Summary

In this episode, we delve into the intricate world of systemic design with expert Mieke van der Bijl Brouwer. Systemic design merges systems thinking with design theory to address complex challenges not by dissecting them into smaller parts but by enhancing their interactions. Mieke explains how this approach can transform organizational behaviors and lead to significant societal shifts. From rethinking university systems for better student well-being to using visual tools for collaborative problem-solving, we explore how systemic design fosters deeper understanding and innovation. Join us as we uncover the potential of thinking in systems, revealing how interconnected perspectives can lead to meaningful change.

Transcript

Interconnected: Exploring the World Through Systemic Design

00:00:00] Rob Brodnick: Welcome

to the positive turbulence podcast. I’m Rob Brodnick. Today on our show, we’re diving into a concept that might sound complex at first, but has the potential to reshape how we approach problems and design solutions. It’s called systemic design. What does it mean to think systemically in a world obsessed with specifics? How does this perspective shift our understanding of everything from organizational behavior to personal interactions?

[00:00:34] Karyn Zuidinga: Hi, I’m Karyn Zuidinga. Today we’re talking with Mieke Van der Brijl Brouwer, an expert who stumbled upon systemic design in 2016. Although the term might sound new, it has roots that go back decades. Systemic design isn’t just a single tool or method. It’s an emerging field. A blend of systems thinking and design theory aimed at tackling complex problems, not by breaking them down to their simplest parts, but by understanding and improving relationships between those parts.

[00:01:06] Rob Brodnick: From organizations to ecosystems, from microscopes to macro problems, systemic design looks at how everything is connected. It’s a mindset shift from the reductionist view, where improving parts supposedly improves the whole, to a holistic view, where the focus is on how these parts interact and what emerges from those interactions.

[00:01:27] Karyn Zuidinga: We’ll also explore how systemic design is more than just understanding or visualizing problems. It’s about engagement, co-creation, and fundamentally shifting our perceptions. What happens when you design not just with a community, a part of it? How do you foster an environment where small shifts lead to big changes?

All this and more coming up on today’s episode. Stay with us.

[00:01:50] Rob Brodnick: The Positive Turbulence podcast is brought to you by AMI, an innovation learning community that is celebrating 40 years of supporting innovation and creativity for organizations and individuals. Learn more at aminnovation. org. 

Also, we’d like to thank Mack Avenue Music Group as a contributing sponsor. To hear our theme song, Late Night Sunrise, and other great music, visit mackavenue. com. 

[00:02:17] Karyn Zuidinga: Could you explain to our listeners what is systemic design? I mentioned it to a few designers that I know and they were like, Ooh, that sounds really cool. But Karyn, what is it? 

[00:02:30] Mieke Van der Brijl Brouwer: what is it? Yeah, good question. Systemic design is actually something I discovered. When was it in in 2016, but the term has been around for a little bit longer. Systemic design is basically a field. First of all it’s a field. It’s some people call it an emerging discipline, a new discipline. It’s not one method or tool or approach but really a whole field. 

And it’s also a community that came together around. It must have been around 11 or 12 years ago when they were looking at basically how can we bring systems thinking or systems theory and practices and design theory and practices together? 

Systems thinking, systems theory, systems practices, have been developed as a response to the dominant reductionist perspective in science. With the invention of science, we basically, what we started doing as a Western society is that we started to understand things. through reducing them to their smaller parts.

So for example, it started in biology, where they might have been studying species with the invention of the microscope. You could start zooming in onto cells and the smaller things. And there was a lot of excitement. And I, Oh, if we can, if we know what the smaller things, if we know what the building blocks are, then we understand this organism, right?

And the idea was also, if you want to improve something, then you just need to make sure that you improve the parts of this thing. And if you’ve done that, then the whole will automatically also be better. And systems there can be many different things, right? It can be a species of biological species, but they can also be a social system, a group, a team, an organization, a community.

There can be a technical system. So there’s all different types of of systems. Ecosystems are quite well known as well. And the scientific approach is really to reduce those systems, but then at a certain point certain scientists and researchers realized actually, if we only look at the parts, we don’t, we’re not really understanding how it all comes together.

Actually, it’s really important to look at how things are related to each other. Because that’s how we can basically understand phenomena, right? We cannot understand a phenomenon just through understanding its parts. We also need to know how those parts are related and how that leads to what we call emergent property. So systems thinking is something that developed in multiple fields because it was in biology, but also in psychology in, in physics with quantum physics. I think almost any discipline has a stream that is more with systems thinking, and it really helps us understand the behavior of whatever phenomena we’re studying. But that’s also a bit where it stops, right? Okay, we better understand these phenomena. But then if we want these phenomena to improve, if you want a better organization, or we want to solve this complex problems, then what do we do? 

