Summaries of
Community of Practice Meetings
Session 1:
Wrestling with the Complexity of Climate Change, Poverty, and Health
1
Session 2:
Understanding Boundaries and Places to Intervene
2
Session 3:
Frameworks for Action and Paradigm Shifts
3
Session 4:
The Importance of Cause and Effect
4
Session 1:
Wrestling with the Complexity of Climate Change, Poverty, and Health
For returning attendees, this summary serves as a refresher on our foundational concepts. If you are joining us for the first time, welcome! This overview will bring you up to speed on the core frameworks shaping our ongoing discussions.
Featured Framework: Simple, Complicated, Complex, and Chaotic Problems
A fundamental starting place for systems thinking is recognizing that simple or complicated is not the same as complex. These frameworks distinguish problem types to determine the appropriate response strategy.
Simple problems (like baking a cake) have clear, predictable cause-and-effect relationships and established best practices.
Complicated problems (like sending a rocket to the moon) require expertise and analysis to find good practices but still offer a degree of predictability and control.
Complex problems (like raising a child or addressing climate change) are unpredictable, self-organizing, and emergent. Cause and effect are often only visible in hindsight.
Because complex systems feature diverse compositions and dynamic changes, traditional management strategies (planning, regulating, engineering) are insufficient. In complexity, practitioners must shift from trying to "make things happen" to strategies that "help things happen" through negotiation, influence, and adaptation.
Lessons Learned: Participants applied this framework to their own municipal challenges, categorizing initiatives like distributing cooling kits as simple/complicated, versus coordinating extreme weather disaster response as complex or chaotic. The group learned that treating complex social determinants as merely complicated often leads to systemic failure.
Participants shared examples of how complex interconnected factors—such as housing age, climate migration, substance use, and mental health facility closures—compound local vulnerabilities. A major revelation was how a lack of agreement on solutions creates political and social friction. For example, one municipal director highlighted the tension their team faced when attempting to subsidize AC units for vulnerable populations, facing pushback from those arguing, "That air conditioning unit is just going to add more to the climate crisis".
This sparked a discussion on the implicit biases embedded in our systems. Another participant posed a thought-provoking question that challenged the group's mental models: "Why is it okay to cut off somebody's power when they need to stay cool... I really want to get at the root of why we think people have more rights to heating than they do towards other basic essential services.".
Questions to Consider:
Where in your current portfolio are you treating a "complex" problem as if it were merely "complicated"?
What is one project where you could shift your leadership style from attempting to control the outcome to "helping it happen" through relationships and influence?
Session 2:
Understanding Boundaries and Places to Intervene
Building on the first session's exploration of complexity, Session 2 zoomed out to examine the structural and invisible forces that hold our current systems in place. These frameworks are helpful in unpacking a complex challenge.
Featured Framework: The Six Conditions of Systems Change
This framework models the interdependent conditions that hold social and environmental problems in place. It divides systems change into three levels of increasing depth and difficulty:
Structural Change (Explicit): Policies, practices, and resource flows.
Relational Change (Semi-Implicit): Relationships, connections, and power dynamics.
Transformative Change (Implicit): Mental models—the deep-seated beliefs, assumptions, and values that dictate how a system operates.
Lessons Learned: The group used the framework to identify "places to intervene" within their local climate adaptation efforts. They mapped the "current system" to identify what practices need to be "stewarded" (like managing water supply), and what needs to be "hospice" or "composted" (like static planning paradigms, organizational silos, and a bias toward the status quo).
When analyzing the Six Conditions, participants mapped visible structural barriers, such as a lack of explicit climate adaptation guidance in policies, and competitive funding models that trap knowledge in departmental silos. However, they learned that while structural changes are highly visible, true transformation requires addressing the implicit, "below the surface" conditions. For example, they identified how unequal power dynamics allow higher governments to constrain local action, and how deep-seated mental models (such as a bias toward mitigation over risk management or prioritizing immediate needs over long-term adaptation) cause policy paralysis.
As one city advisor aptly noted regarding the necessity of transformative change: "The staff in my division are probably tired of me... hearing me saying we need to develop a shared mental model on various things that we work on... that's the first step. And then you can get more sophisticated from there.".
Questions to Consider:
When proposing a new climate or health initiative, how much of your focus goes toward structural changes (policies/funding) versus relational changes (power dynamics/trust)?
What is one prevailing "mental model" in your department that acts as a barrier to climate equity, and how could you challenge it?
Session 3:
Frameworks for Action and Paradigm Shifts
In our third session, we transitioned from defining the problem to actively mapping solutions. If you are joining us moving forward, this summary highlights how we are moving toward practica applications of systems thinking in our daily work.
Featured Framework: The Diagonal Model
The Diagonal Model is a framework that helps organizations reconcile the tension between tackling specific targets (e.g., opening a cooling center) and building general capabilities (e.g., appointing a chief heat officer).
