Per Axbom
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Computer Voice
UX podcast episode 308.

[Music]

James Royal-Lawson
You’re listening to UX Podcast coming to you from Stockholm, Sweden, helping

Per Axbom
the UX community, explore ideas and share knowledge for over a decade.

James Royal-Lawson
We are your hosts, James Royal-Lawson, and Per Axbom with listeners in countries and territories all over the world, from Chad to Bosnia Herzegovina.

Per Axbom
Sheryl Cababa is a multidisciplinary designer with more than two decades of experience working on everything from robotic surgery experience design, to reimagining K to 12 education through service design. In her work with consultancies, such as substantial, fraud, and Adaptive Path, she has worked with a diverse base of clients, including the Gates Foundation, Microsoft, and IKEA.

James Royal-Lawson
Sheryl is an international speaker and workshop facilitator. She specialises in developing tools and methods for designers to expand their mindsets beyond user centred design, anticipate unintended consequences, and engage in systems thinking. With our new book, closing the loop, Sheryl has written a guide for designers wanting to bring more systems thinking into their everyday work.

Per Axbom
I am always curious about the process. So my first question is going to be what made you write a book about systems thinking?

Sheryl Cababa
Yeah, so I am not someone who is a formal what you might call like Systems Thinking methodologist or system thinking scientist. I am just a designer, I’m a designer. I’m a design researcher, design strategist. And I think what I’ve been finding over the past several years is just that the design thinking process as it stands today, or that we’ve pretty much formalised has its limitations in terms of designing for individual users. And that’s great. But I think as we think about how we design products at scale, how we design to essentially try and solve for wicked problems, we’re applying design thinking to all of these diverse spaces in which we need a broader lens. So just thinking about not just an end user, an individual end user, and how they benefit from the use of like a product or service that we’re designing. But also just more broadly, what is the diversity of people who are using our products and services? Who is affected by the things that we’re designing? And maybe aren’t even using it? Who is kind of like collateral damage in the decisions that we’re making as designers? And how limited are we as designers, as a practice, just like in terms of our purview, where we come from, you know, the privileges that we hold, as designers? And how do we expand our thinking, kind of beyond the direct decision making that design thinking offers us?

So I started looking into systems thinking methodologies, you know, these include creating things like causal loop diagrams, and, you know, essentially kind of thinking about all the components of a system, and how do you sort of make sense of it before you go into the design process. And what’s interesting is that oftentimes in the formalised systems thinking process, as you’re doing these, like, analyses and mapping exercises, the map is oftentimes the end product. So it’s like, you’re mapping these things, you’re seeing how forces affect each other, and then you’re inserting kind of change or interventions and seeing how those maps change. And I understand the benefit of that. I feel like that’s a really good way to analyse like a really complex system.

But at the same time, I felt like as a designer that was not super accessible to me. Like it’s not something that I would spend a lot of time doing and then sort of insert these like little wrenches of intervention into a gigantic systems map that is dynamic. And then model it so that mathematically so that I could see what’s going to change. It’s like, yeah, we’re trying, like the goal of being a designer is like, designing end products or designing solutions. And I think I wanted to sort of create a guide in a way to how to integrate systems thinking into your design practice, while still acknowledging like, you’re a designer, you’re trying to accomplish certain things. And this is just a way to expand our analyses. So I didn’t, I couldn’t find any resources that kind of gave me that lens. And so I was like, well, maybe I should write it.

James Royal-Lawson
So, so right at the beginning of the book, you straight away get into well, trying to define systems thinking, I guess, but not just define it, but also separate it into hard systems thinking and soft systems thinking. What’s, what’s the difference between those two then?

Sheryl Cababa
So I think a lot of times when people think about systems thinking they’re thinking about, and maybe in the design space, they’re thinking about things like design systems. I think design systems and any sort of complex systems that are oriented around solving engineering problems fall into, like a hard, the hard systems methodology, and by the way, like, Peter Checkland, who’s a systems thinking scientist, who’s been doing this, basically, since the 1960s, is kind of the person who kind of broke this out into these two categories. And not everyone who engages in formalised systems thinking, like, just as a caveat, necessarily agrees that these distinctions exist.

