Systems – Page 2 – Integration and Implementation Insights

Dealing with imperfection in tackling complex problems

March 4, 2025February 25, 2025

By Gabriele Bammer.

gabriele-bammer_nov-2021 — Gabriele Bammer (biography)

Why is an appreciation of imperfection and its inevitability important for those seeking to understand and act on complex societal and environmental problems? Which traps can imperfection lead to and what are the most effective ways of dealing with it?

The inevitability of imperfection

Imperfection is inevitable both in attempting to develop a comprehensive understanding of complex societal and environmental problems and in acting on them. The multiple underpinning reasons include:

● Complex problems are systems problems, and all systems views are partial, so that the whole system cannot be taken into account. Even then, boundaries need to be set to effectively deploy available resources and these artificial boundaries further constrain understanding of the whole system.

Structured dialogical design

July 10, 2024July 9, 2024

By Yiannis Laouris

How can heterogeneous groups reach consensus on complex issues in a reasonably limited amount of time? What kind of process allows for meaningful community involvement that is genuinely participatory and democratic?

Structured Dialogical Design is a process that achieves both these aims. The key aspects of the process and steps are presented.

Triggering questions

Structured Dialogical Design processes are always structured around triggering questions, which frame the discussions and help define the stakeholders of the issues under consideration. The idea is that those primarily concerned with and/or affected by the issues under consideration should become the primary participants.

For Structured Dialogical Design all stakeholders (or their representatives) concerned with the issues at stake must be included, including those seemingly without a voice (which many of us may not be hearing and are not responsive to listening to, such as the voice of nature).

Integration and Implementation Sciences (i2S) 3.0: An updated framework to foster expertise for tackling complex problems

February 24, 2025April 16, 2024

By Gabriele Bammer

How can researchers interested in tackling complex societal and environmental problems easily find and draw on what they need from inter- and transdisciplinary approaches, systems thinking, action research, post-normal science and a range of other ways of combining disciplinary and stakeholder perspectives in order to bring about improvements? How can the necessary expertise be fostered and supported in a systematic way?

These are the questions that I have been addressing for more than 20 years in considering whether a new discipline – Integration and Implementation Sciences or i2S – could provide a way forward. i2S 3.0 is the third conceptualization of this discipline and the current version is summarised in the figure below.

At this stage in its development, i2S is focused on providing a framework and conduit for sharing concepts, methods, processes and other tools that are currently fragmented across inter- and transdisciplinarity, systems thinking, action research, post-normal science and other approaches.

Competencies for systems thinking practitioners. Part 2: Skills and behaviours

March 19, 2024March 12, 2024

Edited by Gabriele Bammer

editors-addition_systems

What skills and behaviours are required by those seeking to provide expert systemic analysis, advice and facilitation to support decision-makers in understanding and addressing complex problems?

This is the second of two blog posts presenting the systems thinking competencies provided by the UK Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education (no date) and completes an overview of what decision makers should be able to expect from systems thinking practitioners, along with the knowledge, skills and behaviour competencies such systems thinking practitioners should have. The first blog post provided overall expectations of what systems thinking practitioners should be able to do and knowledge competencies.

Skills competencies

Skills in 11 areas are required for a systems thinking practitioner.

Competencies for systems thinking practitioners. Part 1: Overall expectations and knowledge

March 19, 2024March 12, 2024

Edited by Gabriele Bammer

editors-addition_systems

What knowledge, skills and behaviours are required by those seeking to provide expert systemic analysis, advice and facilitation to support decision-makers in understanding and addressing complex problems, ie., problems that have no single ‘owner’ or cause, and no simple solution? What should decision makers be able to expect from the systems thinking practitioners they engage with?

The UK Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education (no date) provides competencies in knowledge, skills and behaviours and these are reproduced here (knowledge competencies), and in a companion blog post (skills and behaviour competencies). This list of competencies provides a very useful way of getting an overview of systems thinking and the skills required.

What should systems thinking practitioners be able to do?

Eighth annual review

January 12, 2024December 12, 2023

By Gabriele Bammer

Which i2Insights contributions inspired you in 2023? What did you learn that was new and how did it help you in tackling the complex societal or environmental problems you focus on? What would you like to see in 2024 and beyond?

One of the delights of curating i2Insights is learning something from every blog post. Another is the personal interactions involved in broadening the global community of contributors, introducing fresh voices and fresh insights, alongside those who are more seasoned contributors.

In this last blog post for 2023, I survey three of the year’s many highlights and what they mean for the operation of i2Insights:

integration and synthesis as an emerging ‘hot’ topic
re-introducing “golden oldies,” ie. tried and tested tools
increasing the number of countries represented by contributors, with an accompanying focus on decolonisation.

How measuring impact gets in the way of real world change

December 12, 2023November 28, 2023

By Toby Lowe

Why is the idea that we can measure our impact to understand how well we are performing fundamentally flawed? Why is it impossible to “demonstrate your impact” in complex environments?

