 All right, wonderful. Well, welcome. There are concurrent panels going on right now, so we appreciate your joining us for this one. And I want to remind you, this panel is about bridging the gap, tools for systems thinking and practice. And it will highlight the excellent work that the Omijar Group and its family of organizations, particularly the Democracy Fund and Humanity United, are doing, grappling with systems, really implementing it, I think in a courageous way to think differently about the world's most difficult challenges and to really push for enduring change and social change at scale. My name is Alexa Courtney. I'm the CEO of Frontier Design Group, a strategy firm that uses the tools of systems and design thinking to engage with the challenges of human security and national security. I also have the privilege of being based here at the US Institute of Peace and directing our fragility study. Some of you may have heard the excellent fragility panel earlier in the day where we had President Nancy Lindborg and some of our senior advisory group members. It's been a privilege to work with the Omijar Group as they have taken on the experiment of systems and over time institutionalized systems thinking. And we'll hear from a variety of different perspectives today from big, bold systems thinkers and systems practitioners in terms of how they've really grappled with the good, the bad and the messy of systems. So I'd like to introduce you to our panel before turning it over to them. Rob Rossigliano, he is the Systems and Complexity Coach of the Omijar Group and works across the family of organizations to support leadership teams, investment and initiative teams with systems, tools, practices and mindsets and thinking about what that really means for the kind of change they're seeking in the world. I've had the privilege of working with Rob for many years so I wanna just plug his book because I know that he would not but making peace last, a systemic approach to sustainable peace building is becoming the text in many graduate school curriculum around here, rather the Bible. So I encourage you to read that if you haven't and he brings a wealth of experience both in the peace building field and negotiation to the Omijar Group. Many of you probably know Rob from his role as chairman of the Alliance for Peace Building which he just stepped down from after six years. We're joined by Betsy Wright Hawkins. She is the program director of the Governance Initiative at the Democracy Fund. The Democracy Fund is one of the Omijar Group organizations that's really working on the health, the wellness and the vitality of our own democracy here at home. And Betsy really brings a wealth of experience from her time on Capitol Hill over 25 years working across the aisle balancing a budget which is no small feat in today's political environment back in the mid-90s and establishing the 9-11 Commission and implementing its recommendations. She worked for many years for her hometown congressman representative Christopher Shays and also spent some time at Amnesty International. Her colleague Adam Embroghi, saying that right? Embroghi, Adam Embroghi, he is the program director for Responsive Politics at the Democracy Fund and like Betsy has quite a bit of time on Capitol Hill before joining Democracy Fund, held several significant positions in the U.S. Senate including Chief Counsel for the Committee on Rules and Administration and works on campaign finance and election administration issues. To his left, we're joined by Peter Runlett, the managing director at Humanity United. Humanity United is a vibrant organization that's really working on innovatively countering the pernicious challenges of trafficking but also atrocity prevention and violent conflict more broadly. Peter actually had the privilege of establishing the Washington D.C. office for Humanity United and has been in and out of government and administrations in a variety of roles working under the Obama administration as deputy assistant to the president and deputy staff secretary but as well as in the Clinton administration where he served as council, excuse me, yes, associate council to the president, spent some time working on the 9-11 commission as well and Leah Greenberg to his left is an investments manager at Humanity United focused on public-private partnerships working with the U.S. government to think about enduring ways to engage and combat human trafficking. She also has congressional experience as I'm seeing a common theme here. She had served with Congressman Tom Periello and previously at the State Department. We have a fantastic panel. Rob is going to kick us off and for this audience demystify what it is we mean when we talk about systems thinking and then you'll have the privilege of listening to each of our panelists as they really grappled in real time with what that means in the kind of work that they're doing with their partnership base that they are engaging. Before we kick off, I just wanna take a really, really quick straw poll to get a sense of the systems expertise in the room. So if you identify as a systems enthusiast, wow, enthusiastic group. That's great. That's more than I anticipated. Now what if you are a self-identified systems skeptic? You're not sure what all the hype is about. Maybe there's a few more hands in the room. I see a few familiar faces here. So thank you for being