So the idea was that from these people who came together about 10 years ago was what if we bring design as a practice, which is very much about future focus and what you can improve. And this idea of system thinking, what if we bring these two things together would that help us in create better systems or whatever you mean with that word word systems. Yeah, that’s basically what systemic design is. It brings together design and systems. 

And it’s important to distinguish three different types of integration.

One is the idea of systems design. Systems design has actually been around for a much longer, a longer time. I don’t know how old systems design or system engineering is, but definitely decades where which is really aimed at designing technical systems, which of course also about design and about systems thinking. It could be, for example, through, through cybernetics or through system dynamics. There’s a lot of different theories that describe system behavior. So in systems design, we’re really, we’re actually working with systems that we can design. We can design all the parts. We can design how they’re related to each other, what the interfaces are, and we can usually also predict the behavior of whatever we’re designing. So that’s systems design. I know very little about systems design.

Then we have systemic design and systemic design is about systems that we cannot design. Systemic design plays in the field of complexity. A complex system is a particular type of system which has particular characteristics which make it impossible to predict how that system is going to behave. So there’s all kinds of terminology that’s used like non linearity, path dependency, emergent behavior, self organization. If you know a little bit about complexity theory, then you will recognize those terms.

And in a complex system, because we cannot predict how it’s going to behave yeah, we can also not design it, right? So we cannot, we might think we can design an organization, but really we can’t, right? Because there’s so many things that we don’t have control over. We might design certain conditions in which people who work in an organization can do their work effectively. But we cannot design a person and we can also definitely not design how people relate to each other. So there’s many moving parts that, we cannot control. But what we can try to do if we use this idea of systemic design, then there’s two things. 

One is what the UK Design Council calls system conscious design. I might design, want to Design I don’t know, a refrigerator or a coffee cup. And when I design, that, I take into account the the potential harm that thing might have on the encompassing system. Of course, first of all, we want to have this particular thing to have a certain function. So that’s what we call the intention. So with a refrigerator that would be, to keep food good, or with a cup, it would be to allow people to drink coffee. So we want to design that function, but we also want to Minimize the negative effects on the encompassing system. And there it’s usually, the effects that we have on the planet or we have on certain communities, and we do that through a systemic way. That’s system conscious design.

And then you have system shifting design. And that’s the area. that, we do most of our work in is based on the idea that actually if we have a certain phenomenon, a certain system and we want to make this better what can we do to shift this system? So we know we cannot design it, but there’s this belief that if you do something to the system you might be able to shift it into direction You want it to go. So that could be, for example, 

I have colleagues who are working on the protein shift. So how can we shift to a food system that’s more sustainable in terms of how it produces protein and also in terms of protein consumption. I do a lot of work in in trying to shift the academic system, the university system. into a direction where students and staff are flourishing. 

[00:09:33] Karyn Zuidinga: I see Rob smiling because that’s a lot of the work that, that we’ve been doing together and that he has done prior around shifting learning systems, just in very broad brushstrokes. I was going to ask you for an example. So when we talk about shifting learning systems, what do you mean when you say that, right? What’s the problem? And how are you trying to solve it? So that, our listeners can get a sense of, oh, what’s different about this? 

[00:10:02] Mieke Van der Brijl Brouwer: it’s interesting that you use the word problem and solution. Because if we’re talking about these really complex challenges you normally don’t have solutions in the sense that it can resolve a problem. Sometimes we use the word wicked problem because they’re usually problems that are related to each other. We might try to resolve one part of it and then something else might emerge. We tend not to use the word solution because we cannot solve systems. But we can try to intervene. 

 I’ll give you an example of the university and student well being. There’s a lot of attention actually for student well being, particularly since the pandemic. We’ve seen a decline in mental health. In in, in many different ways, there’s a very high pressure to perform. There’s a lot of anxiety, depression. The numbers are not looking good. And same counts actually for university staff. And there is actually a lot of initiatives that are aimed at doing something about this. A lot of people are working in this space. But what you see quite commonly is that the kind of things that are designed for that problem or challenge. are things that are really aimed directly at that particular problem. So you see, for example a lot of new programs or apps, mental health apps or training or organizational initiatives that are aimed at getting, for example, more students psychologists. But in a way, they’re just band aid solutions, right? They’re not reducing the number of students with mental health issues. They’re just, maybe you can make sure we need them, right? If a student is really unwell, of course they need that support. But they’re not going to resolve this bigger challenge because we know that a lot of these challenges, they’re not independent. They’re actually related to each other. 

We look at this systemically, meaning that we see education and being as being intrinsically related. So if the student is not feeling well, they’re not learning. And also the way we shape our education system has direct impact on how a student feels. And also how a staff member feels also has impact on how a student feels, right? Very simply, if I come into the classroom and I’m tired, there’s no way I can engage students in the learning, right? So I’ve been working on this challenge for I started doing this when I was still working at University of Technology Sydney. So that’s, that was in 2015, 2016, yeah, seven, eight years now. And then I moved to the Netherlands to TU Delft and I continue that work. And actually when you ask me what is the problem you’re trying to solve? That’s also something that sometimes shifts.

