Tag Archives: Design Thinking

Circular Economy, Sustainability, Systems Thinking

What do systems thinking, futures studies, service design, agile, and the circular economy have in common?

Systems thinking, futures studies, service design, Scrum, and the circular economy share a common thread: they help us understand how systems work, learn faster, and make better decisions. Together, they allow us to reimagine and redesign the way our societies and systems of production and consumption work.

Systems thinking

Systems thinking looks at parts, wholes, and their relationships. It starts with synthesis: how the system you’re designing—or the problem you’re solving—relates to larger systems. A system can be defined as a set of interrelated parts that produce some collective output, and one way to categorize systems is as simple (e.g. bike or a grocery check-out line), complicated (e.g. spaceship), complex (e.g. city or climate change), or chaotic (e.g. natural disaster or a financial crisis). However, all systems are just models of the world that can change depending on how you define the system boundaries and relationships.

Starting a system change process often requires that the parts of the system first recognize that they are part of some system in the first place. Those trying to change a system are never outside the system, even if they think so. Identifying and integrating different perspectives, boundary definitions, system layers, and temporal scales is crucial when designing complex systems or when solving (or dissolving) problems by using systems thinking. Recognizing the existence of different feedback loops, patterns of behavior, processes, structures, and mental models can also be part of the process. If you think you understand the system completely, you’re usually wrong.

Futures studies

Futures studies explores possible, probable, desirable, and undesirable futures by combining facts about the present with different techniques that allow imagining various images of the future. The whole point is to consider and explore many alternative futures instead of assuming one future pathway that is more or less like the present moment. Instead of forecasting, different pathways and scenarios are mapped out to expand our collective vision and inform decision-making and design. Identifying and questioning the underlying assumptions we currently make about the future is crucial, as is identifying the different forces that affect us and the perspectives that we might be missing. Futures studies can be informed by different systems thinking approaches, but it is already systemic in its general outlook.

Service design (human-centred design)

Service design (or human-centered design) is about designing with human needs in mind. The user and her unmet needs are at the front and center of the process. However, the user’s needs must be balanced with those of the business and the possibilities of technology so that we don’t design a service that drives our organization to the ground. The work must start with questioning deeply held assumptions about the user by building empathy for the user and through studying the user’s broader context. Systems thinking can be used for exploring the system that the user and our own organization are a part of to better understand the possibilities and constraints of the situation. Prototypes and co-creating with the user provide feedback that helps us test our assumptions and inform the next design iteration. Those solutions that have proven to provide value to the user, that actually work, and that are profitable are developed further and implemented at scale.

Scrum

Scrum is about using systems thinking to leverage the power of teamwork, communication, and feedback to get valuable work done with less time and effort. Scrum recognizes human limitations (such as our inability to accurately estimate how much time a task takes) and then works around those limitations by putting in place a process that leverages our strengths instead of our weaknesses. Scrum also questions deeply held assumptions about what productivity means (spoiler: it’s not about working long hours and multitasking) and applies cybernetics – the science of communication, control, and feedback – to enable real productivity. When using Scrum, we place our trust in teamwork over individual heroics and in the power of process over moments of epiphany and sacrifice. Waste in all its forms is removed and things are done right the first time to avoid doing them twice. Transparency and clear lines of communication are prioritized to help the team solve bottlenecks and receive feedback about their work from the customer. Feedback is used to both improve the work process and prioritize the next increment of products and services.

The circular economy

The circular economy is about rethinking the way we make things. The circular economy uses systems thinking to understand how the economy, society, and nature connect to one another and then applies that understanding to realign the economy with the long-term health of the latter two. Deeply held assumptions about how businesses and the economy work are re-evaluated to uncover new ways of creating value. Value itself is redefined from the perspective of the whole system instead of sacrificing the rest of the system to optimize the economy. This is achieved by expanding the boundaries and scope of our planning activities to align our economic aims with the health and well-being of the overall system. The circular economy is just a tool to accomplish this broader goal, and the different R’s (refuse, reuse, repair, remanufacture…etc.) and other similar CE principles are heuristics and rules of thumb that help us approximately design towards that goal. The circular business models are patterns of design that are helpful, but not enough on their own. Everything in the economy must change at all levels of analysis, and we need systems thinking to also recognize the limits of our capabilities, including entropy and rebound effects.

How these fit together in practice

  • Systems thinking maps the terrain and interdependencies.
  • Futures studies explores the routes ahead and tests assumptions.
  • Service design grounds choices in human reality and iterates with users.
  • Scrum delivers value in small, learnable increments.
  • Circular economy sets boundary conditions so today’s solutions remain viable tomorrow.

