - 00:00:43: Hello everybody and welcome back to Awkward Silences. Today we are here with Sheryl Cababa, who is the Chief Strategy Officer at Substantial and also the author of “Closing the Loop: Systems Thinking for Designers.” Really excited to have you here and dig into this really big meaty topic of systems thinking. Thanks for joining us today.

Sheryl - 00:01:12: Yes, absolutely, really happy to be here.

JH - 00:01:14: Yeah, this feels like a topic or a category that people like to talk about. I hear everyone mention systems thinking, but I'm always curious how well people actually understand it or apply it in their work so I'm excited to dig in.

Erin - 00:01:24: Yeah, systems thinking, it's something I enjoy. Systems, ecosystems, about how things exist in a context and not in a vacuum. But I'm sure you're going to enlighten us a lot in what systems thinking is and how it applies to designers and maybe also what it isn't. Sometimes it's to understand things by what they aren't. So let's dig into it.

Sheryl - 00:01:42: Yeah, great.

Erin - 00:01:43: Well, first of all, I guess, what made you write this book? Why do you enjoy thinking about systems thinking?

Sheryl - 00:01:47: Yeah, so I actually hadn't really integrated systems thinking into my work until about six or seven years ago. And one thing that I found as a designer is that I was starting to feel a little bit like the methods that we use had some shortcomings in terms of the things that we were being tasked to think about, especially because if you work, for example, in user experience design or digital design, a lot of the things we're designing are just at enormous scale and has a user base that it doesn't seem like our tools for designing things respond to that. And the methods that I'm thinking about, at the core, are just what we understand as design thinking or user-centered design. Oftentimes we're designing with a single user in mind and thinking about the benefits of use of a product in the moment and thinking about how maybe they walk through an experience for the most part and then that sort of leaves out these other questions we might have, like who our other stakeholders are, what happens contextually beyond that experience, and also who are the variety of potential end users as well as end beneficiaries, people who might be affected by our products, but maybe aren't even users of the products that we're working on. All of these felt like gaps in thinking and so I started delving into systems thinking methodology to better understand like, are there ways that I could integrate this in my practice? And the reason that I decided to write a book about it is because I'm a design strategist and researcher, but my background is in product design and I already have a job as a designer, right? I already have processes, methods; I fit in at a certain point in the design and development process, especially for things like software and I occupy a certain place within the organization. And so looking at systems thinking methods, it felt like these ideas are great, how exactly do I integrate this into my practice? My goal is not to suddenly become a systems thinking methodology practitioner and leave my job as a designer behind. I need to figure out a way to integrate it into my practice in a way that is actionable and accessible. And so I felt like there was a little bit of a gap in the literature around this intersection of kind of like design and design thinking and systems thinking, and I couldn't find resources myself on how these things might intersect. And so, yeah, I thought writing a book that feels accessible and actionable to designers, I think is something that felt worth doing.

JH - 00:04:31: Nice, that's awesome. Do you have any examples you can recall of when you were a designer, like before and after exploring systems thinking of like I used to approach something this way and then I shifted my approach, like just something maybe tangible for folks to kind of help hook onto it?