This is actually a design practice. From design, we know that the way we look at a problem has direct influence on what kind of solution you come up with, what kind of idea of intervention you come up with. So you basically constantly have to work with that challenge and work with that system to, yeah, to look at it from different perspectives. And over the last seven, eight years, there’ve been a whole range of different experiences that have made me realize that particular elements of it are very important. So one example is this idea of the relationship between a teacher and a student. I very strongly believe, and I’ve also experienced it that if you have a relationship if as a teacher you manage to connect to students then that has huge impact on your teaching ability. And also that, students often feel better. So learning involves giving feedback, critiquing and this is can be really hard, to receive critique, but if you do it in a connected way. Then then you actually learn. So connections are important, and a lot of connections together, they create a community.

So connections, it’s not just between teacher and student, but also between students and between teachers. Yeah, so it’s really this idea of community, I very strongly believe in. It’s very important to create yeah, I can. We call it also a thriving community and it’s hard to say exactly how all these things go, right? Because these kind of process, a system shift processes, take a long time and you need to engage with it for a long time to to create any impact. And also I don’t think systemic design or any kind of method is a silver bullet. We’re also constantly re advancing ourselves. Aside from systemic design, I’m also. really interested in transdisciplinary practices. So really looking at bringing different ways of knowing together. And I was lucky to live and work in Australia for a couple of years, because there I also had the opportunity to engage with indigenous communities. And I learned a lot about wellbeing from those communities. 

I remember at one point in the work I was doing an aboriginal person explained to me how those communities look at wellbeing and where in the Western world we see wellbeing as an individual thing. They actually have a much more systemic perspective on it because wellbeing is a community thing. So if someone’s unwell they don’t say, that person is unwell. We need to get help for that person. That’s what they say. The family Is unwell or the community is unwell. So we need to get help for that community or for that family. And when they share that story with me, I actually got quite emotional because I was thinking, I’ve struggled with my mental health in the past. I’ve had amazing help from psychologists. But, my, my family, my husband’s, my, my friends were also affected by the fact that I was feeling unwell and they, they didn’t get any support. And I thought, Oh, this community idea makes so much more sense to me. now also in the university, when we talk about student wellbeing, we also talk about community well being. And, we’re talking about a healthy university, not just a healthy student. I would say what is different is that’s really a different way of looking at the challenge. So not thinking, oh, here’s a problem. These are all the solutions I can come up with, but really trying to understand, hey, these are, these problems are actually symptoms of a System of interconnected parts. Can we try to understand what’s going on here. And then what can we do small experiments, prototypes to help us get started with this shift. It’s fundamentally a different approach compared to the much more dominant reductionist approach that we still see. 

[00:16:24] Rob Brodnick: One of the things I’ve been thinking about is the application and sort of evolution of these tools and this thinking. it seems to me that recently our ability to visually represent complexity and systems has been a watershed moment, so to speak. And I can remember when I was doing work in this area 25 years ago, I struggled with the tools and I wasn’t an artist. I couldn’t very well represent what I was conceiving in my brain. But now, and particularly with collaborative tools, the ability to build models and maps, I think, is now an accelerator for our ability to do systems And design work I’d love to hear your thoughts about the topic. 

[00:17:22] Mieke Van der Brijl Brouwer: I find visualization tools mapping tools particularly useful for sense making and for collaboration. Like you say but not so good for communication. There’s a famous professor in our field, Birgit Seveldsson, and he wrote a book about designing complexity. And he says, you really have to sit with this complexity, right? It’s not about trying to understand everything. It’s a practice, right? So you they have these rich design spaces, like these walls full of maps and visualizations. and as designers, you you try to make sense of what’s happening. And then eventually you learn more and you add it. And it’s like a living document and which works for the people who are actually in this process and who feel comfortable with it. Let me say it like that. And then the other thing where I’ve found these visualizations very useful. That’s also from the work of Birgit Seveldsson and his colleague, Andreas Wettre, is in dialogue. Because We are used to having a meeting with a preset agenda where everyone speaks at the time and there’s someone taking minutes. And it’s actually, it’s not a very creative process. Also, it’s very hard to make the relationships between what people are saying. 

But if you create a map, so you put a very large sheet of paper on the table. You might have an overall agenda, like kind of this is the topic we want to talk about but then people draw what they say And they draw also the relationships between what they’re saying. And then you get a very different conversation. And also for people, it’s much more easier to relate to what’s being said because it’s also there. So I see the visualizations, I see them very much as tools in, in, in the making, right? In the visualizing. 

