A once thriving town starved their fishery dry to a near-zero population and now they aren’t able to replenish it. The government won’t step in, competitors can’t work together and fishermen are racing to catch and sell the remaining fish.

How do you replenish the fish population?

A group of systems thinkers did it by first building a soccer field… and it worked.

Today the stigma of designers focusing exclusively on “making things pretty” is alive and well. It’s partly true, early on designers focused on creating visuals, people like Paul Rand and Milton Glaser come to mind. But then designers focused creating products, and now increasingly human-centered designers are being asked to work on far more complex challenges like in education or healthcare or misinformation and climate change. These kinds of challenges often get called socio-technical or “wicked” problems. They introduce a sense of scale and complexity that extends past what design thinking currently addresses. Complex problems bring with them interdependencies, feedbacks, delays, and casual interactions. Complexities that designers today are not trained to understand.

“Designers are entrusted with increasingly complex and impactful challenges. However, the current system of design education does not always prepare students for these challenges.” — Michael W. Meyer, Don Norman

Designers aren’t prepared to help resolve the challenges of tomorrow. Designers right now, interpret most problems as one that can be solved by studying the user.If we are looking to solve problems in education and healthcare, simply studying human behavior is not enough. Humans often merely face the effects to a problem that’s actually caused by systemic forces. We need to study systems, not just users. We need to understand this because you need to know where and how to enact upon a system to get the desired outcome. Without having an understanding you risk creating a solution that either does nothing or makes things even worse.

“Design thinking is not a cure all method to solving all problems.“ — Peter H. Jones, Ph.D

For designers to solve the problems of tomorrow, designers need to see through a systems thinking lens.

2+2=🐠

Peter Senge tells a story that starts in the sea of Cortez, a hugely important region to Mexico's economy and environment has been run dry from competing fishers racing to catch and sell as much fish as possible without allowing enough time for fish to repopulate. In La Paz there have been many efforts to restore the marine life population, but it’s been very difficult and unsuccessful. Where in other countries you can count on governments to step in and regulate, in Mexico that’s hasn’t been possible. What do you do?

A group of system thinkers took a counter-intuitive first step, they built a soccer field in the fishermen’s town. Why? This group understood that key leverage in this system was a strong relationship with the fishers. Without that, no change was possible. Without cooperation and a shared vision, creating meaningful changes would be hard to achieve. It would take a combined effort and trust between fishermen themselves and with the group of systems thinkers to catalyst a revitalization effort.

With the soccer field built, fishers brought their kids to play soccer, fishers who previously competed for fish were now brought together. A once fragmented set of fishing competitors began to slowly create a community. What grew into a community then grew into dialogue and concern about the state of their fishing population. What grew into dialogue then was facilitated to grow into a shared vision of protecting their natural resources.

The next step of action was to introduce sustainable farming. This helped do two things, one, not fish anymore, and two, reduce the economic dependency the community had on fishing.

These incremental changes added up to the fish population growing to 3 million, from what was nearly zero.

And it all started with the counter-intuitive insights that creating a soccer field could become a catalyst for change.

See through a systems lens

Turns out this situation fits into the system archetype called “tragedy of the commons”. It’s a pattern that comes up when an easily available but limited resource gets used and in many cases sold. Eventually, this resource returns less and less, causing individuals or organizations to push harder to obtain the resource, this, in turn, depletes the resource faster and faster.

One way to remedy the tragedy of the commons is by bringing the “commons” together and empowering them to self-regulate. Giving them a shared vision and purpose for which self-regulating can help them achieve is a powerful way to remedy the unwanted effects the come from this system archetype.

But designers today wouldn’t know about this. They wouldn’t know how to solve this type of problem. We need to know causal relationships that exist so you can know what levers to turn and what dials to turn and how much to turn and when to do so you get the right outcomes.

Designers today aren’t taught this, but we still take on challenges at this scale. As human-centered designers broaden the scale of problems we look to solve, we need to start seeing through a systems thinking lens.

References and rabbit holes

Don Norman and Michael W.Meyer discuss the demands that 21st century problems are putting on designers and they explore how education can change to meet these complex problems of the 21st century. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2405872620300046

Peter H Jones here talks about how and why it’s important for design and systems thinking to come to together to work on complex problems. He also talks about the progression of design, from visual communication to socio-technical problems. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/280921326_Systemic_Design_Principles_for_Complex_Social_Systems

Peter Senge wrote the Fifth Discipline, a book about becoming a learning organization, but also a digs deeper into systems thinking and system archetypes https://amzn.to/3eJNClz

Peter Senge also had a great lecture where he told the success story of revitalizing the fish population in La Paz. https://youtu.be/0QtQqZ6Q5-o

Melanie Bell-Mayeda from IDEOdiscusses why systems design is key when tackling larger scale problems https://bit.ly/3favK2a

I’ll be writing 3 more articles here on Medium before I go exclusively on my Substack blog called Tangent. If you liked this article and are interested in how we design for humans today and how we might design for them in the future, subscribe to Tangent for free.