Sheryl - 00:04:42: Yeah, I've worked on everything from early activity monitors, I worked at Philips Design for a while and worked on an activity monitor before the Fitbit came out. I remember the day the Fitbit came out, our team was kind of like, whoa, this is our competition. And that product that I was working on had this complex system of real life coaches and things like that. But it sort of felt like the area in which I was tasked to think was really about the interface, when you plug this thing into your machine and you look at your data, that was what I was working on. And not to say that that's not complex, but there was this entire system of the business model of this particular device and also how it was sold, how it was marketed, who they expected the audience to be, and I don't think I was really privy to whatever factored into those decisions. So I was working on this narrow space, but questions would keep coming up for me, like, okay, so I'm designing this interaction between a coach and this user, but I don't even really know what the parameters are around who this coach is and how they're connected to this product. You can learn these things piecemeal, but it felt like there was some sort of missing analysis of what is feeding into where this product sits and what's the context almost in its entirety in which it sits and I think this is my experience as a product designer in general. It felt a little bit dissatisfying in that I was tasked with this narrow slice where my lane was doing the screeny thing and the screeny thing had so much impact beyond what I was doing as well as inputs into what I was doing that I wasn't fully aware of. So I think that's one of the reasons I became a design strategist is because I was kind of like a disgruntled product designer and so it felt like going upstream a little bit in terms of decisions was a more satisfying move for me. Then I think ostensibly, when I really started using more systems thinking analysis was when I was working on things like healthcare products and services. For example, I worked on a robotic surgery project where they were thinking about the ecosystem, and I think thinking about those ecosystems are the entry point to systems thinking methodology. So I think there's many instances in which designers are sort of put in the same position, especially if you're in a big organization or you're working on a big enterprise product or something, you might be tasked with this narrow slice, but with very little understanding of what surrounds it.

Erin - 00:07:15: Interesting. As you were talking about this, I started to think a lot about ethnography, right? A research method. You talk about the interaction of the wearable device, right? And it's like, your job is to research the user and the device and their interaction between it. But, of course, the device and the person live in an environment with context, with things happening around them, to say nothing of the business in which the device is being developed. This has me thinking about ethnography as a method to get at some of this other stuff. Is that a method that can maybe bridge some of this gap between traditional UX methods and systems thinking, or where does that sit?

Sheryl - 00:07:52: Yeah, absolutely. In my job as a design researcher, I do a lot of ethnography inspired work, where you're trying to understand the context in which the experience of use is going to sit. So, quite different from UX research where, yeah, you're looking directly at the intersection between the device and the human using it. And it's funny because I think that intersects really well with systems thinking, framing your mindset around how best to understand context, and not just that direct benefit of use. Understanding people's experiences before they even have any interaction with a specific product or service is essential in good design thinking. I think where the gap is for a lot of how this is typically implemented in design research is that I would feel that there was this missing element of getting at really broadly who your users are and those who might be affected by your eventual design decisions. For example, I work a lot in education, and the work that we do at Substantial is oriented around equity-centered design. And so, we're specifically thinking about the populations who have been marginalized within the design decision-making process, traditionally and typically. For example, we think about how black and Latino students in the US experience certain education technology products, we try to understand their experiences within the system and engage them in co-design. I think that's an extension of systems thinking: engaging with this idea more broadly of who the people who might be affected by the things you're designing might be, the categories they fall in, and how you can better design with outcomes in mind, with outcomes that are oriented around equity. I think the really nice intersection of systems thinking and design thinking is that designers are orienting towards that humanistic approach. I think an issue with systems thinking methodology, as it stood over the years, is that it feels very abstract, that it feels very non-human, that it kind of reduces people to forces that interact with each other. And I think a designer superpower is that we do take this approach that is really human-centered, that is oriented around humans, that is intended to be empathy-driven. And you can use that as a starting point. I think it’s just thinking more broadly about who your stakeholders are in terms of the entirety of the system, rather than just focusing on a really narrow slice of who the stakeholders are, which is like your end user, and maybe like the decision makers within your organization. So I do think that approach, that ethnographic research-inspired approach is really useful within the systems thinking process, specifically for designers. And I wrote about it in that book. I think there was a moment where I'm like, am I just writing about design research here? Should I be doing this? And I was almost like, the audience here should have familiarity with some of what I'm writing about. Like you have to do foundational research. You have to do foundational research. You have to do generative research. But I think a lot of people actually don't necessarily do that to the extent that we should be, even when it comes to just design thinking. So I made sure to include it, because I do think there is this extension for me in terms of taking that approach of really understanding context foundationally before going into any sort of problem solving.

