Talk & Reconsider

Talking ideas through with team members and other stakeholders helps a great deal in achieving multiple perspectives on the same problem.

Discuss the system with others; perhaps try to explain it to someone who’s not familiar with the process to try to find the words to express it. Many realizations will happen when you talk to someone you respect and whose insights you appreciate.

Depending on the system’s complexity and size, you might want to call in some external colleagues and experts in the various aspects of your challenge to discuss what’s going on in its subsections so that you can put one and one together and reflect on the insights you found.

For larger projects, system mapping is often performed by experienced mapping experts. In that case, not the whole team is up to snuff with the details. In that case, the whole team needs to discuss the maps made and explore the system. Once you’ve ‘immersed’ yourself in the system, you’ll have developed a thorough understanding and comprehensive system-perspective of the issue at hand.

You can measure the acquired experience with the system’s behavior against the object or network parameters, and ultimately, the goal of the trajectory on a systems level. By doing this, you’ll develop a feel of what will happen to the system’s state if you change an object or network property.

Once a decent understanding of the system has been established, and the solution space has been opened, it’s time to move on and map a route from where the system currently is to where we feel it should go.