What we’ve also tried is make visuals and make them look super nice and then go to stakeholders and get them to understand the way we saw the challenge. That’s extremely difficult. They’re not very good communication tools. and I actually have a really nice example of that. I just presented a paper at the, Related Statistic and Design Conference this week with one of my recent graduates, and she had done a project for. It was for parents with special needs children. 

So her client is a parent of a special needs child. And these parents, they they actually have a lot of struggles. They struggle because, the care is quite intense, takes a lot of time. They have a lot of appointments, healthcare appointments, education appointments. They have to go through all kinds of bureaucracy to apply for government funding. And then on top of that, it also completely changes their professional And their social lives. And 60 percent of parents with a special needs ends up with a burnout, which is not good for the parents and also not good for the child. Now, interesting enough, the whole health system or care system, I have to say is focused on the child and not on the parents because parents are expected to care for their child. Karina’s clients , Who also happens to be a designer. She already had all kinds of initiatives that she she implemented for parents, but she was quite interested in this systemic design approach. And Karina also. So she started what she started doing was she started first interviewing all kinds of different stakeholders like in the care domain, she interviewed parents, she interviewed people working in the municipality, national government, and then she also asked them about their, relationships to each other in relation to the special needs child, And then she made a map and the map has all the stakeholders, but also all the issues. And then she wrote the report, which describes each stakeholder, their needs and the relationship to the other stakeholders. And it’s just completely overwhelming. And she had done all this mapping and she said, Yeah, I get it now, but I feel very uncomfortable or I feel like I’m not really, grasping here this emotional aspect, because, it’s there’s all these experiences that I feel are really important and you don’t really see that in the map.

So then she was thinking, what can I do to provide the people who are working in this care system with a perspective on, how their system basically is constituted of all the relationship and the effect this has on this parent with their special needs child. And then she then she designs a wonderful children’s book. And the children’s book is about a hedgehog and a baby hedgehog and hedgehog represents the parents and the baby hedgehog represents the the child. And in this book basically describes the life of this this parent. And each day there’s someone else visiting and other animal visits and each animal actually represents a stakeholder.

So there’s rabbits, they are the social network, there’s the geese, they are the healthcare workers, then there’s the deer that are the municipality workers, and then basically you see she describes in this children’s book how This hedgehog is really trying to, Care for the, baby hedgehog, but she’s really struggling and you can feel it’s not going well. The rabbits, they come, that’s the social network, the friends, and they visit, and then they leave, and they say you should really come and eat come eat some carrot cake and call us if you need any help. And then they go away. And then the hedgehog has to clean the whole house. And each day, something like this happens. And each day the hedgehog goes to bed one hour later. And at the end of, the book, she goes to bed at 3 AM. So you can really feel this tension building up. And you can you recognize the different stakeholders through the animals. So she wrote this book, she illustrated it, it looks very beautiful.

And then what she did was she went back to the actual stakeholders, had them read the book, And she asked them, do you recognize this story? And do, you maybe recognize yourself or your role in this? How does that make you feel? And interestingly enough, a lot of the, stakeholders who read this book, they were really touched by it and really moved because they suddenly could see what the effect was of, this whole system on this? parent. And a couple of, them also straight away started, thinking about, Oh, what can I do How can I maybe start creating some they didn’t call it, shifts, but that’s what I would call it but how can I start to to change things here? So I thought it was very smart because she realized, okay, this mapping might help me as a designer here to make some sense, but actually I want to reflect it back. so, we call it a systemic mirror. We want to reflect back at the system because as a student or as a designer, you cannot really shift that system, right? You’re not connected to it. You’re just coming from the outside. If we want system shift, one of the ideas is that you work with people who I sometimes call system residents, right? Who are actually, creating that system together If you present them with that mirror, they see that system in a different way, and, then they might also be able to change it. And that’s a very different visualization, right? 

[00:24:25] Rob Brodnick: I really, really like that one. We’ve been toying with the concept of metaphor. Metaphor as the vehicle because the system complexity makes it so hard to understand and perceive, and even with map, And, I think this is a great example because it’s so human, but yet embedded in that were the the challenges within the system and maybe, you know, as, as broadening and deepening understanding. So you, you call that the, system systemic mirror or the system mirror. 

[00:24:56] Mieke Van der Brijl Brouwer: we’ve invented. 

[00:24:58] Karyn Zuidinga: Rob and I were just talking, we did a project with a large institution in the U. S. we were looking at, clinical placements for health professions and One of the challenges that they face is getting clinicians to want to become people who accept clinical placements And become clinical placement instructors, for lack of a better term. And we were just saying how fascinating it. was, because when We first started talking to the people inside the institution they were just saying, It’s hard. And it was just a barrier. It’s so hard to find people. They don’t want to do it. They’re so overwhelmed. We created, the simplest of, of models. It was just a, a series of bubbles showing the path from, not being an instructor to mastery in that world. And then the barriers. What I thought was really fascinating was we went from, It’s a problem to the, people who were inside the institution taking total ownership to the point where they completely thought it was their diagram. 

