Systems Practice

This course has been developed by The Omidyar Group and +Acumen to help anyone working on complex problems across any field of social change learn to use a Systems Practice to make sustainable social impact.

• About the Omidyar Group
• About Rob Ricigliano

This course will lead you through each step of understanding a system, analyzing it to find points of leverage, and learning how to adapt in a changing environment. You will also gain access to a portfolio of step-by-step tools, processes, and mindsets to apply to your current and future work.

By completing this course, you will:

• Identify complex social challenges that are best tackled using a Systems Practice
• Understand how to launch your own Systems Practice
• Map a complex system
• Identify leverage opportunities within your system
• Develop a strategy that matches the complexity of the challenge you are tackling

Course Outline

1. What is Systems Practice?
   • Explain why it is essential to take a systemic view of complex social challenges
   • Differentiate between clock and cloud problems
   • Define "system" and "Systems Practice"
   • Frame your own Systems Challenge
   • Diagnose whether a Systems Practice is right for tackling your challenge
2. Set a Guiding Star and Near Star for Your System
   • Understand the Systems Practice mindsets
   • Define your area of focus for your Systems Practice by developing an aspirational guiding star and provisional near star
   • Formulate a framing question for your Systems Practice
3. Explore Forces in Your System
   • Identify the forces that enable change and the forces that inhibit change in your system
   • Organize these forces into upstream causes and downstream effects
   • Conduct an SAT analysis to ensure you are holistically viewing the system
4. Build Loops and Discover the Deep Structure
   • Find patterns in your system
   • Identify how the forces in your system are tied together in feedback loops
   • Uncover the deep structure that will serve as the anchor point for your systems map
5. Map Your System
   • Build a systems map by bringing together all your loops, spotting overlapping factors, and drawing intersections
   • Craft a narrative that helps you tell a better story about the system you hope to impact
6. Socialize Your Map
   • Share your map and narrative with others to get feedback
   • Refine and iterate your map based on the feedback you receive
7. Find Leverage and Pull It All Together
   • Analyze your map to find opportunities for leverage (places where relatively small engagements can have much larger impacts over time)
   • Discuss a systems change strategy with your team
   • Compile all your work into a Systems Journey Deck

Systems Practice is both a specific methodology, as will be defined in this course, and a more general approach to grappling with adaptive problems in complex environments with the aim of making enduring social change at scale.

A systems practice helps answer three basic questions:

• How does the environment within which you work operate as a complex, dynamic system?
• How will your strategy engage the system in order to have highly leveraged impact?
• How will you test your assumptions and hypotheses so you can learn and adapt effectively?

The approach we'll teach in this course uses systems mapping to help you understand how an environment works as a dynamic system. Using the map, you'll identify opportunities to gain leverage and develop an approach to effectively engage the system.