But that said, I feel like it’s a it’s a good framework for designers to think about systems thinking so hard systems is, yeah, if you are kind of building something complex, like if you, you know, for example, I’m in Seattle, Boeing is based here and when engineers are building an aeroplane, I would think of that as like hard systems, because there’s a lot of components a super complex, you’re kind of coordinating, putting those things together, that is hard systems methodology. Whereas soft Systems Thinking is kind of the area that I feel like, that describes what I’m writing about, which is leading with inquiry in to a complex sort of problem space. So how do you take a systemic lens to learning about a problem space, and better understanding it in order to create potential solutions?

And so it’s kind of front loading your analysis and inquiry. And that could result in hard systems like you could be designing sort of complex things that require a hard systems thinking. But I think the space that I’m most interested in is, how do you define a problem space more broadly? And then how do you think about the various potential interventions or solutions that might help change that problem space are effect it or create better outcomes? And so that’s how I kind of think about the two spaces. There was actually a recent Twitter thread that talked about a concept that I hadn’t been aware of, and I wish I had been aware of as I was writing this book, but Karl Popper, the philosopher had sort of divided problems into kind of two spaces. One is clock problems, and one is cloud problems. And the clock problems is he describes it as clock problems, because it’s like, if you are tasked with building a clock, you know, kind of like what you need to do, and the decisions that you need to make, you’re like, I need to make this work. I needed to do these things. And so it’s more or less an engineering problem. Whereas the cloud problem is this kind of nebulous space where you’re trying to understand what the problem even is. And I think that cloud space is kind of the area in which I’m writing about when I think about systems thinking and how it might apply. For designers.

James Royal-Lawson
I think that’s that’s such a pretty good way of describing it. Because I think often normally I would think more of like you did with the Boeing, the plane and here’s a is a plane and it’s a complex thing, and there’s lots of wires lots of different things. And all of this needs to go to together in order to make this thing stay in the air when it’s flying around. Whereas, you know, the soft things I think, are is like the I guess more human side of it looks like we’re this messy, messy humans with all these different interconnected decisions and stuff that’s all playing around. But I also thought was really interesting, when you had the you brought it up now about design systems, because I hadn’t thought about design systems in this context. My background is as an economist, so I’m familiar with aspects of design of system thinking and design thinking, and, and then design systems are something that feels like they’ve come very recently. But I guess there’s a story behind I mean, you must have done some research or feedback amongst designers to get that kind of feeling that there was a lot of overlap there or confusion about the phrases.

Sheryl Cababa
Yeah, I mean, I do think I do think there’s some confusion, like when I talk about systems thinking, I think there’s a handful of folks, especially in the design space, who think I’m about to talk about design systems. And I’m like, I always have to caveat it and be like, no, no, no, like, that’s, that’s actually, because that falls, I think that falls pretty readily into the heart Systems Thinking space, is thinking about components is thinking about how they connect with each other. And it’s sort of breaking down systems in a way that you can then create efficiencies, I refer to, I don’t know, a lot of designers are familiar with the book “A Pattern Language” And that’s from, you know, like the 1970s. And it was written, oh, my gosh, I’m like forgetting, oh it’s Christopher Alexanders, I think it was one of the authors. And it was basically like, how you in how you design environments like this is how a house should be designed. And this is how this house should fit into a neighbourhood. And this is how the rows should be designed around those houses. And then when you put these neighbourhoods together, this is how they should connect to each other. And it’s kind of like thinking about, like, the smallest component all the way up to the largest component. And He even talks about, like, I don’t know, I’m sure there’s problematic things in this book right now. But like, you know, the types of family units that should live in them, or what have you, it’s kind of funny, because it is sort of thinking about it, like The Sims, like if you read a pattern language with the idea that you’re like, Oh, I’m really designing like a Sims world. It sort of falls into that category.

But yeah, I mean, I think systems thinking can inform something like design systems. But that is that definitely falls outside of the category of the kinds of systems thinking frameworks and methods that I’m engaged in, in the book. It’s essentially, the way I think about it is that Systems Thinking is just meant to like broaden your lens as a designer, from like, on a couple of levels, like, it’s really important to expand your notion of why, like, why do things happen the way they do today, before you start problem solving. And then also just kind of thinking about how a lot of different things are interconnected. There are things that are difficult to predict, like human behaviours. And there’s a broader system in place outside of just the area in which you as a designer might be tasked with problem solving. And that might actually inform the way you try and problem solve. So yeah, I mean, I think is really about just like understanding complex spaces and designing for them. Yeah.