 Rob and I became invisible.

[00:26:04] Rob Brodnick: Which is great. You know, that’s the that’s what I want in the end.

[00:26:07] Karyn Zuidinga: We became utterly invisible. They took ownership of it and then they, they saw it. And so then they they started inserting themselves into, like, from external to inside. It, like, it and now that I have a term for it the systemic mirror. , We showed them the mirror of what was going on, And, they could suddenly see themselves, and where all the barriers were, and they could start to think about ways to shift.

[00:26:33] Rob Brodnick: They, went from disabled to enabled or to having a total lack of agency to being agents within the system. And, you know, they, they started to come up with things they could do in their world that seem like really small things, but as you add them up across the system, think that’s where the change for them is going to come from. 

[00:26:56] Mieke Van der Brijl Brouwer: I think a key thing to any kind of system change is how to basically get people on board. And I wouldn’t even call this design or systems thinking so much, if I’m thinking of the university of a system and trying to shift that into a direction where we can actually talk about things like human relationships and these kinds of kind of thing, you have to get people on board, right? If people don’t take ownership, like you’re saying, then it’s going to be super, super hard. how do you engage people in this more systemic way of looking and seeing what their role in it is and also what they can do about it. I really love that, that, you go to this concept of agency because there’s, I think there’s a lot to gain. 

[00:27:38] Karyn Zuidinga: Maybe it’s just a shift in thinking, but here’s a challenge. As a designer the focus is on solution, quote unquote, and the artifact, the thing that you’re creating, right? And now the story is you’re not really creating a thing. You’re creating some shifts in mindset or you’re maybe supporting the creation of some shifts in mindset. You’re not really creating that even. And it’s all, I think the biggest challenge is it’s all small changes, right? And they’re not, sort of coming out with, a, big, ta da, here’s my MVP. You’re coming out with, here’s a, a simple diagram that gives you a mirror from this solutions will emerge.

Talk to me about some of that, that gap and that shift in thinking. You’re going to come here, you’re going to make little diagrams, and you’re going to cause small shifts with diagrams. Talk to me about that shift in thinking. 

[00:28:34] Mieke Van der Brijl Brouwer: Wonderful question. A wonderful question because I very much agree with you and I often say you have to be both ambitious and humble. Because we’re talking about big shifts here. And I think you need to have that ambition to make the smaller things that you do meaningful. At the same time, you need to be humble because it takes a lot of energy, different initiatives to start creating any shifts and like you say, very often it’s indirect, right? Like this diagram that you make or this little children’s book. So humility is incredibly incredibly important.

A couple of years ago, I did a study where I looked at organizations in the world who we’re making a lot of societal impact and I try to understand how they were working, if they were using design at all, or if not, what other kinds of practices they were using. Some of them were using systems thinking explicitly. A lot of them implicitly. But one of the organizations I really admire is the Australian Center for Social Innovation. And I was talking to their CEO, Carolyn Curtis, and she was talking about this idea of two track thinking. So she said we always work on two kind of tracks. So one is the longer term, bigger system shifts which might you know, engaging with governments to change policies or engaging with the media to change the narrative. But we also know that we, have to do things today, right? You need to build these prototypes as we call them as designers. Because these things go, hand in hand.

So in systems, you both need to have this idea. Okay, where I’m going, what can I do on that kind of more strategic level? And at the same time, you have to work with these prototypes, these quick things that You do, that You that help you learn about the system that you’re working in and that can also create this shorter term impact. So, I really quite like this idea of this two track thinking. And it’s not like you say, it’s not ta da, here’s my big fantastic solution to this problem and that indeed requires quite a shift in in attitude. It also requires a shift in the design field, you could say. 

[00:30:46] Rob Brodnick: One of my colleagues calls this co-creation, he said this is how we do it, we have to agree to co create our futures as, as his response to systems change. I I like that phrase. That’s a good one. 

[00:30:58] Mieke Van der Brijl Brouwer: Yeah, it’s quite common term of code co-creation co-design we use a lot, but also that you have to use carefully, I would have to say. Because co-design is quite a established term in the design field, right? So you design something, you always do it with the people you’re designing for. But it’s not the same as co-creation. I think co-creation is more like, people also have agency. And I actually learned that through a very interesting experience. I was so I was teaching in in Australia and Sydney in the, I think the best degree program in the world. It’s called the Bachelor of Creative Intelligence and Innovation, BCII. And it was this idea that, yeah, it’s a good name. The idea that regardless of the profession that a student is going to be in, They are going to have to deal with complexity and therefore they need to learn all these skills that you need in a complex context. So that could be systems thinking, that could be creative skills, methods And practices, that could be all kinds of social, relational kind of practices.

