The Hidden Power Podcast S2 Ep 20: Check 19 - Governments - Systems Thinking

Beneficial change most often results from working with the affected population through the medium of STiP.

Systems Thinking in Practice – or STiP, as we sometimes call it – is, frankly, one of the great hopes of our time. It has the endorsement of the UN, the WHO and the OECD and has proved effective in alleviating difficulties of bewildering complexity by engaging social learning.

This principle takes the fundamental purpose of government – beneficial change – and addresses the patchy performance of governments everywhere. The placating, appeasing, and overall absence of effective action on the part of governments is easily traced to the impossibility of such a tiny cohort being able to contend with the vast complexity of their imagined mandate. The systemic response, the STiP response, is to turn this on its head, and put the mandate where it is needed – at the front line, where life is happening, far from the much-vaunted Corridors of Power.

What is it, to think systemically? What does it look like, in practice?

In this episode we unpack this promising approach to the challenges of our time.

Talking points:

This great hope
Problems are the world’s problems
The problems with governments – over-stretched
Laying it all out – “problems”, maps, stakeholders, “solutions”
Situations of concern
Extending and containing boundaries
Systems mapping – a picture of the whole system, how the system works
Goulburn-Broken River Catchment – vast complexity
Polarised perspectives: Bawdens World-views
The library at Shepton Mallet
Rich pictures – visual representations and complex communications and humans
Framing and re-framing
Solutions landscapes – homelessness in Vancouver
The design turn – systems thinking in practise is designing
…and is empowering to civil society: Pacific coast tidal wave planning and the pandemic
Individual action and STiP – An art therapist bucks the bureaucracy and frees an agoraphobic
What Why and How – applying learning to your relationship