JH - 00:11:24: Yeah. Is there an aspect of this that is contextual at all? Like, if I'm a designer researcher and we're doing maybe a narrow thing, like we got some very targeted feedback that this menu is a little confusing and we're just gonna redesign it minorly to clear that up. Maybe a situation like that or something in that spirit maybe is like, you don't need to think about the system as much, you can kind of zoom in and it may be okay. Whereas we're trying to stand up a new product offering or a new suite of functionality and we really need to think about how this fits into our business model, how does this fit into the user experience with the suite of products? So are there areas as you're doing research or design that you dial this up and down depending on the type of work you're doing or how would you encourage people to think about that part of it?

Sheryl - 00:12:01: Yeah, I do think there is the kind of problem solving that is just problem solving to figure out how something can just work better, and you know exactly what you're trying to achieve there. And maybe that doesn't require you creating a whole mapping exercise of causal loop diagrams and things like that, and that's totally fine. I talk a little bit about hard systems methodology and soft systems methodology, and the way I like to describe that is that Karl Popper, the philosopher, had this metaphor for types of problems, and he described some things as cloud problems and some things as clock problems. And I think a lot of engineering, building things kind of problems fall into the clock problems category. Like you're trying to make a clock and you're trying to figure out how to make it work and for it to tell time with precision. It’s very directive, you know exactly what you're trying to do. And then there are cloud problems. So these are more ambiguous, there's a sense of multifinality, which is a term in system thinking that describes there are many, many different ways to solve a problem and it could go in many different directions. And also you might not have even a great deal of clarity on what the problem itself is. I think a good intersection or a good description of what you might think of as cloud problems is “wicked problems.” So like Horst Rittel in the 1970s coined that to describe problems that are so complex that there's not any singular way of solving them, and so the cloud problem space is really good for systems thinking. I think the clock problem space, not so much, that's very directional already when you know exactly what you're going to be doing. I think the issue lies in that we often assign actual cloud problems or cloud problem solving to the clock space, and so that's where we kind of run into trouble. Like if you're working on a social media platform or something like that, you're thinking about it as clock problems. But because there's this human social collective behavioral aspect to it, it then becomes a cloud problem and we need to be able to acknowledge that through a shift in our tools and analysis.

JH - 00:14:11: Yeah, to build off that, have you found ways for designers or researchers to identify what they might be working on? Like, how do you know which one is which? I'd imagine if you're a builder and like you're in a design role, to your point, you kind of see a lot of things probably as clock problems because of the nature of your work, and so are there good rules of thumb or things you've done in your career to help you identify what you're working on?

Sheryl - 00:14:29: Yeah, I mean, it's a good question because I don't think I have a formula or anything like that. But the way I kind of describe the concepts of systems thinking is there's like three different components. So it's like thinking about how things are interconnected, thinking about causality, and thinking about wholeness. So if you're working on something that seems super interconnected with other things and you don't have a lot of visibility into what those other things are, you probably should work to make those interconnections visible to yourself as a practitioner, to your organization, because I think that'll be required in order to be able to be successful in terms of the product or service that you're designing. I think there's also causality, so oftentimes we just think about like, okay, we're a designer and creating this thing, and then this is how somebody is going to experience it and that's all we're interested in. But I think one of the things that I’ve focused more readily on over the past few years is just how do you connect that to broader outcomes? There are societal outcomes or outcomes that happen beyond just the direct benefit of use. And then lastly, there's wholeness. So I think just thinking about that context in which your product or service sits, are there things that in that regard you need to make visible as well? Like, for example, just working often with tech developers, I think they're oftentimes thinking about a specific use case, like a student will use this in the context of math class or something like that, and they're not necessarily aware of things like how are those students assessed in math? What kinds of diversity of environments is this product even going to be used in? What kind of connectivity do different school systems have? Who are the buyers in this particular school district? What kinds of schools are you thinking about integrating this within? What kind of learning management system is this particular school district using? And what's the demographics of students who are in these environments? What kinds of resources do they have? They're designing a clock, but I think just having visibility or alignment on what is the cloud that surrounds that clock, I guess, would be beneficial in that then you can kind of make decisions about your product that could result in new ideas. It can be a driver of innovation. It can also be a problem solver before you go ahead and release this product out into the world. So I think there's different ways that you can articulate systems within your work, as well as use your understanding of the system to acknowledge where additional problem solving needs to happen.