Per Axbom
I really liked how you how you started with your first answer. I’m just a designer, because sometimes it can feel really intimidating to think about these new concepts. And now that we’re going through them all soft and hard. And all these different theories don’t really need to understand all this. But what you’re really doing in the book is actually breaking it down and make it really simple for me to just start applying it in my work. So I thought, let’s get into what are the three concepts of design or systems thinking?

Sheryl Cababa
Yeah, so I think about the three areas in which you can best serve expand your thinking as a designer are the notions of wholeness, interconnectivity, or interconnectedness, and causality. So in terms of wholeness, I think you just refer to that a little bit. And that means kind of thinking more broadly about where the area that you’re thinking about sits, and what can possibly affect that. So if you’re designing the “like button”, I’m just coming up with that. It’s not, it doesn’t sit in a vacuum. And you can just really like think about it as like testing with individual users and seeing if they like it, or if they’re frustrated by it or what their pain points are. You also have to think about the system in which it sits.

So hey, a good example of that recently was like when Elon Musk decided the blue checkmark on Twitter, people were going to pay $8 for it or what have you. And yeah, that’s just like a good system for creating blue checkmark, you could almost like just like, foresee, even if you couldn’t do it specifically of how exactly that was going to go wrong, and down to people impersonating Elon Musk himself, all of those things, point to this idea of wholeness, like you need to kind of look beyond just the specific way in which you’re solving a problem. And I think that’s something about Elon Musk, like he’s an engineer, right? So like he thinks about it in that very clock focused way without understanding that human behaviour is a cloud of unpredictability, and that you have to like, do a lot of analysis to make sure you don’t have unintended consequences, right. I think that also applies to the notion of interconnectedness. So we have wholeness, we have interconnectedness, and how things are connected in ways that you might not necessarily anticipate.

I think, in terms of interconnectedness, I like to think of just things that are not normally in the purview of, you know, when I think about designers, specifically working in the technology industry, for example, is like, you should be thinking about regulation, like the regulatory environment, you should be thinking about policy about how all of those things could affect the products and services that we are designing. And I think there’s, um, you know, I don’t want to like lump all designers who work in like, let’s say, user experience design in the same category, because I think there are quite a few who are inherently aware of that, for example, like those who are working in civic design, really, truly understand the notion of like, understanding the regulatory environment, or trying to or knowing that that has an impact. And then, and there’s all sorts of forms of interconnectedness that we need to consider. And then the last one is causality.

And so causality is just what our I think there’s two ways of thinking about this. One is, as you try to understand the world as it exists today, as you would try to understand the status quo, how do you understand the root causes of kinds of the problems that we’re currently experiencing? And then, as you think about ways to intervene within those problems, spaces, how do we then think about the potential unintended consequences that might result? And so you’re kind of like working downward in terms of understanding the status quo. And then you’re kind of working forward. I know, those like, metaphors don’t work together. But you’re working forward. When, as you’re thinking about the potential solutions. And as I said before, like I have a lot of trouble with the word solutions, because Peter Senge who wrote The Fifth Discipline, which is like, I guess, like, management theory, organisational management theory plus Systems Thinking book that was kind of like, foundational. In the 70s, he said that something along the lines of today’s problems are yesterday’s solutions. So by not calling them solutions, you don’t apply finality to that, you understand that they may create additional problems that you’ll then need to solve. And so I think it’s important to think about them as like interventions or initiatives, or the kinds of things that we understand might need some change, tweaking adjustment iteration in the future. So yeah, so those are kind of the three concepts is wholeness, interconnectedness and causality.

Per Axbom
And that really makes me think, and you’re alluding to it when you’re talking about Elon Musk, that is, yeah, he was his scope was too narrow. And he had to go broader. But when do you stop? When do you because I was experimenting with doing like, what do you actually had in the book, like a causality map of the pandemic as well, and what effects has the virus been and so on? But when I kept going and going, I realised, well, I could I could do this forever. How do I know I’m done mapping out whatever system if I am to map it?

