See It! Days 17-19

This post is part of a series showing my working through the 2025 Advent of System Seeing exercises set by Ruth Malan. For background see the introduction.

This set of exercises is concerned with the location of a technical system within a social system. Spoiler: it only adds complexity.

Day 17

Task: (1) Considering the situation you’re exploring: identify systems and their interrelationships. How far out do we zoom? What heuristics do you use? (2) Pick a (socio)technical system to focus on. Write a brief description of its primary purpose.

I found the questions in the exercise the most interesting part of it this time.

How far out do we zoom? This is the perennial problem in my world; I am always trying to find ways to judge whether I have gone far enough in the dimensions I have identified as relevant and hoping that I identified more or less the correct set of dimensions. Getting the opinion of others really helps, as the early exercises in this series identified. What is the edge of a context?

What heuristics do you use? I have written a lot about heuristics for working.

For the second part of the exercise, the sociotechnical system I picked is a museum. My first attempt at its primary purpose was this:

The primary purpose of a museum is to exhibit something for public consumption.

It didn't survive even light stress testing: first, because there are private museums and, second, because by this yardstick a cinema would be a museum. I iterated some more, acknowledged that I'm not trying to write a definition of a museum, and ended up with this:

The primary purpose of a museum is to act as a memory and sense-making institution that curates artifacts to construct, preserve, and share knowledge about them and their context.

Feels clunky, but I'll live with it.

Day 18

Task: Identify (and draw) the network of capabilities that enable that system from day 17 to be viable as a system with that purpose.

This exercise again makes it clear that finding a useful granularity for the network depends on the way in which it will be used. For example, running a museum requires a lot of the same basic stuff that running any non-trivial organisation requires. Should I have inserted a node labelled "standard organisational infrastructure" and emphasised only what is special to a museum?

Similarly, needs often bottom out at some kind of resource: probably money. I included this in a couple of places but didn't want to flood the diagram with that. Can they be taken as read?

The task asks a couple of questions:

What capabilities are internal to the system? What external (to the system) capabilities does the system depend on? Interestingly, I found that I had stopped at a system boundary (where the internal meets the external) without thinking much about it. I added external dependencies to a section only after reviewing this question. What does that tell us? We bring explicit and tacit biases with us to each task.

If we broaden our view to more of the lifecycle of the system, what additional capabilities come into view? I didn't deliberately not think about system lifecycle so I feel like I've included some things that are relevant already, such as fundraising, HR, and financial or, for museums specifically, accessions and disposals.

If we back up to consider the problem that users of the system face (why they are using the system), and explore what capabilities they need, does that differ from taking the system purpose as a starting point? I think that it doesn't, although the prominence of some nodes in the network might be different. For example, as a museum director I care about a lot of things that a day visitor does not: I might sacrifice some short-term priorities to protect long-term survival for instance.

Day 19

Task: Identify an area (in your situation) where you would like to do something and want to explore what you'll encounter and what it will take.

I can't share the output from this exercise, but I can share some thoughts on how I like to think about this kind of problem.

I find that I go for a mindmap less often than I used to because I find the tooling (Miro in my case) too irritating and turning it into some other shape of model too tricky. What I tend to do now is use sticky notes which I group spatially, or with colour or some other attribute, and then shuffle them around on the whiteboard until I find a way to represent the space that helps me to think about the problem at hand.

This often results in some kind of classification of features of the space and compare options based on those features. Because sticky notes on a whiteboard don't constrain me at all, I can make informal, flexible tables that reflect levels of certainty, overlap, constraint and so on.
Image: Inspired by Explore It! by Elisabeth Hendrickson. Pragmatic Press

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