Step 3: System Understanding

Where This Fits

This is the third step of the SiD five-step method (Goals and Indicators, System Mapping, System Understanding, Solutioning and Roadmapping, Evaluate and Iterate). In Step 2 you built maps. Now you step back and ask: what does it all mean? How does this system actually behave?

From Maps to Understanding

You have charted the system's objects, relationships, flows, and dynamics. Now comes the part that sounds deceptively simple: understand it.

How does the system behave? If you pull this lever over here, what happens over there? This phase involves experimentation, discussion, and contemplation. The goal is to get acquainted with the system deeply enough to define steps that can improve it.

The central focus of this step is intuitive understanding through immersion. Using the knowledge embedded in the maps you have created, the system starts to become a living mental thing. You develop a feeling for its dynamics and get a sense of how everything connects. Through this process, the bottom-up system maps and top-down system understanding meet, generating deeper insight.

Why Immersion Works

This mental process is powerful and leads to insight from which improvement steps emerge naturally. Describing how to have an "a-ha" moment is difficult. What we know is that opening the mind after mapping the system generates a natural feeling for its dynamics. You reflect about it. You talk about it. You play with it.

Our brains evolved surrounded by complex systems. We are in tune with their behaviors and patterns. Given time and mental space, we can recognize patterns and obtain intuitive understanding of systems far too complex for purely analytical approaches. This is not mysticism. It is the same cognitive process a skilled mechanic uses when they "just know" something sounds wrong with an engine, or a sailor uses when they read the weather.

The process involves both solitary introspection and group discussion. Mental rest is required, and is not optional.

If the project is small and you personally mapped the system, you may have developed understanding during the mapping itself. In most cases, that luxury is not available. A group of people needs to understand what is going on, or the system is too complex for any one person. The following methods help create shared understanding across a team.

Three Modes of Immersion

1. Relax and Reflect

The story goes that Archimedes had been working on a complex math problem for days. His wife finally drew him a bath and forced him to relax. In the bath, the solution came. He had uploaded all the required data into his brain, could not figure it out by "thinking," and just needed downtime for his subconscious to work with it. When he figured it out, he famously yelled "Eureka," the term forever associated with that moment.

Do as Archimedes did. When you are with a group, take a day or half a day off and process all the complex data by not thinking about it. Walk in a forest. Go knitting. Work in the garden. Whatever it is, make sure it is mentally light, physically relaxing, and distracting. Nature is a particularly good setting for this.

This may sound indulgent. It is not. It is a deliberate, evidence-backed part of the process. Complex pattern recognition requires neural processing that cannot be forced through conscious effort.

2. Play and Learn

Playing with a system is one of the most intuitive ways to figure out its character. If you can find a way to play with the system, through a card game, a creative process, or any other interactive format, do it.

Serious gaming. For complex social, policy, and economic issues, serious games are a powerful exploration tool. A game might investigate how international stakeholders influence a carbon tax credit system. These games allow a large group to explore a complicated issue over hours or days, with everyone walking away with an intricate understanding of its details, workings, and possible solution pathways. Specialist serious game organizers can help unravel the system and turn it into a dynamic, playable simulation. If the project type and resources allow for this, it is highly recommended.

Climbing the mountain of understanding. This mental exercise helps gain a holistic view. The essence: walk from an object perspective up to a systems perspective, and back down again. Start at the material level of reality. Move through the interrelations of the network toward the systems level, where everything is connected. From there, you have a wide view across the entire system. Scan the horizon. Then descend back to the object level with new insights and observe how they manifest in material reality.

Role reversal. In projects where stakeholder interaction is prominent, play games where each participant takes the position of a different stakeholder and tries to maximize that party's interest. This can be done through conversation, games, or written exchange. The perspective shift is often revelatory.

Simulation. For projects involving large resource flows and technical operations, computer simulations of parts of the system may provide insight. Thermal analysis software for a building, for example, lends insight into how heating systems function. Treat simulations as play. You cannot truly model a complex system, but you can experiment with computer models and see if they help.

Walking down SiD Road. To gain overall understanding, walk through SiD's object, network, and system indicators one by one, probing each with "what if" questions.

• What if you increase transparency in this system? What does that mean in context? What would it result in?
• What are the strongest drivers for resilience?
• How do the ecosystems of the topic influence the diversity of the system's network?

Ask many questions. Poke the system and see how it responds in your mind. With a team, you can do this in a structured fashion, going down each parameter and discussing what it means in the system's context.

3. Talk and Reconsider

Discuss the system with others. Try to explain it to someone not initiated in the process. Many realizations happen when you put complex ideas into words for someone you respect.

Depending on the system's complexity, you might call in external colleagues and experts to discuss specific aspects, so you can put the pieces together and reflect on what you find. For larger projects, experienced mapping experts often do the mapping, and the whole team needs to come together to discuss the results, explore the system, and build shared understanding.

What Understanding Produces

Once you have immersed yourself in the system, you develop a thorough, comprehensive system-perspective of the issue. You can measure acquired experience against object or network parameters and, ultimately, the goal of the trajectory at the system level.

You develop a feel for what happens to the state of the system if you change an object or network property. This is not guesswork. It is informed intuition built on rigorous mapping and sustained attention.

Once understanding is established and solution space has opened, it is time to move on: map a route from where the system is to where it should go.

Supporting Tools

Viable Systems Model (VSM)

The Viable Systems Model, developed by cybernetician Stafford Beer and published in 1972, is a tool for understanding network relations from a bottom-up reductionist perspective. It is especially useful for rapid analysis of organizational structures, internal logistics, supply chain complexity, and other finite network structures. Because VSM has been in development for decades, many resources are available. VSM can be combined with SiD's qualitative network and systems analysis approaches and used to set up quantitative analysis on selected network parameters.

Physical Exploration

Going outside and physically exploring the system and the challenge is a great way to process them. A group walk works wonders, but there are also specific group exercises for exploring different aspects, such as network relations. In SiD training weekends, physical exercises are used to increase understanding of systems thinking, for example, by having a group physically explore the importance of Connectivity, Transparency, and Awareness parameters on group dynamics.

Large-Scale Group Mapping

Large-scale system mapping in a group is both a mapping activity and an understanding activity. At Brighton University in the UK, a group mapped the persistence of homelessness in the city and explored ways to counteract the dynamic systemically. The team made initial system maps, then combined, expanded, improved, and deepened working components in sketch form. Finally, they created a large-scale presentation to communicate the solution.

Takeaway

Understanding cannot be rushed or skipped. It is the bridge between having data and knowing what to do with it. Immerse yourself. Give your brain time. Discuss, play, walk, and reflect. The solutions that emerge from genuine system understanding are qualitatively different from, and more effective than, solutions generated by jumping straight from data to action.

Next: Chapter 2.4 takes you into Step 4, Solutioning and Roadmapping, where understanding translates into concrete actions and plans.