Having a Systems Advantage opens the door to an entirely new realm of efficacy.
Playing in the systems arena without the capacity to strategize at the systems level is akin to playing soccer with a badminton racquet. As our world tips into an era marked by rapid change and increasing levels of complexity, any business or institution faces the imminent risk of being made irrelevant by those that attain the “systems advantage”.
Systems Advantage is already becoming a critical differentiator and an opportunity space for a new type of efficacy – making impact at the system level and designing win-win strategies that combine impact with breakthrough business opportunities. Transforming the organization by putting systems approaches deep into the decision making and innovation process uncovers opportunities for Blue Ocean Strategies with a purpose.
Systems Leadership is the next generation paradigm for leading in a complex world marked by rapid change
While our traditional models of leadership have driven the advancement of present-day technology and infrastructure, they are not suited for the new terrain that we find ourselves in now. The challenges we face in the new world order cannot be addressed by our prowess at analysis, efficiency, retroactive measurement and evaluation, and risk reduction. We instead need to match our approaches and models with the attributes of the class of questions and challenges of the new world.
A Systems Leader is an architect of transformative ecosystems. Rather than seeking comfort in reductive or simplistic solutions that seem convenient but unlikely to change the system, a Systems Leader carries out thinking and action with a systems perspective. Systems Leaders transform system behaviors to bring about desirable outcomes, resilient futures, and the capacity to tackle complex challenges.
Without a shift in direction, all our innovation and implementation efforts might be taking us away from where we want to get to.
Framing the direction and the ability to create systems-based ‘theories of change’ is one of the most resource-leveraged places to innovate. Organizations currently face the simultaneous crisis of simplistic directionality framing, coupled with an institutional lack of imagination. Despite rapidly mounting risks to the systems that underpin our civilization and our economies, leaders, organizations, and institutions find themselves trapped in legacy structures, mandates, and mindsets, where incremental change is the norm.
It is critically important to work towards an aspiration which sets a high bar in both the nature and the extent of transformation, which then becomes the beacon for strategy and innovation. The System Acupuncture® process ensures that success is framed carefully, bringing innovation not only into addressing challenges, but in framing the challenge itself in terms of altered system behaviors and trajectories.
Behaviorally Informed Design is a set of frameworks built on principles from behavioral sciences that help us design for change in human behavior. Designing interventions with intentional behavior change in mind has the power to scale and sustain impact. Behaviorally Informed Design incorporates theories from fields such as Social Psychology, Cognitive Psychology, Nero-Economics, Behavioral Economics, and Decision Theory in the design of system change interventions.
You can take the online course, Behaviorally Informed Design for Energy Conservation through Stanford Online.
Until you have success, all you have is the potential for success. When organizations invest in a system intervention, too often they are impatient to see impact, when they should actually be focusing on the growth of impact potential. Impact Potential™ offers a powerful strategic tool for organizations to increase their likelihood of non-linear impact while avoiding unintended consequences. Our Impact Potential™ tool-set incorporates workflows and decision-making frameworks for managing the innovation and strategy processes so that broad and scaled impact is ensured.
Transforming systems is not just a matter of good innovation and good implementation; it takes a shift in mindset across organizational cultural systems. Small shifts in mindsets and the underlying philosophical stance can result in massive changes. Going on the Systems Acupuncture® journey brings about purposeful intent with the creative confidence to shift system dynamics. Our work in multi-ontological systems creates a basis to ride the modern-day bridge between aspirational vision and action oriented practicality.
Design Thinking is a powerful human centered innovation approach that addresses challenges at the interaction point between people and the system. It can be used to design highly effective products and services that improve the experience of its users.
Since human actions have become a dominant driver of change and impact on Earth, System Acupuncture® acknowledges and integrates human-level perspectives to design platforms for behavior change.
Game designers in the interactive entertainment industry are professional system designers. The ability to imagine worlds and systems that don't yet exist then construct coherent system experiences that tap into deep human engagement is crucial for designing interventions to transform complex systems. We explore ways to leverage the power of game design techniques to create systems, interventions, and platforms that engage and transform system behaviors.
We are in the midst of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR). A large number of frame-changing technologies (each of which potentially as profound as the internal combustion engine) are emerging at the same time. Emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) simultaneously carry great promise and grave threats. Technological development seem to have a will of its own and tend to propagate faster than the rate at which they can be directed and infused with ethical frameworks. System Acupuncture® blends technology strategy with human and business systems, while creating an ethical engine for self-navigation away from harmful consequences.
"Space is the body language of an organization"
Carefully crafted and insight-driven environments have the ability to change behaviors and mindsets conducive to innovation, change workflows to allow for very specific types of interaction, provide a vehicle for transmitting brand values both internally and externally, enhance decision making, and enable information flow. In short, space is itself a platform for large scale organizational impact.
Global ChangeLabs's Space as Strategy goes beyond “place-making” and instead creates “spatial operating systems” that acts as an armature for enabling the flourishing of an organization’s culture.
Systems approaches are especially necessary for innovating unprecedented solutions for highly complex challenges
But sometimes even identifying the challenge is the challenge - all we know is that something has to change. Helping you reach strategic clarity and design actionable pathways is what we do.
Get in touch and let's explore how to work together.
These underlying principles permiate through our work. They encourage us to take perspectives that reveal new opportunities within the challenges we face.