JH - 00:17:18: All right, a quick awkward interruption here. It's fun to talk about user research, but you know what's really fun? Is doing user research. And we want to help you with that.

Erin - 00:17:26: We want to help you so much that we have created a special place. It's called userinterviews.com/awkward for you to get your first three participants free.

JH - 00:17:38: We all know we should be talking to users more, so we went ahead and removed as many barriers as possible. It's going to be easy, it's going to be quick, you're going to love it. So go over there and check it out.


Erin - 00:17:46: And then when you're done with that, go on over to your favorite podcasting app and leave us a review, please. Sheryl, I imagine a potential risk or concern with systems thinking, as contrasted with design thinking or evaluative methods, clock making methods, is that this sounds big and chaotic and we're like diverging, right? I'm imagining chalkboards with webs and lots of interconnecting drawings and just chaos, right? Because everything's connected and it's whole and it's causal. What are the tools or methods or ways in which they can sort of expand, right? But then ultimately converge and get to decisions, right? Get to things moving forward.

Sheryl - 00:18:31 It's a good question because I think that aligns with a lot of the fears that I hear about trying to integrate systems thinking into your project work, it’s like, my work is already so directional, I am sitting in this lane and I don't even know if I have like the time or resources to be able to engage in this. It doesn't have to be big. Like one of the objectives I had in writing the books is I want there to be some methods in here that a design practitioner can just read and then take into tomorrow's workshop, because I don't think it has to be super involved, you don't have to spend like three months creating a giant causal loop diagram that gets chopped around to a whole bunch of stakeholders and the rest of your organization or anything like that. I actually don't even think that's an effective way of communicating. I've created those in the past. I'm gonna say right now, like nobody reads them. Nobody looks at them unless you've created some sort of executive summary of what you've done. And they're great forms of analysis but they're not good for funneling into decision-making necessarily. I think where those kinds of methods are worthwhile, let's say you want to understand causal loops within the system in which your problem space lies, the space in which you're doing this work is with a group of multidisciplinary stakeholders. You as a designer are not just like going off and doing this thing and then presenting it back to others. It's an alignment exercise, ultimately. It's a communication tool. So you might be thinking about how we understand how multilingual learners in middle school experience math. I'm not just like going off as a designer and doing some secondary research or even just interviews with students or what have you. I'm actually engaging with different stakeholders within the system, whether it's a school or district administrators, academic experts in the space, like researchers who have a good understanding of the system and the space, and then, yeah, also engaging lived experts like students and teachers who are most affected by the decision-making within that space but usually have the least decision-making power. And this kind of mix of stakeholders, including like the organizational stakeholders that I'm working with, are a really good group in order to determine how to create a representation of the system, whether you're creating a causal loop diagram. I think another sort of framework that I use really often in my own work is the iceberg diagram. So understanding what's on the surface? What are the things that we're seeing in terms of this particular problem space? And then what beneath that are the patterns of behavior? What is the infrastructure below that? And then finally, like what are the mental models? So really understanding the root cause. And I think developing that understanding, you've actually then created a space in which you can use the entirety of that for ideation. Like you can use the entirety of that to kind of think about where interventions can happen and it doesn't just have to be at the surface level. So you might be thinking about tutoring supplements for the students that I was referring to earlier. But actually there's an opportunity for professional development for teachers. And like these things emerge as you get to the root cause and you better understand these interconnections within the system. So I think it's a good way to just start doing it in workshops, right? It frees you from thinking about this as like some sort of independent project that you're running.

Erin - 00:22:05: So instead of just right back to the wearable and the person, we have some sort of diagram of the context, the environment, the ecosystem in which these things exist. And then when we want to iterate on that product, on that experience, we kind of know what the range of options are, and depending on the nature of the problem or the opportunity, where in this diagram we might wanna plug into that might be most effective. You mentioned the iceberg, are there some other key sort of diagrams or exercises that are accessible to folks?

