Systems Practice | The Omidyar Group

WORKSHOP 1
LAUNCH YOUR SYSTEMS PRACTICE

Estimated Time: 2 hours

LAUNCH YOUR SYSTEMS PRACTICE

About This Workshop

In this first workshop, you’ll get to know your team members and decide on the complex social
challenge you want to tackle. You’ll diagnose whether a Systems Practice is the right approach
for tackling this challenge and reframe it if necessary.

Your assignment for this module will be to share a visual representation of your systems
challenge (see worksheet on final page of this PDF) and upload it to NovoEd. After the deadline
for the assignment has passed, be sure to check the platform to see all of the complex social
challenges that teams from around the world will be tackling in this course.

What You’ll Need

• Copies of this workshop guide

• Pens and markers
• Sticky notes or stickers
• A whiteboard, easel, blank wall or table
• Access to a computer/mobile device and an internet connection so that you can reference the
online course

What You’ll Do

• Team Introductions and Logistics (30 minutes)

• Frame Your Challenge Discussion (15 minutes)
• Create a Complexity Spectrums Chart (30 minutes)
• Complete ASSIGNMENT 1: Systems Challenge Worksheet (15 minutes)
INTRODUCTIONS and LOGISTICS
1. Introductions (30 minutes)

Spend a few minutes introducing yourself to the other people in your group. You may want to
share:
• Your name, organizational affiliation and role (if you don’t already know each other)
• What you already know about Systems Practice or systems thinking
• What you are hoping to learn by taking this course

Make sure you are all registered on the NovoEd platform. If you need help, follow the guidelines
in the “How to Form a Team” section of the course. If you’re still looking for team members to
join you, post in the discussion forum. Remember that we recommend that you find a team of
people who are all working on the same complex social challenge you can meet in person. It is
ideal if you can find colleagues at work who are interested in forming a team with you.
When you have everyone gathered together, we also recommend pulling up the Course Roadmap
page of the course and scheduling your team meetings for the next 8 weeks now.

TIP: You can take this course individually just by watching the videos and reading the case
studies each week. However, to get a deeper and more immersive understanding of Systems
Practice, we highly recommend forming a team to complete the assignments.

BEST PRACTICES FOR TEAMS

Hundreds of thousands of people from around the world have taken +Acumen courses in teams.
Forming a team might seem like a lot of work, but people tell us it is well worth the effort! You
are more likely to stay motivated to finish the course and apply what you learn in this course to
your work if you take it with other people.

Here are some best practices we’ve learned set the most successful teams apart:

• Designate a team leader for each session. This person can coordinate scheduling,
upload the final assignment each week, keep the group on track, and maybe even bring
snacks! To ensure this doesn’t become too burdensome for one person, we recommend
designating one team leader per week.
• Schedule your meetings now. You will get busy. You’re more likely to finish the course
if you put time on your calendars right away.
• Meet in person. Even though this is an online course, we highly recommend that you
find a team that you can meet with in person. We’ve found teams are able to complete the
activities much more easily if they do the work offline and then upload their products and
share their learning online.
• If you want to try a virtual meeting, stay organized and test out collaboration tools like
Limnu, Padlet, Google Hangouts, Skype, Slack, and appear.in.
• Learn more tips in this article.
FRAME YOUR SYSTEMS CHALLENGE
2. Discussion (15 minutes)

Decide what complex social challenge your team wants to tackle. Ideally, this should be an issue
you are already working on or have some experience with. These challenges could be things such
as:

• Homelessness in the United States

• The global refugee crisis
• Food insecurity in Bihar, India
• Inequity in the French education system
• Mental health among veterans in the United States
• Lack of global action on climate change
• Teacher shortage in Pakistan
• Obesity crisis among minority youth in the United States

Write your answers down on this page.

COMPLEXITY SPECTRUMS CHART
3. Create a complexity spectrums chart (30 minutes)

Create a large version of the chart described below. Find a white board, a blank wall, or a large
clean table. Get out some sticky notes or markers.

It should have four headings:

• Level of Understanding
• Engagement
• Environment
• Goals

Then create “spectrums” with the following two poles:

• Level of Understanding
o Well understood / Not understood
• Engagement
o Consensus / Diversity of opinion
• Environment
o Stable / Dynamic
• Self Contained / Interconnected
o Goals
• Small Scale / Broad Change
o Short-term / Sustained
COMPLEXITY SPECTRUMS CHART

3. Create a complexity spectrums chart

Once you’ve created your chart, write your challenge at the top. Talk through each dimension of
complexity, trying to figure out where your challenge falls on each spectrum using the following
discussion prompts. Place a sticky note or sticker in the appropriate place on each spectrum. The
more stickers you have on the right side of your spectrum, the more complex your challenge. See
examples on the following page.

Level of Understanding

• How well is your challenge understood?

• Do you know what causes it?
• Is there solid evidence that your proposed actions will have the intended effects?

If no one really understands the problem or there are no proven solutions, your challenge would
fall on the right

Engagement

• Is there a high level of consensus among stakeholders and experts about what to do OR is
there significant diversity of opinion and even conflict among stakeholders about how to
address this challenge?

If there is not consensus among stakeholders about how to tackle your challenge, you would
land on the right.

Environment

• Is your challenge relatively self-contained or is it intertwined with the broader

environment?
• Is your challenge occurring in an environment that is politically, socially and
economically stable or unstable?

If your environment is dynamic or your challenge is interconnected to the broader environment,

you fall to the right.

Goal

• Are you trying to make short-term change or long-term, sustained change?

• Are you trying to achieve change at a small level or a broad scale?

If your goals are to created sustained, broad scale challenge, you fall to the right.
COMPLEXITY SPECTRUMS CHART
Here’s one example.

A team working on agriculture in India began by defining their challenge as “improving

irrigation for one village.”

However, when they assessed this challenge according to the dimensions of complexity, they
found that:

• Level of understanding: There were already known solutions for how to implement
microdrip irrigation systems in villages.
• Engagement: There was already consensus around the best irrigation systems to try.
• Environment: The village where they were operating was relatively stable. The
irrigation challenges were relatively self- contained.
• Goals: The team’s goals were short-term and small scale. They wanted to test out a
solution rapidly and see if it worked in one village.

This analysis led them to conclude that the problem of bringing irrigation to one village was not
really a complex, adaptive challenge that would require a systems practice approach.
Accordingly, they reframed their challenge.

By reframing their challenge to the larger issue of “food insecurity in Bihar,” they expanded the
scope and complexity of the issue they were trying to address, making it better suited to a
systems practice approach. When they analyzed this challenge again, most of their sticky notes
fell on the right side of the chart. Unlike the relatively well-defined irrigation challenge, the
wider issue of food security across an entire region of India was a complex problem reliant on
many factors with no known solution.

Go through this exercise for your own challenge and reframe your challenge as until you find
something that is sufficiently complex to be addressed with the systems practice approach we’ll
teach you in this course.

Finish your workshop by having your team complete and submit the worksheet on the following
page.
ASSIGNMENT 1
Fill in the questions below.

The systems challenge we hope to tackle is:

Because:

Visualize your complex challenge.

Show us a visual representation of why your challenge is so complex. This doesn’t have to be
perfect—just start to get creative. You can take a picture or illustrate some aspect of your
challenge (stick figures are fine!). The goal is simply to visualize some element of your complex
social challenge so that other teams can see what you are working on.

If creating a visual representation is not accessible to you, feel free to use words to describe your
challenge, or any other creative means of completing the assignment.