Sheryl Cababa
Yeah, it’s really hard. It’s, that’s actually a really tough question. And I think oftentimes, design practitioners that I speak to are afraid of that very thing. Like, like, I will, will I ever feel like it’s complete, like, well, I feel like I’m just going and going and going, and trying to Yeah, essentially boil the ocean. By, like trying to map it. And I guess my sense about that is, yeah, it’s an it’s an ambiguous space. So you might feel that kind of discomfort, but I think What’s most important is probably having some like, clarity on your research questions like, What are you trying to understand? And what are you trying to uncover? You know, you could use something like the iceberg model, which I talked about in the book, which is, you know, analysing events, understanding the patterns and trends beneath those events, the structural issues, and then the mindsets. And I think doing that, in tandem, if you are doing a causal loop diagram, for example, helps you kind of limit the boundaries of like, what you’re trying to understand. And I think one thing to remember is, as you’re doing something like a causal loop diagram, to not just get totally lost in it, is to really try to get to the root cause.

So I call it the deep structure I recommend to anybody who asked about like, a really super practical method for causal diagramming is Omidyar Network systems practice is a PDF that they’ve just kind of released to the world, you can just basically Google it. And it’s a really good guide for creating causal loop diagrams. And I think, like, even they don’t say, like, “Hey, here’s how you know that you’re done.” Because everybody’s kind of dealing with the different sizes of different spaces. And also, what is the kind of objective of you doing this work? Is it to kind of pinpoint, oh, hey, here’s like five different areas of intervention that we can think about that would make sense for this space, then, I don’t know probably when you get to those five intervention areas, like you’re you don’t have to do a great deal more analysis. I like to think of the and I think I don’t write about this in terms of the causal loop diagramming.

But in the book, I do talk about it when you’re thinking about a theory of change, is you can use the steep framework. So like, what are things that are happening that are socio-cultural, technological, economic, ecological, and political. And you can just like start doing your analysis in that way and start creating causal loops. But oftentimes, what I found is like the best causal loop diagrams, they sometimes don’t even have more than like two loops. If you look at the book, there’s this book, Systems Thinking for Social Change by David Peter Stroh. And he has some causal loop diagrams in there. And they’re all basically like three loops or two loops. And the reason for that is that they’ve pretty much kind of like, boiled down the problems into these three loops. So you shouldn’t have to be doing like, you know, hundreds of interconnected, I’ve actually done those systems mapping exercises, where there’s hundreds of interconnected loops. And I don’t know, if they’re of greater value, then kind of doing one that has like three or four.

Sheryl Cababa
I’m gonna guess, system has to be bounded. I mean, otherwise, we’re just gonna kind of like explode into the universe of, you know, infinity. And I think it’s a good point, you said about how the root cause or the root of them is probably what guides your bounding, that, you know, going back to your problem. I mean, I suppose when you’re doing your you did your one about COVID-19, then you get to a point where you you feel like you’re, it’s drifting maybe a little bit too far away from your COVID-19 central loop. Exactly. You could keep going on forever. But you think well, actually, this is a, this is a secondary or tertiary, oh, this is a kind of like, third order effect. Now maybe I don’t need to dig too deep into that.

Per Axbom
And it has to be manageable. I guess I really liked how you expressed it using the perhaps the iceberg model first, because that allows me to find my boundaries. But also it has to be manageable. And I was thinking as you were speaking as well, what you were saying about it’s never finished. But I need to I need to finish it so I can get on to next step actually working with it and drawing conclusions from it and understanding it and talking about it with others. So one trick is also of course, not to spend too much. It’s the same problem as well, I realised, I mean, for your UX research, when How do I how do I know I’m done with my UX research? Because it’s time boxed?

Sheryl Cababa
Yeah, yeah, exactly. I think one, one thing that’s like, an important thing to take away is that you should not be doing these kinds of mapping exercises in isolation. You should be doing them with your stakeholders, because then you kind of are gaining alignment. And you need to ensure also that your stakeholders are diverse, that they’re people who are potentially like affected by the system that you’re referring to, but also their decision makers in the mix. And yeah, I think a good example is if one of your research questions is something like okay, In the city in which I live in during the pandemic, we had problems with mask adherence, right? And so if that’s one of your questions, you’re kind of looking at the behavioural aspects, you’re looking at the communications that you’re sort of government entities have engaged in, you’re looking at sort of the barriers to people like finding it feasible to wear masks, you’re looking at the mindsets that are involved, and kind of doing these exercises.

Even creating causal loops with other stakeholders, I think will help kind of get you to a place where you’re kind of understanding the promises more broadly, as well as doing it with like, and sometimes more accessible ones are things like the iceberg model, in order to kind of do that and gain alignment with your stakeholders about where the problems really are. And so, yeah, coming in with some clarity about what are the things you’re actually trying to understand, I think, is really is really important before you embark on this, because you don’t want to be like, Okay, we’re just going to understand, try to understand homelessness worldwide. You’re not going to get anywhere with that, because there are so many specific and localised contexts and what have you. So you really need to like create, like, first of all, some boundaries that give you some clarity as to like, where your analysis should naturally stop.

