About a year ago, I was told to read a book about Systems Thinking: Systems Thinking for Social Change: A Practical Guide to Solving Complex Problems, Avoiding Unintended Consequences, and Achieving Lasting Results, by David Peter Stroh. Systems Thinking is all about looking at a problem from the perspective in which the problem exists – sometimes, there are multiple systems forming into one larger system. As you can imagine, the “system” can balloon, and systems mapping is what we do to visualize what that balloon looks like.
“Systems Cartography” is basically a fancy way of saying “Systems Mapping.” It’s figuring out how all the pieces are connected, and visualizing it in a way that helps you understand the greater context and find the connections between various elements of the problem. Systems Thinking is one way of tackling problems in order to find wholistic, sustainable solutions because this kind of thinking targets a framework or cycle in which a problem exists.
Whenever I am driving alone or spend some time organizing my desk and room, I listen to higher education podcasts that are typically geared towards people at the leadership level. Understanding the bigger system of higher education, and the challenges it faces today, is not only enthralling to me, but it helps inform the end goals of the work that I do.
After I read Stroh’s work, I started drawing my own systems maps. Some included imagery, others were more straightforward, like in the Medium article linked above. It is exactly why I have a whiteboard in my office now: to brainstorm and consider the bigger systems in place when I have time to strategize for my work.
I am a Systems Cartographer – still in training, still in development, but that is another goal for this blog: to share my systems cartography and provide a visual means of conveying what I am thinking, to supplement my writing.