See It! A System Seeing Adventure

My friend Patrick Prill posted some of his System Seeing practices at the start of the year. He is a systems thinker and nobody's fool so I guessed that if he valued Ruth Malan's Advent(ure) in System Seeing series of daily exercises it would be worth taking a look. I did. I agreed. I bookmarked it and then ...

And then months later I came back to it. Although the activities are cast as an Advent series, in the spirit of Advent of Code, there's nothing seasonal about them and I can now say, having completed them, the things they talk about, the skills they encourage us to exercise, and the questions they ask are timeless, at least while there's still humans on this planet.

This is how Ruth Malan introduces them:

Each day of Advent ... there is an activity that is focused on the concepts and practices of system perceiving and understanding. This activity has instructions (which often include a visual canvas or model that can help focus and structure the work in that particular activity), as well as a small set of quotes for reflection and nuance.

I took notes along the way and I've compiled them into a short series of posts here, sometimes more than one day's exercise per post because they cluster by topic or by the extent to which the results can be shared publicly.

I enjoyed doing the activities; I like this kind of intentional practice, I got to think about some things I wouldn't have otherwise done, and I came away with a handful of new model types that could be useful to me in future.

Even though I felt like much of it was in my wheelhouse — for example, I have spent a lot of time thinking about how I work, learning and trying approaches to analysing systems, teaching myself to sketchnote — I still feel like there was value in the reading, the doing, and the reflecting.

--00--

Some comments on the way I approached things:

Ruth recommends spending 15-20 minutes per exercise, which includes some time for review. I decided to honour the spirit of that by trying to limit effort on the task to 15 minutes but I allowed myself as long to reflect as I felt was useful. Doing things so late meant that, at least in the earlier exercises, there were other people's attempts to review and compare to.

One of my sketchnoting revelations was that, despite the beautiful notes you'll see around the place, full of colour, laid out wonderfully, with identifiable icons and readable writing, what I need is to get the ideas down and for that a limited palette is sufficient. I've got better with practice, but what you see here, except when mentioned, is the first attempt using the paper in my scrap drawer and the pens on my desk, cleaned up with the scan function on my phone's camera app.

--00--

Thank you to Ruth for taking the time and making the effort to put this together and apologies to Elisabeth for appropriating the cover of Explore It! for the zine I made during the exercises and at the top. See here for an indication of how much I adore and have been influenced by Elisabeth's work and here for her forthcoming book on systems thinking.

Start: Days 1-5
Image: Pragmatic Press

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