James Royal-Lawson
If I’m a designer, I’m trying to just get some more clarity myself personally on a project I’m working on. And maybe I’m not in a position to contact stakeholders or work with stakeholders, I’m just kind of like, I’m feeling my way in this and wanting to kind of reassure myself of where I’m working. I mean, is there still usefulness in that? Or do we have to go full on kind of take on the organisation with our systems thinking?

Sheryl Cababa
Yeah, it’s a good question, because I really think about that the mindset of engaging in systems thinking for designers is design is facilitation, like you’re facilitating other people’s knowledge or facilitating other people’s expertise, you’re engaging people who don’t have the same skills or experiences as you do. And that comes in a number of different formats. And one is one doing foundational research with people. So understanding their context, I think this is where there’s like a really strong overlap between design research, and systems thinking, especially when applied to design space. And then there’s also like engaging in participatory design or co-design when it comes to building this understanding. And so I think there are moments where, yeah, you do go away, and you can synthesise, but you’re going to have to validate that synthesis with others. And, and that could be your decision makers. But that could also be people who are affected by the system. So it could be like end users end beneficiaries, folks like that.

So a good example is I do a lot of project work in education. And I could be working, for example, for an educational tech developer who’s just, you know, I don’t know creating courseware or supplements for students trying to learn math. And you could just go off and design that and test it with, I don’t know, sixth grade students or something like at the school nearby. But I don’t think that will help as you’re thinking about one, like, school education is public and highly regulated arena, where there are lots and lots of stakeholders, it’s meant to serve many, many different types of people. And by not sort of doing a little bit of due diligence and expanding who your stakeholders are, you’re probably missing the boat on some things, and you’re probably creating some unintended consequences in in others. And so, I think part of your job in like working in those kinds of complex spaces is really engaging diverse stakeholders. And of course, that takes like a lot more time and energy and making the case which I know can be an issue, especially, you know, you’re working on things that require speed from your organisation, but I think it’s important and it’s important to make the case for it. Yeah.

James Royal-Lawson
Thinking again about the referring back to Elon Musk again, because there’s been so many examples that you get from him in recent months. That he seems to be working very linear, you know, he’s doing, he is working iteratively. But he is still working very linear that let’s throw the blue tick change out there and oh, look, it didn’t work, I will just do another iteration see again. So that’s when he’s ploughing on in a straight line without considering any systems thinking.

Sheryl Cababa
Yeah, I think, um, I think that’s why sort of the analysis upfront before you throw things out into the world is really important. I don’t get the impression they’re even doing like basic, from like a classic design thinking method, basic research and validation before they do that, like he’s basically doing that iteration.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah there’s not enough, I mean, you hope that they’ve got, they’ve got kind of aligned values within Twitter, that would mean make sure that they didn’t engage in creating harm. So I think it’s a fascinating kind of test exercise is kind of like dry, try do some causal loop map of Twitter and take your blue tick, like you said, Sheryl and, change the blue tick, and then map out what the kind of changes are of that.

Sheryl Cababa
Yeah, I’ve worked with some of these big technology companies kind of making these decisions about social networks. Because they did, I did do a map in a few years ago, oriented around Facebook, and kind of like their impact. And I think, it is really interesting. I mean, they some of them are engaging in that kind of analysis before they release features. And it shows because, like, some of the features I know about have not been released, because they just feel like it could cause too much harm, unless it’s worked out differently. And, and that’s kind of interesting in that space is like, we don’t hear about it. So we think they’re just doing damage. When I think in reality, when done correctly, you probably won’t hear about it because it might mean not making that decision or like not releasing that particular design or feature.

Per Axbom
That’s a very good point, I get often asked a lot about one of the best examples of ethical practices. And I realised, well, they haven’t been implemented. That’s the thing.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah. And I think another aspect of this is when you think about how there’s been so much talk of disrupting markets and disrupting things, and when you talk about systemic change or systems, it’s like, when when you’ve got like an active goal of disrupting a system, then then the mapping of that system and understanding of the system is absolutely essential. And my failures, I think a lot of these companies seem to want to disrupt, haven’t really understood what it truly means to disrupt.