honest. And what if you maybe are just systems curious? You're not sure what it's about, but you're open to it. It kind of falls along a bell curve. Okay, wonderful. Well thank you for your honesty and your candor. You're in for a real treat. Rob. So we're having a, we're gonna have a mixer for the systems curious after this session, so just so you know. So let me continue in the vein of taking a poll. How many of you have a mingle schnaub at home that you use? A mingle schnaub? Anybody? Good, because I just totally made that word up. But for a point which is it's a little bit like when people say you use systems thinking, right? And you're like going totally I use systems thinking all the time. So a little bit around the demystification is to just to kind of poke a hole in that. And first of all to say, I can't demystify all of systems thinking. That would take a while and it wouldn't be my ability within my skillset to do. But we will talk about a particular set of tools that we've been developing within Omidyar to make using systems thinking something that actually is accessible and practical and value added. I'll talk a little bit more about that, but let me sort of set the stage a little bit. I'm gonna talk a little bit about an overview of why we as Omidyar got into systems thinking. Why did they reach out to me a few years ago to bring me into the organization? I think you guys are probably asking yourselves why did they ask this guy to come in the organization? And then so I'm gonna kind of give you an outline of the menu and our four panelists are gonna give you a taste of the meal. So I think that's really what we wanted to get at is what is it really like to go through this process? To go from best system skeptic. So we didn't ask for who was like a system grenade thrower. There were some of those two. But let me give you a start. Let me kind of give you a lay of the land a little bit first and then get into the, I'm gonna give you an overview of the process that we have been pioneering within Omidyar. So a few years ago, within the last few years, I should say many people, including many of those up there, have been saying a lot of really positive things about systems thinking. That we should be doing this in development and we should be doing it in social change work in general. So they're saying these really nice things about systems, which is kind of good for, I like that. It's better than 2002, 2003 when I was getting into this work and people like looked at me like are you totally nuts? But it also scares me because we're at a point in this field where the enthusiasm for systems is not matched by our ability to actually implement a systems approach. So my, be careful what you wish for thing here for me is people are glomming on to this idea and wanting their mengelschnaub without knowing what it is. And they find out that it's hard. It's not a magic pill, right? So the fact that several years ago, we didn't have tools that were accessible, practical and value add and I think we're on the cusp of getting there. Brief story on how I came to appreciate this. In 2007, I was working with a large relief and development organization that had been working in a conflict affected country, which I won't name, but it's largely between somewhere between Iran and Pakistan, highly conflict affected country. And so I got their country team together and I got them to give me two days. And the first day we went through all this analysis of their system and then overnight I was like, you know, the cooking show person who tells you how to bake the souffle and then magically a souffle comes out of the oven. So they gave me all the ingredients for a systems map. I produced one overnight and then I was very proud that I could put it up on the screen the next morning and show it to the group and the angels would sing and the heavens would, the sun would shine in. So I put the systems map up and there's silence and I'm thinking any minute the applause is gonna start. And the only thing I hear that breaks the silence is, oh shit, we suck. So I was kind of interested to know that the systems map was not the value add tool that I had hoped it would be. And that's where it really took me on this challenge of actually, okay, we've gotta figure this out. We've gotta make this something that isn't just for some wacky consultant or professor to come in and then do for your organization, but it's gotta be something that staffs can use, communities can use all throughout the layers. We talked a lot about community participation, participation earlier and how important it is. It has to be accessible and usable at all those levels. So how do we get there? So in 2013, an executive with the Mid-Yard Group reached out to me and we had this conversation about helping them find a way to bring systems thinking and a systems approach into their organization. And one of the first things I said to Mike Mori, one of the executives at Mid-Yard, is that this is a disruptive process of going from a traditional practice to a systems practice is a disruptive process. Now, I'm looking at the faces of people from, I know from our organizations, who would probably use stronger language than disruptive. Am I? Yes, Peter's giving me a big, broad smile there. You don't have to say the words, we can keep that to ourselves. But you really can't do this unless there's a core belief in why