"Quick wins" are highly targeted but build little systemic capability.
"Foundation building" increases general capabilities but lacks specific targets, often operating as a long-term, system-wide approach.
True transformation occurs in the "diagonal," where interventions are designed to achieve specific goals while simultaneously building robust, resilient systems and creating spillover benefits.
Lessons Learned: Using an interactive digital whiteboard, participants engaged in an exercise to map current municipal initiatives addressing extreme heat, wildfires, water/flooding, and housing onto the Diagonal Model.
By mapping these initiatives, they learned the value of upstream, preventive design. One attendee shared the realization: "What struck me is that the items that fell in that integrative [diagonal] space were more upstream, so they were more proactive and preventive, as opposed to reactive and crisis-driven.".
Participants also experienced productive tension when trying to define what a "target" truly is. Another participant noted that community-driven actions—like neighbor check-ins—felt strange to classify as "targets" because we traditionally view targets as top-down mandates. The group also learned that an over-reliance on isolated "quick wins" (like handing out 500 AC units) acts merely as a drop in the bucket without addressing root causes. As one participant summarized, "We continue to focus on trying to address these things without addressing these complex underlying issues that create the vulnerabilities in the first place."
Questions to Consider:
Looking at your immediate priorities, which ones are reactive "quick wins”, and which ones are "foundation building"?
How can you redesign a current, highly specific target so that it simultaneously builds general capabilities or creates positive spillover effects for other departments?
Session 4:
The Importance of Cause and Effect
Introduction to the Cynefin Framework
The facilitator introduced the Cynefin framework to differentiate problem types based on the relationship between cause and effect. A core message of the session was that systems thinking recognizes "complex" is not the same as "complicated," and frameworks use varying considerations—such as predictability, certainty, and cause-and-effect—to separate them.
The Four Quadrants of Cynefin:
Simple: The relationship between cause and effect is obvious. You can categorize the problem and apply a reproducible Best Practice.
Complicated: The relationship requires analysis or expert knowledge. You study the system and apply a Good Practice.
Complex: The relationship between cause and effect is unpredictable and can only be perceived in hindsight, requiring testing and probing to develop an Emergent Practice.
Chaotic: The relationship between cause and effect is unclear or impossible to determine, requiring immediate action to stabilize the situation with a Novel Practice.
An important takeaway emphasized during this introduction was that only "simple" problems have "best practices".
Breakout Exercise & Plenary Reflection
Participants were divided into groups and used a collaborative virtual mural to sort climate-action strategies into the four quadrants of the Cynefin framework. During the plenary reflection, participants shared several high-level insights regarding the challenge of classifying problems:
The Power of Framing: Participants realized that how a problem is framed directly dictates how it is solved. If systems are viewed too rigidly through simple cause-and-effect lenses, teams may mistakenly attempt to apply complicated solutions to problems that are deeply complex.
Chunking Actions: Large initiatives often span multiple quadrants. Groups found that breaking an action into smaller chunks revealed that the initial steps (e.g., mapping a hazard zone) might be simple, while subsequent steps (e.g., preparing for future risks) are highly complicated.
Perception vs. Reality of Chaos: Initial reactions to emergencies can be misleading. For instance, an extreme weather disaster feels chaotic, but because existing emergency response structures and knowledge can be leveraged, the cause and effect are actually known. Conversely, deeply held cultural or mental models were identified as truly chaotic because their countless, unmeasurable influences make cause and effect impossible to map.
Framework Subjectivity: Finally, participants noted that the framework's strict focus on cause and effect occasionally made it difficult to perfectly distinguish between complex and complicated scenarios, suggesting that looking at elements like "certainty" or "agreement" is sometimes needed to find the line.
Question Storming (Insights for Next Session Planning)
To close the session, participants engaged in a "Question Storming" exercise, generating questions about systems thinking without attempting to answer them. These questions provide excellent guidance for organizers to shape the focus of future sessions:
Do we all have a shared definition of systems, and what is the exact difference between systemic and systematic challenges?
What needs to be true to actually apply systems thinking in real-world institutions, and how do you translate it into actionable problem-solving or work plans?
Can we actually solve complex problems, and once you identify an issue as complex, how do you proceed?
How can highly specific, contextual insights be translated so they are relevant to decision-makers in other contexts and organizations?
Who needs to be in the room to do this thinking well, and are the resulting solutions technical, cultural, or both?
How much influence do non-leadership staff have on instituting systems thinking, and how do we ensure time and resources are devoted to solving complex and chaotic problems?
How do you disagree productively during complex systems thinking?
Is innovation only needed when solving complex and chaotic problems?
How often do you need to revisit the system understanding you have created?
Next Steps: The Community of Practice will take a summer break and resume in the fall, utilizing these generated questions to guide the next series of frameworks, discussions, and huddles.
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