READING 4

Uncover the Story of Your System

Systems Practice | The Omidyar Group


“A systems view stands back
just far enough to deliberately
blur discrete events into
patterns of behavior.”  system will reverberate and affect other parts. This is evidence
-Zaid Hassan in “The Social
Labs Revolution”
“Systems thinking tries to take
into account the interactions
between different parts of a
system and understand how
together they are effecting
change rather than simply
trying to understand specific
components in isolation.”
-Kimberly Bowman
in “Systems Thinking: An
Introduction for Oxfam
Program Staff”
UNCOVER THE
STORY OF YOUR
SYSTEM
What is your system’s core story?
Back in Module 1, we established that because elements in a
system are interconnected, a change to any one element of the
of feedback, or the transmission and return of information and
energy. The forces that persist and drive the system are always
tied together in loops. In this Module, you’ll learn to describe
the dynamic patterns--or feedback  loops--that occur in a
system. In the workbook, you’ll walk through the creation of
these loops, which will form the building blocks for your
systems map. You’ll also start to articulate your system’s core
story and uncover the deep structure.
 In this reading we’ll:
•  Show you how the U.S. Education team, the Vibrant Public
Square team, and the Transforming Peacebuilding Team at
Omidyar Network, Democracy Fund, and Humanity United
continued refining and building feedback loops
•  Help you understand how the teams articulated their
systems’ core stories and uncovered the deep structures
Systems Practice | The Omidyar Group 1

“Systems mapping can be used
to help stakeholders build a
visual picture of the
relationship and
interdependencies beyond the
boundaries they normally
assume….Tools that help foster
reflection and generative
conversation are aimed at
enabling groups to slow down
long enough to ‘try on’ other
people’s viewpoints regarding
a complex problem. These
tools enable organizations and
individuals to question, revise,
and in many case release their
embedded assumptions.”
- Peter Senge, Hal Hamilton
and John Kania in “The Dawn
of System Leadership”
A TAXONOMY
OF LOOPS
The Powerful Stories in Your System
If the terms “feedback loops” or “dynamic patterns” are still
abstract to you, remember that each “loop” is really just a
powerful story of how things work in your context.
For example, take the issue of why people join gangs. This can
be described in technical terms as a feedback loop or dynamic
pattern:
•  The level of threat leads to the…
•  appeal of gangs as protection leads to…
•  gang membership leads to…
•  conflict/violence between gangs leads to…
•  level of threat… (and it all connects back to the beginning)
It might also show up as a story of the reality young adults
face: “the gangs have great appeal to young men and women
in difficult neighborhoods because the gang offers security
from the many real threats these young adults face everyday.
However, as more people join different gangs, conflicts
between gangs grow, which in turn increases the threats that
kids face and ensures that even more kids join gangs.”
Your workbook will also contain a taxonomy of the four types
of feedback loops, but to break it down simply:
•  Vicious Loops: describe situations when things are getting
worse and worse (see the gang example above)
•  Virtuous Loops: describe situations when things are getting
better and better
•  Stabilizing Loops: describe situations that are kept from
getting worse
•  Stagnating Loops: describe situations that are kept form
getting better
Systems Practice | The Omidyar Group 2
CASE STUDY 1
How the U.S. Education Team
Built Loops and Uncovered the Core Story
The U.S. Education team at Omidyar Network had
held their brainstorm session with stakeholders.
They had generated an extensive list of structural,
attitudinal and transactional factors at work in their
system. They had also begun to knit these factors
into loops to show how one factor might connect
to another. Ashley and associate Ryan Fennerty
now looked at all of the loops and began the
difficult work of starting to refine them. This is
where some frustration started to set in.
“We started by taking the factors that had not
gotten fleshed out in the workshop and built more
loops around those topics,” Ashley recalls, “Then
we also tried to clarify the thinking around the
original loops. I had moments of getting stuck. I
tried to build many loops by myself, but I quickly
realized that it was almost essential to have
another person in the room just to ask them ‘Does
this make sense to you?’”
Isabelle and Ashley tried to combine the loops to
avoid redundancy in their map and move
towards clarity. “We brought in loops that we
already had and tried to put them together. We
recognized things that were missing and made
additions,” Ashley recalls.
 
