Imagine in a mid-sized city, traffic congestion has been a growing issue, especially during peak hours. The local government has received numerous complaints from residents about extended commute times, increased air pollution, and accidents. In response, they considered solutions such as widening roads and adding more traffic lights. Next year, the government receive the same complains form residents, moreover they became more frustrated. Complexity is always resolved through non-intuitive solution.
Organizations are complex human systems. They are comprised of people and the relationships between them, making them dynamic, adaptive, and unpredictable. In order to understand these organizations, we need not just manage complexity but also bring empathy to complexity. It combines systems thinking, which helps to see the connections and interactions between people in a system, with human-centered design, which helps empathize with people and their experiences in order to arrive at creative solutions.
systems map
Systems maps serve as representations of systems and the relationship between their elements, such as people, processes, behaviors, and mindsets. Visualizing the system through mapping enables us to make sense of complex situations, uncover the root causes of problems, create a shared understanding among stakeholders. Who are them? What are their relationships? How do they interact with each other? The more you can foster new interactions and relationships, the more powerful leverage points become easy to spot as gaps, pain points, or hotspots of influence. We could build on it to co-create a solution by interviewing the key stakeholders,hearing their stories, feeling what they feel by empathizing with them. We will be inspired and surprised by an unusual new idea to be implemented with them in a way that they are engaged.
Another tool is the process map. It helps us to see places where the process is being slowed down, blocked, or diverted. Where are the common touchpoints, overlaps, or gaps? It helps to visualize the system, to make it visible to everyone by working together to map the journey of how multiple teams create new products/service/solution to market, including critical handoffs between teams. Process mapping is a way to make sense of the complex whole. A process map shows you all the steps and stakeholders involved in a given activity and how they interact with each other.
Sketch of a process map
But when you need to dig deeper in the soft but the most important aspects of human being, the iceberg model is more useful. It guides us to not to stop at What are the patterns of behavior, but to go further and ask what are the structural influences? In an organization, structures can include policies, procedures, or guidelines, tools, programs, or processes, roles, rituals, or resources. They could be formal or informal ways of working, written or unwritten rules. At the deepest level of a system are the mindsets that give rise to structures. Mindsets are the beliefs, values, and assumptions that shape our perception of the world. They direct and drive our behavior and give meaning to our actions. They explain why we do what we do. The mindsets are the hardest part of the system to perceive. They often lie at the root of our most complex challenges, and so we need to look for ways to surface and make them explicit.
Iceberg Map
In reality we need to take advantage of several perspectives in order to spot levers and co-create and design a solution with key stakeholders. In this way, we could spot the most efficient leverage, the stakeholders will be engaged and stay being it. The change of a complex system will be efficient and humanized.
When we understand both the people and the system, you can take on any challenge—no matter how complex it is. Visualize the system helps to make sense of complex situations, uncover root causes of problems, and create a shared understanding of the system. Humanize the system helps to surface insights about stakeholders, reframe problems from different perspectives, and spot opportunities for design. By visualizing the system and Humanizing it we could redesign the system by picking the most impactful ideas, experimenting with the levers of design, prototype and testing solutions.