Chapter 6: Leverage Points and Prototypes: Integrating Systems Thinking and Design Thinking to Help Organizations Evolve

As organizations are confronted with ever-increasing rates of external change many are finding that their internal structures (and resulting behaviors) no longer allow them to respond effectively to that change. This chapter explores the integration of two theoretical approaches frequently employed to help organizations deal with change—systems thinking and design thinking. It argues that systems thinking and design thinking are required leadership skills as the rate of external change continues to accelerate and leaders must help their organizations adapt quickly in the face of this continuous change. In the course of individually applying systems thinking (Colleen) and design thinking (Peter) as core components of organizational systems change, the two authors share their experience of bringing together these two approaches in order to help client organizations identify potential high-impact leverage points for change and create novel responses that enable an organization to move in positive new directions. Through a series of workshops and client engagements, the authors have experimented with various ways to bring systems thinking and design thinking together in service of helping organizations create and implement a future of their own design. This chapter first looks at the strengths and limitations of systems thinking and design thinking and then shows how the integrated model has evolved based on its application to a variety of organizational challenges. The resulting model suggests a low-cost, robust, repeatable process for: (1) identifying where an organization might choose to intervene in order to have the greatest chance of impact; (2) generating potential future states; and (3) introducing those potential future states into the system in order to begin to shift the organization in a positive direction. The chapter concludes with a summary of what the authors have learned along the way in their attempts to integrate these two approaches and their future plans.