Sheryl Cababa
Yeah, and I think there is, I refer at one point in the book to, I think he’s called Peter Martin, Mertens framework for Unintended Consequences. And he basically sort of outlines the reason that are, sorry, Robert Merton. The reasons that folks are unable to anticipate unintended consequences. And I think one of those he calls the imperious immediacy of interest, you want to create good in the world. And so the only things that you see is like the positive outcomes of what you’re working on. And I think I was like, wow, this guy wrote this stuff in the 30s. But this really feels like techno optimism, you know, like ride sharing services, right? Like how they have basically, or something like Airbnb, like, you’re kind of thinking about, Oh, there’s going to be this benefit. And yeah, it’s going to save people money is going to, like, you know, if you think about Uber is going to transform the landscape of transportation, it’s going to, you know, be less carbon output, because now, you know, people aren’t going to have to own their own cars, and they’re not going to be driving as much, they’ll just be relying on others to drive.

And like, study after study has now shown that it actually is increasing carbon output. In cities where these ride services are really prevalent. It’s actually disrupting public transportation to the point of like, a lack of funding and many public transport systems, which is not what we want, you know, especially if we are interested in more efficient mass transit, transit, and, but they were able to kind of like tell themselves these stories about the positive impact it would have from the beginning. And I think that’s, I mean, I think that’s something that hopefully some of this type of analysis helps to fight is like, by trying to understand it before it’s happening out in the world and that you’re doing this iteratively by combining it with design thinking that you can sort of better understand how it might have an impact before you actually kind of make those decisions.

James Royal-Lawson
That’s interesting, the whole thing with with Airbnb how, you know, did they think when they set off to with a vision of being at a b&b? Did they expect to hollow out entire communities in like pretty picturesque seaside towns or something? And, and, you know, did was that part of the vision? And did they care about that as a consequence of their work? And if they did care about it? Or didn’t I mean, there’s so how does that affect the business side of this? Yeah. And who drives the legal aspect to make sure this change is in place to stop that loop going around and destroying communities? Absolutely fascinating.

Sheryl Cababa
Yeah definitely. Is, is one of those things where it’s like, I mean, we’ve all we’ve all stayed in Airbnb right. And there’s just like, I think oftentimes, yeah, it’s a pretty good alternative. But you kind of see these, this sort of impact on, like, when this type of thing happens at scale. And I sort of think like, a lot of these companies. The only time, Yeah, and here, like, hopefully, it’s not sounding too cynical, but like, the only time that they will take action is when it starts affecting them. So if they’re hollowing out the seaside town, and the seaside town becomes less interesting to visit, which means that it you know, less money for Airbnb, then I think that’s a point where they might take action, but this is why regulatory environments are really important. Like to be able to stop that type of thing from happening.

Now you have organisations like Uber that have literally actually tried to, I don’t know, that have tried to fly in the face of like regulatory environments in order to kind of do what they want to do. And I think like that, that particularly is kind of thinking about, I don’t know, it’s kind of this short termism that is somewhat disturbing, because I think in the end, yeah, these organisations, they’ll be affected by the very changes that they made in these cities, and what have you whether a city cracks down, or whether, like you’re saying, like the, the culture of places change that they’re so dependent on for, you know, for their own business to be successful.

James Royal-Lawson
I love how we’ve moved out during this conversation from we, we’ve moved from the lower level systems of selling, but here’s, here’s a Like button, you click and so on. And now we’ve move up to where we’re interconnected systems and like governments and organisations, communities and so on, which is next level system, interconnectivity. Wonderful.

Per Axbom
Which is the point I think, and I think that’s what I really appreciated about your book is that also that you sort of critique, design thinking, but you’re being very positive in that it can complement design thinking as well. Because if we actually do use systems thinking we could mitigate some of the weaknesses that design thinking brings, the user is not a user, it’s a human being who was very complex, because I think about in the beginning, and there are harms that we’ve been talking about now that happen, that we can actually uncover with systems thinking, if we do a better job of that, then maybe, just maybe we can reach a place that actually contributes better to society in a way that we would like to. But I honestly think that a lot of companies actually do want to.