systems thinking is right for you and for your organization. And it took a while I think for, I think the executives, the governance bodies, Pierre, Pamela, Mid-Yard, Mike Mori had a belief in this and sort of set out a challenge to the rest of the organizations that this is something we think we should add to our toolkit. We don't know how to do it. We think this is something we're gonna do over the next several years to kind of figure this out. And we've got this bushy-tailed resource reviewed named Rob and he'll work with you to do this. But I wanna play for you how we now articulate our why. At the Amid-Yard Group, we are dedicated to fostering healthy societies where empowered and compassionate people can thrive. Together, our work has contributed positive, meaningful value to the world. But sometimes we wonder, will it get us to the enduring change we are ultimately hoping to see? There are times when we encounter roadblocks. It can feel like the movie Groundhog Day when despite our solutions, we see the same problems over and over again. Or when we solve one problem, another pops up somewhere else, like a game of whack-a-mole. Most confusing of all is when we find ourselves in opposite day, where our solutions somehow end up making things even worse. It's what blood banks experienced when they tried to increase donations by paying donors. But they found that this actually demotivated altruistic people, which led to fewer donations overall. Or take homelessness. Many cities have poured energy and resources into addressing this problem for years, but the number of people ending up on the streets continues to rise. The question is why? It's because shelters were never meant to provide a path to sustainable living. And because job training programs can't make a dent if there are no economic opportunities. And no one program can address the underlying challenges. These factors are all interconnected and interwoven. This is a truer representation of reality, but it's confusing, frustrating, and messy. It can be hard to know what to do with this mess. So we've challenged ourselves to add to our toolkit. We believe that systems thinking can help. Systems thinking is a mindset, a collection of tools, and processes for engaging with our messy world. Systems thinking helps us gain clarity by making sense of complex environments and understanding the interconnections. It helps us find leverage and reveal points in a system where modest actions have the potential for significant impact. It helps us adapt so we can engage with constantly changing environments and see the ripple effects of our actions within the broader context of the system. Together, systems thinking helps us to gain clarity about a complex problem in order to find leverage, so we may act strategically with confidence. When we see the effects of our actions on the system, we learn and adapt, and these lessons fuel a virtuous cycle. Our approach here at the Omidyar Group is constantly evolving to incorporate insights from many fields. We believe this kind of systems thinking is a powerful addition to our toolkit. We look forward to partnering with you and learning together as we pursue the enduring change we want to see in the world. So based on that, we take up the challenge of how do we build strategies as a set of donor, a set of philanthropic donor organizations that are up to the challenge of these issues, these problems that we seek to address, which is no small task. And we began, our process was to really work in partnership with teams, represented by our four panelists, to actually figure out, well, how do we actually make these tools work? And so I think a lot of people wanted off-the-shelf answers, which we didn't have. It's been frustrating and tiresome to be doing this together, but I think ultimately has led us to a really good place. And what I wanna do now is sort of summarize that toolkit that we've begun to develop. So I'm gonna walk through this fairly quickly and leave, I'm not gonna explain the steps in depth to you, I'd rather have you talk to the team about what it's been like to do this. And also I should say for the team, in the spirit of co-creation and co-development and iteration, none of these folks have been through this process yet. This is the latest state of where the practice is. It has evolved as we've worked with each of them and others throughout the group to get here. So this idea of clarity, which you get clarity by listening deeply to your system. So we have a set of tools that help you listen deeply to your system. We produce dynamic systems maps as being the sort of artifact of what that deep listening has told us. That clarity helps you, as the video mentioned, find leverage, which is how we engage with our environment. We have a series of steps and tools to make that as operational and practical as we can make it. And then in terms of adaptability, there are a set of tools that will help us develop or scaffold our learning and adapt over time. What I'm gonna do is give you a quick overview of those steps and then we'll turn it back to our panel. So this idea of launch, how we get the process started, two very important things about that is we have people think about what they're trying to do in terms of a North Star and a Near Star. North Star being the preferred state of the system you'd want to see. So we're not about, we don't go in and change