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This document is a an Introductory Toolkit for for civil servants. It is one component of a suite of documents that aims to act as a springboard into systems thinking for civil servants unfamiliar with this approach. These documents introduce a small sample of systems thinking concepts and tools, chosen due to their accessibility and alignment to civil service policy development, but which is by no means comprehensive. They are intended to act as a first step towards using systems thinking...
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As with all public policy work, education policies are demanding. Policy workers need to ‘know’ a lot—about the problems they are addressing, the people who need to be engaged, the promises they can make in response, the context they are working in, and the processes they will follow to implement. Most policy workers answer questions about such issues within the structures of plan and control processes used to devise budgets and projects. These structures limit their knowledge gathering,...
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In Building Better Systems, we introduced four keys to unlock system innovation: purpose and power, relationships and resource flows. These four keys make up a set. Systems are often hard to change because power, relationships, and resource flows are locked together in a reinforcing pattern to serve the system’s current purpose. Systems start to change fundamentally when this pattern is disrupted and opened up. Then a new configuration can emerge, serving a new purpose. In this essay...
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Background: Addressing today’s sustainability challenges requires adopting a systemic approach where social and ecological systems are treated as integrated social-ecological systems. Such systems are complex, and the international development sector increasingly recognises the need to account for the complexity of the systems that they seek to transform. Purpose: This paper sketches out the elements of a complexity-aware monitoring and evaluation (M&E) system for international...
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Many education systems in low- and middle-income countries are experiencing a learning crisis. Many efforts to address this crisis do not account for the system features of education, meaning that they fail to consider the ways that interactions and feedback loops produce outcomes. Thinking through the feedback relationships that produce the education system can be challenging. The RISE Education Systems Framework, which is sufficiently structured to give boundaries to the analysis but...
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This Green Paper intends to review key elements of the problem that Development actors will confront as a new decade opens up ahead of us. It will articulate a solution that we believe should become an inherent feature of Development programs and initiatives. This is the outcome of an intense period of experiences and reflections in the Development space across different geographies and institutional mandates and activities, during which the Foundation has collaborated with institutions such...
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Meeting the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) will require adapting or redirecting a variety of very complex global and local human systems. It is essential that development scholars and practitioners have tools to understand the dynamics of these systems and the key drivers of their behavior, such as barriers to progress and leverage points for driving sustainable change. System dynamics tools are well suited to address this challenge, but they must first be adapted for...
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The Cynefin Centre’s Citizen Engagement & Democratic Innovation programme provides tools for collective sense-making in the areas of community development and youth work; civic engagement and democratic innovation; collaborative service/policy design and evaluation; housing/tenant engagement; futures and planning; shared learning and peer to peer knowledge exchange.
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Development and radical uncertaintyFeinstein, O. - 2020 - Development in Practice, 30(8), 1105–1113
Development strategies, programmes and projects are designed making assumptions concerning several variables such as future prices of outputs and inputs, exchange rates and productivity growth. However, knowledge about the future is limited. Uncertainty prevails. The usual approach to deal with uncertainty is to reduce it to risk. Uncertainty is perceived as a negative factor that should and can be eliminated. This article presents an alternative approach which recognises that radical...
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This paper lays out a series of steps people can take to create the new systems we need to meet shared, public challenges. Systems are ubiquitous and powerful. We rely on them to support our daily lives: every time we turn on a tap, flick a switch for electricity, drop our child at school, jump on a bus or visit a doctor we rely on a wider system. There is a widespread sense, among decision makers and citizens that in the coming decades society will need not just new products, software and...
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Systemcraft is our applied framework to help leaders and organisations get started and keep going when faced with complex problems. It is built on our practical experience. It draws on a broad body of research, action and theory from the worlds of complexity thinking, systems theory, adaptive management, leadership development, social movements, development theory and beyond. Systemcraft has been designed to make systems thinking something any leader can apply when they find themselves faced...
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