We had students from 25 different undergrad degrees, they would come together in, their summer and winter breaks in our program. And they would do like a fourth additional year. and then after four years, they would have kind of a bachelor of engineering and creative intelligence and innovation, or a bachelor of fashion design and creative intelligence and innovation. So I thought it was such a cool degree. I was very happy that I got to teach there. And when I started teaching all the courses we were doing were like completely new. They were not common kind of subjects. So I thought, we, have to co-design them, right? Because I’m going to need to work with the students because I’m designing it for them. So We, brought the students together and we started co-designing. And then my colleagues who were all from very different disciplinary backgrounds said, Oh, so interesting. Go to co-design. I’m going to do that too. So then they started doing co-design. And then after a while they came back and said actually, what you call co-design in my discipline is called blah, blah, blah. so in science, it’s called citizen science. In the arts, it’s called socially engaged arts. In management, it’s called co-management. In education, it’s called students as partners. And then we thought, hey, that’s interesting. These are all kind of practices that we use in our discipline to engage with the public. Let’s compare these things. How are they similar? How are they different? And one of the things I realized quite quickly, that’s that what we call co-designing in design is actually not equal in terms of participation. So in co- design, what you do is you, bring your end users together and you they get to have their say maybe they create something too, then you take all of that information and then you design your thing. But in co-management, particularly in environmental co-management. So they work with farmers to develop new kind of policy and procedures, the farmers, they take whatever you have come up with and they apply it in their own practice. So they have a lot more agency, like you were just saying. So this concept of agency is super, super important in system shift. And particularly if you start thinking about using something like co-design, we really need to think through, okay, who actually. has agency here to create shifts. 

I had a very good student who did work on this Maya Goodwill. She develop a whole tool for designers, which you called power literacy for designers. So if you were doing co-design, she made you think about, okay, who really has power here? What are the power relationships? Who decides who’s going to be part of this In the first place, who decides what the process is? Okay. Who decides what we are going to design? Who are, who decides what are the next steps? There’s all these questions that we’re not really used to asking as designers, because we used to having, the expertise sit with the design, the designer, the power sits with the designer and basically the designer decides, right? The architect decides completely going to look like. It’s very different from, saying, Oh, we’re going to do a system shift and here’s your diagram. 

[00:34:52] Karyn Zuidinga: let’s be honest, I can feel the control freak in me having a hard time. 

[00:34:56] Rob Brodnick: That’s hard for managers and especially executives to have that moment of letting go 

[00:35:00] Karyn Zuidinga: if you’re not the decider, what are you? I go back to the control freak in all of us, as designers, particularly those who went through critique driven design school, is that they find themselves coming out with that sense of pressure that they have to have the answer. And they have to control the outputs. 

[00:35:15] Mieke Van der Brijl Brouwer: This is more general to education, I don’t think it’s just design. One of the things I’ve been quite Inspired by, is the work of Yossi Nafink and Kajsa Koskalawatori on invisible social structures. What they’re saying is that service systems specifically look into, but it’s also for any kind of organizations. They build a model which is based on institutional theory. Which basically says there are a lot of invisible layers in these social systems, social structures. They have a huge impact on, on the behavior of that organization, behavior of people in that organization. And there’s basically three pillars, so they say there’s the the beliefs, rules and regulations, and then there’s the norms.

These are all invisible but they are enacted in a visible layer. So enactment is you can See? it in the environment. like actual physical things and in behavior of people. And this invisible layer is also about things like culture. And one of the things I’ve come to realize when you put this model and there’s actually also a really nice iceberg model that they use, which I recommend.

When you use that to look at our education system there’s This culture around performance pressure and individualization, which I think has to do also with this idea of wanting to have control. So a lot of students, they really want to control getting good grades, basically. Very focused on grades and performance and competition. And of course, we want our students to be motivated. That’s it. But we don’t want them just to focus on the end grade. Actually, we want students to learn, right? We want them to learn something. And that sometimes gets in the way of learning, because they’re only focused on the assessment. 

[00:37:03] Karyn Zuidinga: Is this going to be on the test on Friday? 

[00:37:05] Mieke Van der Brijl Brouwer: Exactly. So with the teachers, we’re thinking about, oh, this is really terrible behavior. What can we do about behavior? But when you start to unpack this you actually realize actually it’s part of the culture, this whole performance culture. And it’s so ingrained in the whole university. It’s not just student behavior. Staff behave like that as well. You know, if on social media, if we look on LinkedIn, everyone that’s only kind of sharing their the um, the achievements look at, I’m really thrilled to share that I achieved this or that. And we see it everywhere too, in our university, there’s everywhere there’s photos of the best researchers, of photos of the best teachers, we even have names on each classroom has a name, so to to show that if you’re really good, you’re going to have your name here, right?