Although the idea of measuring impact is seductive, almost all useful social change is achieved as part of a complex system. In other words, your work is a small part of a much larger web of entangled and interdependent activity and social forces.

The systems map of the outcome of obesity, shown in the figure below, illustrates this perfectly – it shows all the factors contributing to people being obese (or not), and all the relationships between those factors.

This is the reality of trying to make impact in the world – your actions are part of a web of relationships – most of which are beyond your control, many of which are beyond your influence, quite a few of which will be completely invisible to you.

The Strategic Choice Approach in shaping public policies

April 3, 2025October 31, 2023

By Catherine Hobbs

catherine-hobbs_2021 — Catherine Hobbs (biography)

How can we be inspired, rather than overwhelmed, by differing perspectives in the inter-organisational planning required to more effectively address cross-cutting issues, or interacting areas of policy? How can we learn from the achievements of public policy action research, in the light of the local and global uncertainties of the 2020s?

Strategic Choice Approach was developed by John Friend with Allen Hickling, originating during the 1960s and 1970s. It emerged through a series of collaborative action research projects applied to public policy challenges in a number of countries, so that its origins are empirical rather than theoretical.

Friend described Strategic Choice Approach as being helpful as a practical approach to planning under pressure where “people of different outlooks and allegiances are working together with a shared concern to move rapidly towards commitments to action or to changes of policy on difficult issues of shared concern” (Friend, no date).

Systemic interventions for complex problems: The Intervention Design Process / Para problemas complejos, intervenciones sistémicas: el Proceso de Diseño de Intervención

October 31, 2023October 24, 2023

By Daniel Marín Vanegas

A Spanish version of this post is available.

What is a useful systemic process for tackling complex societal and environmental problems?

The Intervention Design Process (IDP) is a non-linear approach that integrates different models, methods, techniques, and tools in a set of four iterative stages that are both systematic and systemic (Marín-Vanegas, 2023). The four phases – captured in the acronym IDP-3DC – are:

Diagnosis
Dialogue
Decision
Change.

Co-producing knowledge: Phases, issues and the td-net toolbox

April 30, 2025October 10, 2023

By Sibylle Studer and Theres Paulsen

authors_sibylle-studer_theres-paulsen — 1. Sibylle Studer (biography)
2. Theres Paulsen (biography)

What are the steps involved in co-producing knowledge in transdisciplinary research? What tools are available to help knowledge co-production and for what purpose should they be used?

Based on our experiences with the td-net (Network for Transdisciplinary Research) toolbox, we discuss how knowledge co-production can be organized along an ideal type of a transdisciplinary research process.

Phases and key issues of co-production

In developing the td-net toolbox, we used the following four phases of knowledge co-production, which require an iterative, rather than linear, approach:

Key systems thinking lessons from Donella Meadows

October 3, 2023

By Geoff Marlow

The book “Thinking In Systems: A Primer” by Donella (Dana) Meadows (2008) offers a useful entry point into systems thinking via seven lessons.

Lesson 1: Systems are always more than the sum of their parts

Feedback loops are pivotal, as is looking beyond the players to the underlying rules of the game.

Meadows (p. 13) offers guidance as to “whether you are looking at a system or just a bunch of stuff:

Can you identify parts? . . . and
Do the parts affect each other? . . . and
Do the parts together produce an effect that is different from the effect of each part on its own? . . . and perhaps
Does the effect, the behavior over time, persist in a variety of circumstances?”

Using archetypes as a systemic lens to understand the complexity of sustainable development

August 3, 2023June 13, 2023

By Hossein Hosseini, Enayat A. Moallemi, Sibel Eker, Edoardo Bertone and Katrina Szetey

authors_hossein-hosseini_enayat-moallemi_sibel-eker_edoardo-bertone_katrina-szetey — 1. Hossein Hosseini; 2. Enayat A. Moallemi; 3. Sibel Ekern; 4. Edoardo Bertone; 5. Katrina Szetey (biographies)

What are systems archetypes and how can they be used to bring a deeper understanding of causal drivers, potential dynamic behaviour in the future, and policy resistance when tackling complex problems, including those in sustainable development?

Systems archetypes are recurring generic systems structures found in many kinds of organisations, under many circumstances, and at many levels and scales. They are distinctive combinations of reinforcing and balancing processes theoretically rooted in systems thinking and modelling.

There are eight common archetypes, each with specific underlying causal drivers (eg., feedback loops, delay), expected dynamic behaviour (eg., acceleration, disruption, tipping point), and policy implications (eg., how to respond, where to intervene). Archetypes can help shift an analytical focus from simple behavioural correlations or a limited understanding of interactions between certain goals to a generalised knowledge of recurring patterns, causes, and consequences.