Adam Zeiner

Strategy is brain-work – more often than not it’s abstract and invisible, and challenging to articulate. This is the research, analysis, and debate that goes into making decisions, and the data that comes from observations, interviews, user studies, post-its, brainstorms, and mind maps.

By mapping the components of individual services (or portfolios of services) against these two axes, perhaps we can explore their relationship to systems change. To what extent are we tweaking around the edges of the existing system, versus changing the behaviour of the system itself — and how ambitious is the effort?

Systems thinking enables us to engage complex problems more effectively, steering us away from short-sighted solutions that may work in the short-term but ultimately backfire and make things worse in the long run.

I think of these hierarchical layers as levels of leverage that different people, or teams have with their work.

I’m sure that a strange land is possible in which we would all have access to the tools and practices to help us respond to the challenge of incompleteness, but I, for one, have not come across it yet.

If you’re part of the map-building process there’s no better tool for organizing your team’s research and keeping everyone on the same page. [...] However… I f you’re not part of the map-building process, systems maps can be exhausting to interpret.