Sheryl Cababa
Yeah, no, I agree. I mean, I think I, cynicism aside, I feel like they really believe in what they’re doing. And I think that’s why they’re a little bit of interrogation around like the techno optimism needs to happen. Because I think like, yeah, sometimes you get into a space of like, oh, my gosh, this is new, this is emerging technology it’s going to help everybody. You know, you kind of see this with AI a lot as well, like, where it’s kind of like, oh, yeah, AI is just like, it will remove bias, it will, you know, do all of these things, but then you’re kind of like, well, yeah, but what is what are those AI is being trained on? You know, like, what is informing it, and that could just like reinforce historical bias. And I think some of these exercises, kind of help you at least understand or anticipate where things might not directionally go where you want it to go, so that you can either plan for it, or you can go back and redesign or, you know, you might end up like thinking like this is not this is not worth releasing, and we need to kind of think about, you know, if it’s going to cause more harm than good, then maybe it’s not something we should do.

And I think that’s what a lot of this analysis is really good for. It’s not meant to stop things from happening, which I don’t know I’ve had I’ve definitely had some practitioners asked me that like, is this are these types of methods like meant to keep us from like doing anything? And I was like, no, absolutely not. It’s meant to expand your thinking like the mindset is expand your thinking. So you can do more you can do other things that you can support the solutions that you’re thinking about, by recognising that this intervention needs to happen over here, like, I think it’s just sort of thinking holistically beyond just like what we are actually tasked with doing. And that actually helps us become more innovative and creative about how to problem solve.

James Royal-Lawson
And also you can actually, you can create things, designs that fit into the system. So they kind of improved the system without disrupting the system, because like, going back to what we said about disruption, not, it’s not always good to disrupt systems. Sometimes it’s good to just improve them rather than kind of take them down.

Sheryl Cababa
Yeah, yeah, exactly. I’m really good example, in the book of, there’s a graduate student team at Johns Hopkins who are working on trying to understand how they could, it was like an elderly home service programme, like home health service programme, and they weren’t getting a lot of uptake in terms of folks who are eligible for it using the service. So they did kind of a system thinking analysis to understand, okay, what like, what, what are most of these folks who could use these services? What are they surrounded by what are like some of the other services they’re using? How do they interact with the government, and they were able to kind of pinpoint existing things in the system that they could then sort of take advantage of like, for example, there is a Meals on Wheels service for elderly homebound people. And what they did was they ended up partnering with that particular organisation, to help people learn about this home health service, in order to be able to provide that service to them. And I think, without the systems thinking, analysis, and then there were a few other intervention points as well. And they think just thinking about that very specific space. Just by expanding their notion of who is involved helping them create, like partnerships with existing services, instead of spending a lot of money kind of doing something like some sort of outreach campaign where they’re going door to door or something, there are already people going door to door like they were already there. And they learned about this through their analysis.

And so I think just things like that, like help you get creative about what exists already, I think the Gates Foundation has another really good example of trying to get vaccines to very, very rural places, especially vaccines that need to be refrigerated, you know, where, in the most rural of places in the most developing of markets, the Coca Cola trucks still goes there, right? And so why not have these vaccines also go on to those trucks that have refrigeration on them so that you could also deliver this kind of health service, you know, via that existing private infrastructure? And so it was kind of things like that, that systems thinking helps unearth, so that in many ways, we don’t waste time and effort and money, in doing duplicative things, as well as like thinking about creative solutions that might not might not have occurred to us before.

Per Axbom
That was a perfect note to end on. Really enjoyed your book as well. And it’s, it’s out in what is it March, April, something like that?

Sheryl Cababa
February 21.

Per Axbom
Oh, wow. Thank you so much, Sheryl. I love how this interview sort of makes us question everything. And her book asks us, I mean, we should dismiss the idea of solutions, we should dismiss the idea of human centred design. And I agree with her, I mean, because this is all alludes to, when I talk about ethics and thinking of the bigger perspective, but I also feel kind of when I’m thinking about all the organisations that have to actually think about their unintended consequences of their actions. How many will actually make sure that they don’t cost the I mean, you had some great examples when talking about Airbnb as well.

James Royal-Lawson
I mean yeah, I wrote down in my notes here, it’s like, in response to this, the problem we have of coming across as the party pooper. It’s kind of like, oh, we were having so much fun, and we were getting on so well. We’re designing this until you, Per, pointed out all this ethical stuff. And then you kind of you know, you’re spoiling the party, which is I mean, I don’t think that’s an unusual situation to find yourself in. Many organisations because not every organisation is mature when it comes to reflecting on understanding their own consequences.