So this whole performance culture is so ingrained in the whole culture, you cannot just try to directly change student behavior. No, then you also have to change the culture. And that starts with your own behavior, right? So if I show that performance for me personally is important, that I find it very important that I have so many papers published or that I win this award or that I get this grant, and I then show that, for example, social media and the students, they see that too, right? So it becomes part of the culture. 

So when you’re talking about control I think it’s probably related to that because I completely agree. Right. I’ve also written about that. So important to, to let go and to not control. But I think if, as long as the performance culture is there, then it’s very hard to tell people, you should let go. But, because what’s going to happen if I let go, if I let go, I don’t get the grade. If I don’t get the grades, I, I don’t get to succeed in life basically. So I will fail. And then you could say, failing is great because through failing you learn, 

[00:38:57] Karyn Zuidinga: Well, even, even among sharing of failure stories, they’re usually told as I failed, but that drove me to this greater success. 

[00:39:04] Mieke Van der Brijl Brouwer: exactly.

[00:39:05] Rob Brodnick: Hey, let me bring up a challenge that we’ve been struggling with. I’d love to hear how you’ve experienced it or maybe addressed it. And when we work with individuals or groups or clients or organizations and try to talk about Complexity and the map the systems around us. They seem to always want to jump to the future. And talk about the ideal and they avoid what’s really happening and it’s been a real challenge. And we call this kind of like in change processes current state and. It’s a struggle how to shift between those two things and especially how to try to represent it. 

And it seems we always end up in some kind of mixed reality where people are, thinking what’s currently happening is really the way they would like it to be. Or the way they’d like to get there and even how to represent or depict and break these things apart. Even to see, what’s the journey? Like we can understand, where I, am and where I want to go at the end of the day and we can use a map to do that. But when you’re dealing with systems and change, it gets really hard. Have you experienced that or what solutions have you used or seen others use?

[00:40:25] Mieke Van der Brijl Brouwer: I think I get what you mean. I do this activity with students which is about their personal future. It’s also a little bit related to the wellbeing work. But we tend to think about future as, okay, I need to know where we want to go. So it’s also how organizations think, I think it’s we need to have a vision and then strategy, how we get there. So I recognize that. And it’s all often quite a linear path from here to there. Whilst that is definitely not the reality. There’s the, an activity I do with students actually from the book designing your life from the guys from Stanford IDEO where you, rather than saying This is where I want to go, and these are the steps to get to that.

You first try to get a better set of where you are. But then you draw out different paths. This is the way I think about it currently. This is the the normal way I think about it. And then the second one is, okay, what is, what would you do if the first thing you want to do is not possible? And then the third journey is what would you do if your reputation or money didn’t matter? So it’s really to get people to think outside the square of, this is how I should think about future and strategy to there’s actually a lot of different options. And I can maybe map out what it looks like for the coming five years, but each year or each half year, I have to look at where am I now?

And I often say, each next step in, in my, in whatever project I do, but also in my career is. is another prototype, right? I quite like the work of Dave Snowden, who says, in a complex context, you you cannot predict where it’s going to hats. The only thing you can do is you do things to it. And when you like it, you amplify it. And when you. don’t like it, you take it out, but you have to do things through this context or through the system to be able to understand it. 

So you still need to have an idea of where you want to go, right? If we’re talking about shift , you need to have some kind of vision, at least of the values that are important there. And, but it’s not exact. It’s an evolving vision. While we’re learning here our vision evolves as well, but we still need to have a sense of where we want to go because that where we want to go also, defines who we are working with.

So this is an idea from transition studies. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with transition studies, but it’s another field that that it’s really about societal shifts, but long term social technical shifts. And they look at, really long term 20, 30 year shifts in society. One of the ideas is that you have to have a vision of where you want to go, but then you find the people that also want to go there, because then you become stronger, right? Rather than saying, oh, we get together and together we define where we want to go. No, we actually, we get together with the people who already want to go there because otherwise it’s going to be very difficult. So yeah, I do think it’s important to think about the future, but in a very flexible way and looking at multiple ways and, and also, yeah, having that kind of vision evolve as you go.

[00:43:39] Rob Brodnick: It makes me think about something I read recently, Bob Johanson, who’s at the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto. Book’s called Full Spectrum Thinking. He did some work with the, uh, Military in trying to understand how they manage complexity and ambiguity when they have sort of mission destinations. He described three different modes that they, organize themselves around. And and they’re coupled differently to the expectations of that future, depending on how complex their surroundings are and how dynamic they are. It’s a, an interesting thing to look at that just it pinged, pinged a connection for me as you were describing that. 

[00:44:22] Mieke Van der Brijl Brouwer: I mean, I think this idea of futuring and future literacy is a whole practice in itself. I’m definitely not an expert in it. I’m quite inspired by the work of the Forum for the Future. It’s an organization in the UK. Who also have great M edium publication with a blog post. So that’s one I highly, uh, highly recommend.