Isabelle reflects: “We went through each area of
the map and weighed their relative importance.
We asked ‘What is this loop really telling us? Can
you figure out what is going on here without this
loop? Do you think this is a potential place for
impact?’”
In this way, the map shed loops related to
government and formal education. They also
consulted external experts to help them with this
process of refining the map.
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CORE STORY of the U.S. EDUCATION
TEAM
•  To invest in children’s acquisition of
foundational literacies, competencies
and mindsets, you have to invest in
the education of their parents.
•  A parent’s ability to effectively
engage in a child’s learning and
development is directly connected to
his or her ability to be a life-long
learner and thrive in life and work.
CASE STUDY 1
How the U.S. Education Team Built Loops
and Uncovered the Core Story
They quickly realized how important it was to bring others into
the process. “We have personal biases about which areas we
think are important,” explains Ashley, “For example, I didn’t
want to get rid of anything in formal elementary education
because of my own background working in that area. So that’s
when it’s good to have other voices come in and pressure test
your assumptions and ask you if that is something that really
needs to stay on the map.”
Slowly a version of the map’s deep structure emerged. Below
is what they came up with. In the next module, you’ll learn
how they took this deep structure and used it as the
foundation for the rest of their map.
Systems Practice | The Omidyar Group 4
CASE STUDY 2
How the Vibrant Public Square Team Built
Loops and Uncovered the Core Story
At Democracy Fund, Tom and his team were
similarly engaging in the difficult work of refining
their loops so that a deep structure would
emerge. “The week after the workshop we had a
meeting where we discussed each of these
loops,” Tom says, “And we tried to a build deep
structure, but this first attempt was imperfect to
say the least. Then we came back and did it
again at a second meeting. At the third meeting,
I made the executive call that it was good
enough.”
You can see the deep structure that Tom’s team
at Democracy Fund came up with by viewing this
visualization on Kumu (http://bit.ly/2kybLwf)
which is also pictured above. The core story is
represented in red. The box to the right captures
the core story in narrative form
CORE STORY of the VIBRANT PUBLIC
SQUARE TEAM
The Internet is transforming the dynamics
of local news and providing remarkable
new opportunities for public engagement.
Promising local news experiments are
cropping up across the country. At times,
these new platforms are meeting
community information and participation
needs more effectively than legacy news
institutions had been able to in the past.
At the same time, local legacy news
outlets are shrinking as audiences and
advertisers shift to digital and mobile
platforms — leaving news deserts in
locations where coverage and vigorous
conversation once flourished.
Systems Practice | The Omidyar Group 5

“Our process definitely
involved leaning in and then
stepping back, leaning in and
then stepping back. You can’t
do 12 hours of sitting in a room
and building a map in
isolation. You have to go out to
people and socialize your
thinking and get input and
then come back and build.”
- Tom Glaisyer
CASE STUDY 2
How the Vibrant Public Square Team Built
Loops and Uncovered the Core Story
Then, Tom and a few key members of his team started to
append each of the other loops to the deep structure. They
asked themselves to assess whether each loop was adding
anything meaningful to the overall narrative of the system. In
the process, they eventually pared it down from 43 loops to 18
loops. They kept editing the map and then would go out and
speak to 2-3 people at a time to get feedback and update their
thinking.
“It took time,” Tom remembers, “The 18 month process to build
a strategy and plan was longer than it needed to be, but our
process definitely involved leaning in and then stepping back,
leaning in and then stepping back. You can’t do 12 hours of
sitting in a room and building a map in isolation. You have to
go out to people and socialize your thinking and get input and
then come back and build.”
In the next module, you’ll learn what resulted from all of that
building at Democracy Fund.
Systems Practice | The Omidyar Group 6
CASE STUDY 3
How the Transforming Peacebuilding Team
Built Loops and Uncovered the Core Story

Back at Humanity United, Elise and her team had CORE STORY OF THE TRANSFORMING
all of the upstream and downstream factors PEACEBUILDING TEAM
present in the Central African Republic arrayed in
front of them. Now they began to distill the key At the heart of the current peacebuilding
dynamics. system are two core dynamics that
dominate how the system functions as a
“Looking at the case of the Central African whole:
Republic, we quickly realized that a core dynamic
was that major actors like the UN, bilateral •  The current system simply reacts to
donors, politicians and the media responded to crisis instead of responding early to
crises, but did not adequately respond to the risk the risks of conflict.
of crises. That is, the system is oriented to
•  This dynamic is amplified by a second
respond to crisis once violence is already taking
reality: the system is dominated by
place. Obviously, that’s an ineffective way of
top-down approaches in which
dealing with conflict. Once conflict has broken
international elites support activities
out, it can be very difficult to stop the deeply
that reflect their priorities, overlooking
negative forces of violence and the situation
solutions that can lead to inclusive
quickly unravels,” Elise explains. This dynamic
and sustainable peace.
became a critical part of their core story,
captured below.
 