systems. Systems are not broken or fixed. They are what they are. We work with systems to help them evolve in a certain direction over time. But you need a Near Star to help you say, well, what is it that we're actually trying to produce? What will be a marker of a significant outcome for us that we want to help achieve? Knowing that that outcome that we're pursuing is likely to change. And if we don't have a Near Star to navigate, a North Star to navigate off of, we're gonna be lost. And a lot of great efforts to try to solve big problems did not have a North Star. They had one big answer that didn't work and when it didn't, they were lost. In terms of finding your team and your process, we have a team at a various levels. You have your core team. You have your extended team. You have your participant group. So in that broader circle are people in communities, partners and stakeholders on the ground, experts and so on throughout their communities. Process is infinitely scalable in terms of who gets involved. You can do this with communities. You can do this internally. It can be very internally focused just to try to clarify your own thinking. You can use the process as an intervention in itself. Getting a community to develop its own systems map is itself an intervention. That's really helpful and I think folks will talk about how the maps that they've done have affected the communities within which they work. Once you know what you're trying to do, so in the, one of the strategies that just got approved last week at the Humanity United was on eliminating slavery from corporate supply chains. Their North Star is eliminating the worst forms of exploitation. Their Near Star is corporate supply chains that are free of human slavery. Once you know that, you can ask this very big expansive question which is what enables and what inhibits slavery and corporate supply chains? The Atrocity Prevention Initiative at Humanity United looked at what enables or inhibits the international community to respond effectively to atrocity. You, we do this process where we, it's very big and predispatory. You put out all the enablers on one wall, the inhibitors on the other, you group them into these themes and then you take a theme and you dig in and you say well what's the complex set of drivers of causes and what's the complex set of impacts? So knowing that nothing is straightforward, it's never one to one, one A to B to C. It's like A through Q to pumpkins and then pumpkins to druids or whatever. And by doing that, you start to connect, you start to actually begin to think in terms of causal loops. And these are the, these are patterns. And what we're trying to get at here is really uncovering what are the animating dynamics that make a system work? Because it's by affecting these dynamics that it's gonna affect the system that it's gonna affect the thing we care about. So if we figure out, for example, in our upstream downstream, what are the, if opacity in supply chains was a key causal factor in the overall landscape of slavery and corporate supply chains, what are all the factors that drive opacity? And when you have opacity, what does that then affect? What does it create? You can then start to, so what are the causal dynamics that actually result in opacity happening, that repeat over time? So that we go through this process of each of those upstream downstream analyses produces multiple loops. Those multiple loops now produce a table full of loops, which is what that is. You have to, we literally will lay this out. So a lot of these processes will produce between 30 and 60 feedback loops, which you cannot make a map out of. So we put them on a table and we group them by theme, and then we say, is there a story that unites these thematic clusters of feedback loops? So it's kind of the same process we just went through, but now we stepped back a bit. That becomes what we call a deep structure, which is the essence of the story you're trying to tell. It also is, quite practically, the anchor point for arranging those, however many loops you get. So once you've got a deep structure, you start to play with iterating version of your map after version of your map. You show it to other people, you get their feedback. Eventually you build a map. That's a kind of map that we might have been producing any of the initiative areas that we work with. That sort of beigeish yellow in the middle there is the deep structure. This is the corporate engagement map, the supply chain map. That in the middle there is basically the deep structure that says there's sort of a race to the bottom, which allows corporate supply chains to be opaque and distributed in ways that permit and even incent the use of slavery. But there's an incentive on those in the system to kind of go there. And then the loops, the blue and the green are ones that animate and explain why that deep structure exists. Once you've got a map, we ask, well what are the opportunities for leverage? And it's a very interactive process as well, so that is actually the corporate supply chain map. And you can see those post-its of different colors are marking different characteristics in the system. So where are there frozen parts of our system that aren't gonna change? Where are there bright spots that we might wanna build on? Where is there sort of pent up energy for change in the system that if we could release would actually