Sheryl - 00:22:37: Yeah, I mean, I think in terms of understanding the status quo, like what's happening today that you might want to intervene in, the iceberg diagram is really good. I also think the Ishikawa or Fishbone Diagram is really good. And probably formal systems thinking methodologists would just like poo poo these, they'd be like, those are not-, really? I think systems thinking is a mindset, like these get at those other contextual areas that we've been talking about and use the tool that gets you to where you need to go. Like the tool is not the thing in and of itself. I mean, I think that's oftentimes the mistake that designers make about systems thinking is they think I need to do a causal loop diagram and then we'll figure out where the interventions go, and then we might even model how those causal loops change and I'm like, the map is not the thing. You start obsessing about that map, I don't even know if you can actually, as a designer, use your best skills to make change then. So I think about it as a way of building alignment and then it's like, okay, here are the potential points of intervention. And I talk a little bit about like, well then how do you envision what you're changing? I work a lot with philanthropies and there's a lot in the global development space that is oriented around creating a theory of change, and I included some theory of change frameworks in the book because these have worked really well for just identifying how you can actually make something happen, like what are the inputs, activities and outputs that you need to do? And then it always connects to like, what are the outcomes you're looking to achieve? And then what is the impact you're trying to achieve on a broader scale? So if you're working on malaria vaccines, then there are certain things you have to do, those are the inputs, activities, and outputs. And then the outcomes are the things that you might measure like how many people in a certain population actually get the vaccine. And then the impact is like that wild, broad dream that we have, which is like the eradication of malaria or the reduction of cases of malaria. So having that always in the back of your mind, what are the outcomes and impact that we're actually trying to achieve, helps you be more structured about how do you actually try to achieve that and make sure.

JH - 00:24:55: Yeah, when you were describing some of these methods and diagramming and stuff, I had the thought in my head that was very similar to what you just described of, they seemed like they'd be easy to get pulled towards like a completionist or perfectionist streak of, I wanna make this as good as possible, and to your point, you spent a lot of cycles on it and a lot of time and it isn't actually as effective or you're not getting the best return off of it. If you're doing this in a workshop and you're making some of these fishbone diagrams or icebergs or whatever else, like how do you know when you've hit a spot that is good enough? Like, yes, it's simple and it's a little naive, but there's value here versus we just did something really quick in a half hour and it's so raw that it's actually not that useful. Like, how do you know when you've maybe hit that 80/20 point or you've gotten something valuable?

Sheryl - 00:25:32: I do think there's a step of validating it with other people within the system. So whether it's your decision makers or, you know, as I mentioned before, like subject matter experts in the field, it’s making sure it feels like it captures the entirety of the system. I mean, you think about the alternatives to decision making, right? Like a lot of times decisions are made by some executive based on some assumption they have. I think when you're gathering a cross-disciplinary group of people and their goal is to analyze the system, then you're likely to get further along than just like how those decisions might have been made typically. So maybe framing it in that way is like, these are people who might not have been involved in decision making before and so having their lens on it automatically broadens what you think about the problem space, like the conclusions you might draw. And the fact that you've done research to lead up to this spot too, and your other stakeholders have also done research, means that whatever you're doing should also be evidence based. So when you're reaching that sort of alignment, that is probably the place where it's good enough and people don't always agree on where the system begins and ends, but you just kind of have to make decisions. Even if you don't know where the system ends, you might be able to find some spots to intervene within anyway. Yeah, oftentimes on my education projects, we involve academic researchers. For example, let's say we're working on something that is oriented around assessments and how we can incrementally change assessments, we'll always pull in experts who kind of want to blow up the system who are like, yeah, assessments don't work the way they are, you can't make incremental change, you basically have to start over again, and that starting over is going to take thirty years. I think that's a really useful viewpoint because I think it helps you draw the lines of where the system is. Sometimes those folks, they're not the happiest with the goals. As long as you're explicit about the goals, like the goal of this eventual project or collaboration is not that we're going to blow up the system, but that their perspective is really valuable and understanding. Well, if you could choose some points of intervention, where are those points of intervention? Oftentimes it's been really good to collaborate with people who have that distinct perspective. And I've been on many design teams, as a product designer, it feels like we're just making decisions in isolation, our designers, the engineers we're working with, we're not actually involving the outside world enough except just to validate and do some UXR testing or something. So this is probably the biggest mindset shift, broadening who your stakeholders are and really pulling them into what you're working on, especially because so much of what we're working on is so complex.

