Systems Thinking for Social Changemakers

Abstract

Social change makers are intuitive systems thinkers, but to be successful they need to develop more intentional system-level perspectives to coordinate and implement more meaningful and effective solutions that result in positive social and environmental impact outcomes. The social impact space is proliferated with well-intentioned under-resourced, initiatives striving to make positive change. System change has proven to be an elusive goal, despite much discussion and writing on the topic. One contributing reason is that social change makers (students, social entrepreneurs, civic and community leaders) currently don't have sufficient contextual education in systems dynamics to understand how systems thinking might apply to their challenges. Though there are scattered resources that exist to teach Systems Dynamics, there are limited resources available that specifically tie the Engineering practice of Systems Thinking to social issues, areas that are relevant for social change makers.

This thesis employs a meta-level curriculum through a diverse set of teaching methods on 'Systems Thinking' for Social Entrepreneurs to train orchestrators of system change toward positive system level impact. Our goal is to bridge the current gap – make systems thinking more accessible for social change makers, with relevance. Making a traditionally complex topic clear, digestible, simple and contextual for social change makers so that there is a common language/knowledge and an elevated understanding in the community of practitioners. Ideally, social entrepreneurs and their funders would use these tools to get down a "systems thinking" learning curve that often takes years of experimentation and implementation to achieve. The urgency of the problems we face requires more accelerated deployment of deeply intentional systems change.

We have prepared a set of educational tools as a bridge - leveraging the expertise of MIT leadership (seat of Systems Thinking in the US) and Harvard Business School (strong social entrepreneurship). We will build content and IP that helps equip HBS and MIT with accessible tools. We will test and refine these tools in several settings.