Sense-making from visualising the field of systems change
Introduction
Illuminate is a collaborative network designed to connect people committed to cultivating the field and practice of systems change towards a just, equitable and regenerative future for all.
We know that to achieve systems change there needs to be a high level of collaboration and coordination, access to valuable frameworks, processes and tools and practitioners from a wide range of lineages. However this emerging field is fragmented, with few connections, and has a greater influence from people and practitioners from a white, western and academic culture.
To tackle this, the Illuminate network set out to support the emergence of systems change practice by visualising the field with hopes to create stronger connections among people, organisations and resources, and to recognise the international field with equity at it’s core. As practitioners ourselves, we realised we needed to use our tools on ourselves to help us to see the wider whole. This project was initiated in 2020 with some initial questions like, as a small group of the larger whole building the field - who are the others? This project was led by the School of System Change, and designed by Eric Berlow - ecologist, complexity scientist and CEO of Vibrant Data Labs – a social impact data science group. We have identified 400 practitioners in the first iteration of the map. One year on we are writing about how we are sense-making and re-organising ourselves for the next stage.
The Process/how we did it/methodology
We set out to find publicly available profiles of people doing systems change field-building, to be able to identify these people, explore the words they are using to describe their work, and create a sense of affinities that could help us understand the practice of the evolving field.
The process to create this map was a combination of manual data collection (through desk research and surveys) alongside automated data collection - using publicly available information from websites and LinkedIn profiles. Having engaged with projects that require practitioners to fill out data about themselves on a specific project platform that then quickly becomes out of date, we wanted to use platforms where people were more likely to be updating their profiles regularly. Recognising not all systems change practitioners chose to be on LinkedIn, we included organisational profiles and websites in our data collection options.
Manual data collection: this relied heavily on a snowball method of surveys sent initially within the Illuminate network, to recommend people they identified as systems change practitioners, or doing systems change work. So one person would recommend 10 people, and those 10 people would recommend 100.. so on and so forth. We combined this with expertise of the field from within the School of System Change, and desk research.
Identifying terms, tags and taxonomy: we used this initial data collection, research and profiles to identify systems change terms that could be used to connect people in the field.
Automated data collection: we have built a custom tool that scrapes terms from the corpus from publicly available information of identified practitioners across data like: bio, current title, profile image, and various skills tags.
Sense making, categorising and refining: here we are curating a dictionary of meaningful systems change terms or tags, as well as known synonyms (e.g. systems mapping, capacity building, systems dynamics, scenario planning, etc). With new practitioners being identified within the snowball method, we’ll be able to enrich the corpus with systems change terms from their public information.
Outputs:
We hope to deliver a visual affinity map of diverse leading systems change practitioners that reflects a diversity of approaches to the field, enriched with meaningful systems change tags for searching and browsing people by discipline.
Preliminary interactive visualisation of people that shows overlaps and adjacencies between different systems change approaches.
Open source scripts to facilitate future iterations of this process.
The map
What we have is an affinity map that connects language: how people and organisations are talking about themselves in the field - the words they’re using, the capacity they’re putting forward, what domains they say they are working in, and how those map out across the group that we currently have here. What this map does is then start to cluster the most common terms, for example - stakeholder engagement and facilitation are most commonly found together, as is social innovation, collaboration and impact measurement. The connections that appear in the map doesn’t say anything about people knowing each other or not, it’s really about using language as a way to create connections in the field.
What is the narrative that is emerging?
There are several narratives that are emerging:
There is no one way to do systems change, and that there are an incredibly diverse set of actors working within the field.
The field is immediately bigger than expected, even if the map is at the moment concentrated in Europe and North America (a challenge that is highlighted below).
This map could have the danger of reinforcing dominance within the field
How is it useful?
This map can be useful in a number of ways. Firstly, it is a helpful tool for dialogue amongst systems change field-builders, to help us collectively explore the language we’re using in the field, and how the field as a whole is evolving. It’s important to state that we are not trying to discover anything - we are hoping to help the field see itself - and when there are obvious gaps or concentrations of practice, we can take actions to move in different directions.
Secondly, as practitioners, it is helpful for identifying other individuals who might have strong affinities with our own work and that we aren’t connected to, or people who are working in a way that is complementary to our own approaches. The search functions on the map work well to narrow down from several hundred people to a bunch of individuals using keywords.
What are some concerns?
There are several concerns or complications that have emerged from the first stage of this mapping process. These have been lifted up during a sense-making conversation with the Illuminate stewardship group.
This map is haunted: who sees this map? Who isn’t on this map? How can this map be used as a tool and not a weapon? The snowball method starting from within the initial group has led to a concentration of practitioners and organisations based in Europe and North America, which is already an issue in this fragmented field.
The systems tags initially identified also didn’t include “equity” and associated terms (although they were identified as key words), so this strong current of systems practice wasn’t being picked up in the affinity clusters. The same is true of “networks”. Rerunning the data with these new terms lifted up a new cluster. This shows the importance of using this map as a dialogic rather than a diagnosic tool - a conversation-starter and inquiry tool, not a presentation as a definitive representation of the field of practice. It has helped us see that where “equity” might have been seen as a domain of application for systems change practice previously, the field has evolved to see equity as a systems change practice in and of itself.
Accuracy of the data: We’ll start by saying, there will always be some errors in the data, by the nature of how we’re collecting it. What we’re creating is an imperfect, updatable map. And although the data is gleaned from live webpages and profiles, we cannot guarantee that this is the way practitioners would describe themselves if asked to present their work to a systems change literate group like Illuminate. People would likely talk about themselves differently on somewhere like LinkedIn, and although this data is more likely to be updated than a bespoke platform, it is often not updated very regularly. The language that is captured is a snapshot at a specific time - perhaps a professional move, and has language moved on since then? It also includes an entire history of education and experiences, so the connections keep growing. How can we make sure we’re capturing a live conversation?
Does this have a danger of reinforcing the biases of the field, whereas one of Illuminate’s main goals is to decolonise the field? Does this dictionary of terms force people to use language that they may not have been using before? What is the historical lineage of this vocabulary, and what are some other lineages? We are trying to overcome this by letting the language of how people describe what they do to help define the field - the important part is having diverse people captured, so language can help broaden the definition.
What is next?
While discussing our concerns for this map, we’d like to promote awareness and participation from practitioners around the world. We will be running regular sense making sessions with the stewardship group, and with people who have been identified through the snowball process and appear on the map. We would like this to be a live dialogue over the next year.
Actions
If you are NOT on the map and you would like to be, and/or you would like to recommend other practitioners, please fill in this survey
If you are on the map and would like NOT to be, please get in touch here
If you would like to join a dialogue around what we are learning from this process, please sign-up here
Access more information here