Per Axbom
Right now understanding perhaps, I mean, because you’re thinking of outcomes beyond the scope of your project, really, that’s, that’s what we’re tending to do. And you’re right there, you’re not mature enough. But perhaps you’re also, you’re also so invested in something that you believe will be really good. That’s so easy to just disregard whatever consequences and not see them as big as they perhaps are.

James Royal-Lawson
And this is, this is a very human thing in itself. And I got really, my mind got really going on the whole idea that with the clocks and clouds and hard and soft systems, and how our design industry is in itself, a complex mishmash of hard and soft subsystems that there are people out there. And we’ve had conversations we we’ve talked about how some people like no, don’t think beyond maybe the the interface or design of what they’re doing or design system. And I think it’s it’s kind of understandable that some people might be content, with being inside of a hard system. And that hard system, maybe is the concrete design system they use or you know, inside their figma or inside, you know, you don’t need to look outside of the box. And that does make you kind of feel safer, I guess, because it’s very bounded, it’s bounded.

Per Axbom
And you don’t have to acknowledge that you are responsible for anything beyond that boundary, which is, oh, it’s frustrating. But of course, I mean, that’s I mean, and but then again, then, on the other hand, if you go to the other extreme, how much are you responsible for as you put something into the world?

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, and the whole thing about what you can impact and can’t impact? And you know, Can we realistically expect every single human involved in design, to care about the soft system? That is beyond the hard system that they’re working with it?

Per Axbom
Yeah, but I think that’s where the all the tools that Sheryl has in her book, and the messaging of her book, allows people to at least document and make more people aware. So if people weren’t aware before, they’re more aware now. And it may be that they care that they maybe they don’t care, but it will be more, you’ll reach more people, which makes it probably more true that more people also perhaps be willing to make a difference. Yeah.

James Royal-Lawson
I mean, I suppose and so it’s like, if you’ve got an itch, then you scratch it. I mean, this is a kind of if you’ve got to that point of thinking that there is impacts beyond what you normally would conceive to be within your project within your space or whatever, then it’s time for you to start looking at this and reading about this, and and working out how you can work with it more. Yeah. I guess it’s a next step, isn’t it?

Per Axbom
It probably is a next step. And I mean, it’s it is, I think you said it, it’s you have to it’s domestic interactions with humans. And that can be hard work. And it can be exhausting. But it’s also well worth the work.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, exactly. I think too. Well, the point that you brought up and shadow self says about how we’re changing the language, this whole thing with solutions. I don’t really think I’d completely thought about how pragmatic solutions come from automatic solutions can be, Oh, my word. But the whole thing we use, you know, traditionally, we’ve used the word solution an awful lot than designing IT. And it’s, it’s very definitely definitive. It’s very, this is the end. You know, we’ve all mean, you have worked on many projects, just saying project as well, is almost as problematic as saying solution.

Per Axbom
Yeah because it implies that there’s an end and you’re finished. Yep.

James Royal-Lawson
There is and, you know, some work has to finish. You can’t you can’t continue everything forever. You need to be finished with that design. But it’s not finished finished. You’ve got to be ready with that.

Per Axbom
You also have to be aware that it’s going to have to change again. Yeah.

James Royal-Lawson
And it might not be right. It’s not nothing we do is the ultimate solution.

Per Axbom
And it also may then have created problems, more problems than it’s solved.

James Royal-Lawson
And it might not be your problem that it creates problems. And we get back into the hard system and where you were in the components. Yeah. Are you a designer that’s that’s a component in a system or are you someone observing the system and inside the system and calculating the causal loops and what happens elsewhere?

Per Axbom
But if you are interested in taking responsibility, this is a good book to start with. Definitely. Some recommended listening you have found some when we talked about causal loop diagrams, apparently.

James Royal-Lawson
That we did. This is a long shot. And if you remember

Per Axbom
Oh yeah, you would get really excited about a blog post. I remember this.

James Royal-Lawson
It was a blog post about design systems and systems thinking and what we did we ended up just going off on one about causal loop diagrams. Yeah, quite tenuously linking ourselves to the article that we mentioned. But it’s really good to listen to after this chat with Sheryl about systems thinking and causal loop diagrams.

Per Axbom
Making it more tangible. Remember to keep moving.

James Royal-Lawson
See you on the other side.

[Music]

James Royal-Lawson
I’ve made a belt out of watches.

Per Axbom
You’ve made a belt out of watches?

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah. Now I’m stuck in a time loop.