“What we realized is that although

we needed to fundamentally shift
from responding to crises to
responding to risk, that was not the
whole story. We came to see that a
fundamental problem of the system
was that it perpetuated the process
of disempowering domestic actors.”

- Elise Ford

Systems Practice | The Omidyar Group 7

CASE STUDY 3
How the Transforming Peacebuilding Team
Uncovered the Core Story
Testing the Core Story in Burundi
With that core story articulated, Elise and her team
decided to go test it in Burundi, a country where
Humanity United was already working. Unlike some
teams that move in an accelerated fashion straight
from articulating their core story to building their
map, Elise’s team felt that it would be helpful to
build in long learning cycles to test their ideas on
the ground to inform their map. So they got on a
plane and headed to Africa.
“Burundi is an interesting context for us because it
has been a really prominent example of successful
peacebuilding,” Elise explains. After a ten year civil
war, the country had put in place a comprehensive
peace agreement that was heralded as a success.
Yet, as the team talked to local people and
observed dynamics, they quickly realized that the
peace agreement was in fact very fragile. More
troublingly, there were elections coming up that
would challenge the agreement. The Humanity
United team recognized that Burundi was an
environment where they could hopefully make
meaningful contributions as they tested their
central hypothesis about how the peacebuilding
system worked. They wanted to determine whether
it was effective to try to mitigate the risk of conflict,
rather than just waiting to intervene until after
violence had erupted.
Through their work in Burundi, they were able to
gain a much more nuanced understanding of the
challenges, and, carry out work that in part
contributed to decreased violence around the
election.
“Our teams are in constant
contact with a lot of actors in
an effort to understand
what’s happening in the
system in real time. The
Transforming Peacebuilding
team dedicated time to
doing monthly calls with Devon Ysaguirre
grantees in Burundi to help Manager of
Humanity United better Learning and
understand the situation in Impact, Humanity
the country.” United
They realized that their original core story was
accurate, but incomplete. “What we realized is that
although we needed to fundamentally shift from
responding to crises to responding to risk, that was
not the whole story,” Elise says, “We came to see
that a fundamental problem of the system was that
it perpetuated the process of disempowering
domestic actors. The conflict system essentially
relied on international western elites who
dominated the resources, priorities, and analytical
thinking, which actually meant that there wasn’t the
space for solutions grounded in the places affected
by conflict.”
In other words, although the system did in fact
need to get better at responding to risk, that could
not happen unless massive power imbalances
inherent in the global peacebuilding system were
recalibrated. To change the system, the team at
Humanity United needed to work towards
genuinely empowering local and national actions in
affected countries to lead efforts to prevent
violence and promote peace.
Systems Practice | The Omidyar Group 8
CASE STUDY 3
How the Transforming Peacebuilding Team
Uncovered the Core Story
Testing the Core Story in Burundi
“We learned a lot by engaging in Burundi and
testing our ideas. It completely changed our
understanding of how the system worked and the
strategic role that we could play as a foundation in
trying to influence those dynamics,” Elise recalls,
“Our strategic choices were not made in the
abstract, but were made based on precise
experience in a given country that allowed us to see
constraints.”
With this updated core story formulated—one that
identified the marginalization of national and local
actors as the key dynamic—Elise and her team
traveled to five other countries over a series of
three months to conduct more interviews to see if
these dynamics held across world regions. Once
they had a large quantity of feedback and new
ideas, the team landed in Washington D.C. and
huddled in a conference room to reexamine and
rework their feedback loops.
You’ll learn more about what they came up with in
the next module.
Key Lessons for Your Team
Take a few minutes and reflect on how these case
studies from Omidyar Network, Democracy Fund,
and Humanity United can inform your team’s own
Systems Practice work. Here are a few key lessons
to keep in mind:
•  Build feedback loops with other people. You
need other people to help you think through
how forces are connected and to pressure-test
your assumptions. This might mean corralling a
few colleagues in a conference room—or it
might involve getting on a plane or on Skype to
test your core story with people in another
country.
•  Don’t be afraid to synthesize and prioritize
within your map so that your feedback loops
make sense. You might be tempted to layer
more and more details onto your map. Resist
doing this. Remember that you ultimately want
to tell a clear story to guide strategy and not
emerge with a murky mess.
•  This stage in the process might be the most
frustrating. All three teams found that this
process of trying to build and refine their loops
and emerge with a core story could be very
difficult, and sometimes feel like a frustrating
waste of time. Stick with it! Know that they all
found “simplicity on the other side of
complexity” but it did take energy, time and
perseverance to get there.
Systems Practice | The Omidyar Group 9