Erin - 00:28:25: Yeah, love to talk a little bit more about the future state because we kind of started talking with you've got the design thinking and the systems thinking and they're not opposites from my understanding, Venn diagrams if you will, there's some overlap, they're different, but not opposites. Both have strengths and weaknesses, we've got clouds, we've got clocks. Then we talked about using systems thinking to understand the status quo, to understand the world we live in, which presumably has some problems otherwise, we don't need to design anything. So now we have a good map of the status quo, whether it's causal loops or an iceberg or fishtail, something more simple. How do we move to the future with all this information? You talked a little bit about a theory of change. You know, how do we get everyone on board and use these tools to make change happen?

Sheryl - 00:29:11: There is creating the theory of change, thinking about what are all the points of intervention? What are the kind of changes that you're going to make that will have an impact? We often think of those as solutions, like I encourage people to step away from the terminology of solutions because Peter Senge, who wrote “The Fifth Discipline,” wrote yesterday's solutions are today's problems. So reinforcing that mindset of causality and yeah, circular, right? And keeping that in mind, you also need to think about things like what are the consequences of what we're going to do that we might not be intending, as well as like, what could go wrong? And one of the simplest ways to work out those degrees is by doing a futures wheel, thinking about the change that you want to make or what is the intervention, and then just playing out in degrees. What are the second order effects? What are the third order effects? What could go wrong? And then you can either figure out how to create additional interventions to sell for that, or you can just use it to kind of anticipate that things could go wrong in this category, or we might have to address this down the road, and those could be just oriented around like, how are people incentivized throughout the system? Like, are there things that could potentially go wrong along the way? It's a really nice exercise in thinking beyond the immediate change you want to see. I've actually done futures wheel exercises with some of my clients, they just oriented around things like, okay, what's going to happen if you became like an all remote organization? There are good things that will happen. There are bad things that will happen. Even like a really simple directional example like that, you can play out many different scenarios. The iceberg diagram is also like a good analysis for things like that, like how your organization is making decisions. You could be like, okay, right now, we're hybrid and these are like the things we're seeing, the potential issues with that, and these are kind of like the mental models below that. So yeah, once you imagine what's going to happen, you can then think about how to potentially further ideate on things like how you can offset that or how you can further enhance certain things that might have positive effects. And I also write a little bit about speculative design in the book, because I do think there's an opportunity to imagine the future in a way that falls a little bit outside of like a techno optimistic lens. And I think this is born of me working directly with a lot of like Technology Companies. Oftentimes it's really hard to see the side effects when you're working on, for example, emerging technology, you only see the benefits when you're within an organization. And so how can you use speculative design to think about the potential downsides or the environments in which your technology will sit in a few years time? I've never seen these two things combined in any sort of formal literature, where it’s like systems thinking and speculative design, but I think it's a really good expression of systems thinking in a way because it really considers the context of the future.


Erin - 00:32:06: AI feels like a very ripe area to do some speculative design systems thinking.

JH - 00:32:10: Lots to unpack there.

Sheryl - 00:32:14: Yeah, absolutely.