Common principles

  1. Synthesis before analysis
    Start by identifying the broader systems your work sits within. Constraints from those systems shape plans at lower levels, now and later. Ignore them and you risk unintended consequences or shifting problems elsewhere.
  2. Optimise for whole-system outcomes
    Do not privilege one part’s needs over the health of the whole. That is how systems become fragile or unsustainable.
  3. Don’t try to predict the future
    Explore alternatives and uncertainty. Design for options rather than betting on a single forecast.
  4. Seek feedback early and often
    Build feedback loops that steer design and planning, not just validate at the end.
  5. Involve stakeholders
    Co-create with the people affected. This surfaces constraints, incentives, tacit knowledge, and better ideas.
  6. Question underlying assumptions
    Make assumptions explicit, test them, and update them as you learn.

Start small: draw your system boundary, name three assumptions to test, and add one feedback loop to your process. Then take the next step with what you learn.

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Sustainability

Wicked opportunities in sustainability

While our world has become more dynamic and more complex, so have our problems. Wicked problems, such as climate change, terrorism, social inequality and destruction of natural habitat are extraordinarily difficult to deal with because they are almost impossible to define accurately. However, if we change our perspectives and reframe the issue in a new way we can overcome the wickedness of the challenge.

Wicked problems

“[Wicked problems are a] class of social system problems which are ill-formulated, where the information is confusing, where there are many clients and decision makers with conflicting values, and where the ramifications in the whole system are thoroughly confusing”- Horst Rittel

The definition of wicked problems is as complex as the problems themselves. Wicked problems have been a topic of discussion since the 1970s when Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber published their article, Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning. The authors explained how wicked problems differ from engineering problems in that they are almost impossible to define.

To illustrate, let’s imagine that you have a rising drug problem in your city. The root problem appears to be a new gang that is importing large amounts of drugs to the city from overseas. After identifying the gang leaders, the city police finally apprehends the gang leadership in a large raid and confiscates all the drugs. For a while it seems that the amount of drug offences is decreasing. Surely the problem has been solved, right?

In reality the opposite is the case. In the following months a violent gang war ensues and the amount of people detained for drug abuse is actually increasing! The reason? By eliminating the dominant gang, the police created instability in the hierarchy between other rival gangs in the city and in the drug markets. This instability was then corrected by a violent power struggle between the gangs that remained.

The police had therefore introduced only a temporary solution to the drug problem. In fact, the real problem is not the use of drugs, which is only a symptom of the underlying cause. The use of drugs and other criminal activity were the result of a variety of other societal problems, such as poverty, racial issues and bad city planning. These underlying, systemic issues were not addressed by getting rid of one gang, which is why the drug problem only got worse.

Here are some other examples of wicked problems:

  • Climate change
  • Global terrorism
  • Nation-wide obesity
  • Acidification of the oceans
  • Deteriorating biodiversity
  • Poverty

All of the above problems consist of several interconnected parts. For example, climate change cannot be reduced to one problem definition with simple cause-effect relationships, because the climate itself is very complex and hard to understand. The climate is not a singular thing, like a mountain is, but the cumulative effect of all the streams of air, water and heat in our planet.

Understanding the nature of wicked problems is absolutely necessary for today’s problem solvers and decision makers because most problems worth thinking about are essentially wicked. It is easy to become paralyzed after realizing how challenging it is to solve wicked problems. However, I believe that by reframing the issue we can unleash our creative thinking and turn the problems into an opportunity

Wicked opportunities

What if I told you that climate change, inequality and other similar issues are only problems if we choose to define them so? In fact, I like to think of wicked problems as signals telling us that change is necessary – that we need to start doing something fundamentally different from what we’re doing now. It means that we need to design new and better economic, social, governmental and physical systems than the ones that are now in place. Therefore, our biggest challenge is in fact overcoming our unwillingness to change.

Change is sometimes very difficult, but whenever there’s fundamental change involved, there are also great opportunities. Furthermore, we humans are experts in change! Just think of how different our world is from a hundred years ago – or fifty, or even twenty years ago. The automobile, the airplane and the advent of ICT have all changed our lives and the society so fundamentally that our forefathers would think they’re in a different planet if they saw our world today. So there’s nothing new to systemic change – it is already happening all around us.

Therefore, what we need to do is reframe wicked problems as opportunities. They are opportunities for creating new value, new business and new, more sustainable ways of living. I am happy and inspired to see many companies, such as Demos Effect, Plantagon, MBA Polymers, Ecovative Design, Piggybaggy, RePack and thousands others, adopting this attitude.

There’s a lot to do, so let’s not waste time trying to solve problems because it leads nowhere. Let’s instead choose to change our perspective and begin creating the world we want to live in.

Here are some suggestions how you can reframe wicked problems:

  • If you or your organization are faced with a difficult challenge, ask yourself whether it’s really an opportunity disguised as a problem.
  • When dealing with a wicked problem in your own life, instead of trying to solve the problem, try to think of ways you can re-design your life.
  • If you hear someone talking about a difficult challenge, try to identify the social systems that are involved in the issue. Then try to think of how we could go around the problem by designing the systems better.

References:

Rittel, H. & Webber, M. (1073). Dilemmas in a general theory of planning. Policy Sciences. vol. 4. pp. 155-169.

Buchanan, R. (1992). Wicked problems in design thinking. Design Issues, vol. 8. no. 2. pp. 5-21.

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