Systemcraft Labs: innovating new approaches for complex problems

• Client: The Metropolitan Police, The British Army, The NHS, Warrington Council
• Location: Global

The challenge : It just seems so big and there is so much going on that we don’t know where to start

Our world is full of complex problems. Problems such as homelessness in Warrington, knife crime in London; transitioning businesses to Net Zero across the UK; supporting people with disabilities to enter the workforce; providing integrated social and medical care — and countless more.

What these problems have in common is that we will only be able to tackle them by changing the ‘systems’ that produce them. That is, by changing the networks of connections, the underlying beliefs and values, the flows of money and information, the patterns of institutional interactions and so on. These are not engineering challenges; or problems of structure or resourcing – rather these are challenges that require broad coalitions of people to come together and figure out ‘so what do we do next?’ in order to evolve, develop, test and scale new solutions.

Our work : Helping organisations develop practical ways to create system change

Through our Systemcraft Labs we have worked across the private and public sectors to help develop new and practical ways to generate change at the system-level. Systemcraft Labs work with real, live and specific challenges (including some of those referenced above). We introduce Systemcraft as a practical way to look at these often very familiar issues in new and unfamiliar ways, and so generate new approaches to tackling them. The Labs are highly participatory, can work with large or small groups and are focused on generating practical insights and action.

The outcome : Shared understanding, new language and collective ideas for action

Clients have cited a range of outcomes from our Systemcraft Labs, including:

• “Much better shared understanding of some of the really tricky, nebulous issues we are working with.”
• “Systems-thinking can be so abstract — but Systemcraft has helped us get practical with it and know what it means for our people and our context.”
• “We now have a shared language for some of the deeper level changes we are trying to make.”
• “We collectively developed some intriguing new ideas that we hadn’t seen before.”

Depending on the level of ambition, our Labs can be tailored around varying group sizes, the diversity of stakeholders, at some or all stages of change processes.

“Wasafiri helped us identify new and practical ways we could make progress on some really ‘stuck’ and difficult issues. The structure of the Lab meant that the time was focused on our real world, with Systemcraft used as a way to help us think in new ways about very familiar things. This wasn’t an abstract training about a model — it was time spent doing real work on real issues.”

— Client, Metropolitan Police