JH - 00:32:16: A question that comes to mind is something you hear as kind of a best practice within research is if you're the product designer who came up with the prototype, ideally you wouldn't be the one doing the usability testing on it because you're going to have some biases and you might unknowingly lead people because you like the idea, you came up with it. Is some of that true here? Like if you're doing the second and third order effect ideation and like how this might play out in the future, do you need to include people who are a little bit more removed from the immediacy of the work to get real perspectives of like a bad actor could do this with it or this might happen? Or can the people who are working on it in this type of exercise actually do a pretty good job of shifting their perspective and trying to think about some of the unintended consequences a little further out?

Sheryl - 00:32:49: I'm just like a big advocate of outside perspective and maybe that stems from me being a consultant and like going into organizations and rocking their organizational culture and I'm like, okay, I know where I can kind of be the devil's advocate here. Yeah, culture results in sort of a shared way of thinking sometimes and so I think it's always good to involve people who are outside of your team in these kinds of exercises because they will come with a different perspective. I was talking to somebody the other day who was mentioning how they use ChatGPT to enhance their writing because English is their second language and usually it does a pretty bad job of it, so they have to go in and fix it, but it does the basics. It fixes all the basic grammatical errors and things like that. And if you don't automatically have somebody on your team who kind of thinks in that way about how this tool can be used, you might not be able to identify those potential opportunities or side effects or what have you. So I do think it's important. I can't stress enough really that putting together multidisciplinary groups of people to do these kinds of exercises and analyses is core to system thinking and I think that oftentimes gets forgotten in system thinking texts. They get kind of wrapped up in the methods and tools and then you forget who you're supposed to be involving to do this. One of the early thinkers in the 60s and 70s in system thinking is Peter Checkland who wrote about hard systems methodology and soft systems methodology and he really stresses that, like you should be engaging with a really broad set of stakeholders because otherwise you're doing it wrong. And I think that holds true today. It's not about you going off and creating causal loops, I think it's you using your design skills to act as a facilitator rather than just like a producer of something. And that's where I think my work has primarily shifted in integrating systems thinking.

Erin - 00:34:45: Awesome. Yeah, it's also thinking about some of the work you might already be doing through a different lens and what you can get out of it and how it can contribute to your work. I imagine a lot of folks listening have found themselves leading workshops, facilitating, doing a lot of internal stakeholder management but the output of that might be this broader systems view of the world that can improve your designs and your research. But any parting thoughts for researchers or designers listening and really engaging with this topic maybe for the first time.

Sheryl - 00:35:12: Yeah, I guess I wanna emphasize like you can basically start finding ways to integrate sort of systems thinking methods into your practice right away, even if it just means using some of the simpler frameworks. I do think it's a mindset that is worth adopting and that's the starting point, it’s just you start to see what wasn't visible to you before and just like how things are interconnected, how things will play out. I was reading an article just this morning about in the US there's this app that has just been released for asylum seekers at the border and I was like, oh my God, they actually did that, there's an app for that, for this experience. Not only is it a horrible experience, the thing keeps crashing and whatever, but there's all sorts of system problems with it, like people don't have phones when they're seeking asylum. Like it's just, yeah, there's a million ways you can imagine that this is not the silver bullet that they thought it would be and you start kind of seeing that in just everyday situations. I think it really kind of shifts your mindset not just about your work, but how you think about circumstances in general.

JH - 00:36:19: I love thinking about the mentality of just like, you know, you can zoom out and broaden your perspective a little bit without getting super sophisticated here and that's a really good first step. Maybe I forgot to mention it, but definitely check the show notes for a promo code on “Closing the Loop,” if you want to check that book out. It’s a good read, I would encourage everyone to go grab it.

Erin - 00:36:34: Also lots of the other great books and thinkers on the subject as well, we can link up to the show notes too.

Sheryl - 00:36:39: Oh yeah, absolutely.

JH - 00:36:40: Yes. It will be a busy show notes. Check it out.

Erin - 00:36:42: Awesome. Well, thanks so much. This has been really educational and interesting and given me a lot to think about so thank you.

Sheryl - 00:36:47: Thank you so much.

Erin - 00:36:50: Hey there. It's me, Erin.

JH - 00:36:51: And me, JH.

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