See It! Days 6-9

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.

In this set of exercises, the idea of feedback is introduced. Feedback is at the heart of systems thinking because we humans seem to be primed to view the world as a simple linear cause-leads-to-effect machine in which only the causes and effects that matter are those that (a) we desire or (b) are glaringly obvious.

Day 6

Task: Watch a video on causal loops and take sketchnotes.

I know and like this kind of diagram (Be a Quality Detector) but I have struggled to build them for any system that I've looked at. In particular, I find the formal labelling of positive and negative loops to be more of a dark art than a science. The good news is that informality has proved sufficient for me up to now but perhaps I'll learn to be more formal on day 7.

Day 7

Task: Practice using causal loop diagrams to understand interacting effects in a system, for example the effect of adding lanes to a highway.

My diagram captures a scenario where I have assumed that a road is already at or near capacity so that throughput (say, number of cars passing a specific point per hour) is lower than desired. I have several problems with it

1. The wording in the nodes is very important. Take (A) where I instinctively said adding a lane to our road would result in a "reduction in traffic elsewhere." This seems reasonable but makes it harder to decide whether we have a positive or negative relationship. Probably I should have labelled this node "amount of traffic elsewhere" and it'd be more obviously negative.

2. The idea of positive and negative relationships is problematic because they have both a mathematical and a value judgement interpretation. I suspect that what we're really annotating is direct and inverse relationships.

3. Temporality is hard to express. Both (A) and (B) are potential impacts of the action in this scenario, but likely at different times. How can I reflect that?

4. Some of the impacts are secondary, for example (C). How far should I go when thinking about them? In this artificial exercise I don't have a remit so I noted a few and stopped.

5. I have drawn a dashed line (D) to indicate the temptation to loop through the whole cycle again, once congestion returns to the system. I would like to somehow indicate that other choices are available at this point.

6. I don't know how to represent magnitude on these kinds of pictures. How should outcomes be balanced against on another?

Day 8

Task: Create another page for the zine from earlier. Focus on context: why do we consider (system) context? What are associated concepts? Is there an explanatory diagram that helps convey why context is important to consider?

I spent waaaaaay more time than I intended to on this one. I had in mind that there's an interesting parallel between the "start with the why" call of Simon Sinek's elegantly simple Golden Circle model and the idea that systems are "surrounded by the why": the context in which a system sits is the reason it does what it does.

I started with the basic idea of this parallel

Why: the context. The system is the shape it is because of it.
How: the actions performed by the system.
What: the outputs from the system.

and iterated through four or five sketches to get the one above. It's the first time in this series that the image you're seeing is not the first image I drew. Here's some of the along-the-way versions:

I'm not sure what I've done here satisfies the brief, to be honest. I don't think that by itself my diagram really motivates the primacy of context. It's probably less interesting to someone who hasn't come across Sinek's work too, but I think it is at least memorable and graphic.

Other things that I would have liked to included: showing that something designed in a linear way on the left can be part of a system on the right, or that context from analysing a system on the right can feed into the why on the left, but I didn't want to try to superimpose that additional layer onto the sketch because of the risk of obscuring the core detail that's already there.

On top of all of that, enamoured as I am with the idea I've drawn, I'm still not certain whether it holds up.

Day 9

Task: (1) Watch a short video about trees. Jot down notes (and sketches) as you watch it. (2) Draft a zine page on relationships.

I'd come across the so-called Wood Wide Web before, so the basic information in the video was not new to me. What to pull out into my sketchnotes and then into a more general zine page on relationships was tough to decide, and in the end I'm not sure whether I'm happy with what I did. Unlike on day 8, I am comfortable that what my page says is true, but I question whether it's helpful.

Next: Days 10-16
Image: Inspired by Explore It! by Elisabeth Hendrickson. Pragmatic Press

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