[00:44:44] Karyn Zuidinga: We’d like to ask our guests Where they go for positive turbulence. How do you explore the periphery?

[00:44:50] Mieke Van der Brijl Brouwer: It’s very good question. I think, conversations in general. Yeah, with people who are coming from different backgrounds are where I get a lot of my inspiration. So that usually means going outside your bubble, right? Outside your your discipline or domain that you do, that you work in. So for me, the time that I worked in Sydney in a transdisciplinary school was like was like a candy store because there were so many different perspectives there to engage with and like I said, everyone there was also really keen to to learn more about each other’s perspectives because what we also see in this transdisciplinary domain is that you get competition between disciplines, so that’s not very helpful.

So you have to find those spaces where people are different and they want to connect. A little bit of both. So yeah, so the transdisciplinary space I find very interesting. Then of course, the Systemic Design Association, if you’re not already connected, you should be, because that’s where the systems thinkers and the designers come together. And that’s a fantastic community. I joined them in I think it was in 2016 also. And it was funny because I had a master student, and she was doing a master by research Bridget. And she was doing it on design in in public sector. And she said, Oh, I’ve been reading about this idea of systemic design and systems thinking, and I think I should do something with it. And I said no, it’s way too complex.

Just stick to design, and she’s no. I think we should go to this conference. And I I always knew there was, Something like systems thinking or complexity. I had read a little bits and pieces about it. And it felt a little bit like there was kind of this door and there would be a closet behind it with, information about systems and complexity. And I go to this conference and suddenly I realized it’s not a closet. It’s a world. This door opens, it’s like a whole world out there with so much to learn, it was amazing. So this community is one I really recommend because they take a very pluralistic perspective. So they’re not into just cybernetics or system dynamics or complexity management or social systems or whatever.

It’s all of that, right? And that I think is really exciting because, the idea is, yeah, no one, no, like I said, no one really knows how to really address complexity. So we just have to be open to all these different ways ways of knowing. So that’s definitely yeah, a place I go to also for for inspiration and, ah, no, I forgot one really important one. My garden. You probably get that very often. I think, I learned so much about complexity from gardening. So I started gardening in the pandemic because the, it coincided with the pandemic coincided with us buying a house here in Delft. And it came with a garden and I didn’t really know about garden.

I thought, I can do gardening. I’m a designer. I’ll design the garden. So this is the plants I like. This is where they go. They look nice together. I get the nice foliage and the colors. and of course that’s not what gardening is at all. Because then one day you go into your garden and your plants are gone. You’re like, what’s going on here? And suddenly there’s a surprise. There’s, the Slugs and the snails. So a garden is actually a really great teacher because it really teaches you that complexity is not about trying to control, but you have to let go, but you can still do things right. You can run experiments. You just put plants there. If they’re not happy, you put them somewhere else. And, then sometimes you get your surprises as well. So, If you want to learn about complexity and letting it go, start gardening. 

[00:48:36] Karyn Zuidinga: I keep bees, And, I have had the same journey 

[00:48:40] Mieke Van der Brijl Brouwer: Yeah, amazing. 

[00:48:42] Karyn Zuidinga: I really want to say thank you so much for taking this leap of faith with us we didn’t know each other at all when we started this conversation and it’s been wonderful.

[00:48:52] Rob Brodnick: This has been great!

[00:48:53] Mieke Van der Brijl Brouwer: Thank you for inviting me. Yeah. It’s been really fun.

[00:48:56] Karyn Zuidinga: A huge thank you to AMI, who have nurtured us in developing this podcast, is the source of so many of our guests, and, of course, the founder, Stan Gryskiewicz, is also the author of the original book and, dare I say, the Ludwig Von Bertalanffy of Positive Turbulence.

[00:49:14] Rob Brodnick: AMI is a pioneering non profit organization comprised of committed individuals who foster and leverage creativity and innovation in organizations and society. AMI identifies leading edge innovation, shares experiences, sponsors research, and recognizes innovation and creative processes. Find out more at aminnovation. org.

And thank you to Mack Avenue Music Group, our contributing sponsor, for providing our podcast soundtrack, Late Night Sunrise.

[00:49:42] Karyn Zuidinga: If you want to share a positive turbulence moment or otherwise comment on what you’re hearing, please drop us a line at podcast @ positiveturbulence. com. We welcome your thoughts.

Be sure to tune in to the next episode for a conversation with Danielle Duell. She’s the founder of People with Purpose. They help executives and boards achieve clarity on their organization’s purpose. We’ll delve into why purpose is so important to any organization, and hear some of her best advice for discovering yours.

You can also head over to PositiveTurbulence. com to find out more about us, get a transcript of this episode, get links to find out more about our guests, or Positive Turbulence. Until next time, keep the turbulence positive!