result in changing some dynamic and changing the system? Then comes the harder work where you've got to evaluate. So in this example, the teams evaluated eight different opportunities for leverage using basically this exact framework to say how does it fit our organization and what's its potential for impact? Is it where we have distinct advantage in our sector or not? And here you've got to start making some choices. You can't just say we're gonna have one opportunity for leverage and like squeeze eight of them in there. You've got to actually start to make some choices about where you're gonna focus and why. I wanted to give the atrocity prevention deep structure which is about a crisis, an international system that's addicted to crisis which is what I think the AP team has found is it's sort of core story for the atrocity prevention system and then it looked at the broader system, thought about opportunities for leverage and began to build a strategy. So this is the same map I showed earlier but now the team developed a three prong strategy that's represented in those colors around how they are gonna try to engage with the system and how they see ripple effects in long-term changes. The dotted lines are ripple effects. It's not the things they're touching directly, it's the effects of the effects that they're trying to have. So that drawing it on a pretty map like that doesn't make it so unfortunately. This is done in Kumu, I'll give you the web address for Kumu software that we use. You have to scaffold learning. As one of our board members said that when teams come before us, we don't want them to convince us they got it right because we know they got it wrong. What we wanna know is how well are you set up to learn to do it better? So in this chart what we try to do is say on the left it's what do we hope to accomplish? How do we move from the current state of the system to a future preferred state of the system? How are we gonna get there? What's the leverage we hope to exploit? And what's our program portfolio? Then you move over to the right side and build up and say, well, the fast variables are what are the outputs of our programs in the short term and what are the outcomes we wanna see? What difference do we want them to make immediately in their environment? Those outcomes hopefully feed up into impacts of dynamics and ripple effects throughout the system. Those are intermediate variables. Those are not things that are gonna happen even in a year, let alone two or three, up to slow variables which are how do we impact, get to our near star basically. How do we see some change in the system? But this is basically all along here you have testable hypotheses and you have indicators you can use to test those hypotheses. And so you're constantly, this is the scaffold for learning, right? It's helping you build that engine that will allow you to learn effectively over time. And you're constantly assessing and adapting. What are the impact of our programs on the context and our context on our programs. That bottom line, the internal line is also really important which has kind of been verboten in the M&E community where you don't talk about process. If you're engaging for five to 10 years and you're spending millions of dollars, you better be auditing the effectiveness, the integrity of your process and how well you learn and adapt. Because as one of our board members said, you got to show us you can get it right. It's all about how you can learn and adapt effectively and you can't do that unless they approach as well. I think about this as like a research lab, right? The cloneliness protocols and all those things don't actually result in discoveries. But if you don't have proper, follow proper protocol in your lab, you're unlikely to find a discovery. And then there's no rocket science after this. It's basically repeat as needed. And so you're constantly going back around through that process. So that for me is the overall overview of the process. I want to turn it over to our panel now to sort of talk about what it's been like for them to go through this. Wonderful. And why don't we start with Betsy and go down the row and it'd be great if you could reflect from your personal experience on what has been most challenging, what's been most rewarding or impactful and what do you wish you, what do you know now that you wish you knew when you started this experiment with systems? Sure. Can everybody hear me? Okay, I don't usually have a problem with that. But anyway, so just very briefly and I do want to keep it brief because I want to leave time for questions but just a general sense of where the governance program fits in to Democracy Fund as a whole. As Alexa said, we are focused exclusively on U.S. democracy, founded a number of years ago as the anti-fear-mongering initiative in the wake of the shooting of Gaby Giffords to really look at what were the dynamics at work that were leading to the changes in the American populace, the American electorate that were allowing for really the emergence of violence as a currency in American political discourse. And so there were three initiatives that grew out of that. One focused on what was called informed participation based on the premise that people will make more informed choices and engage in the political system if they have better information and information they feel is more reliable and that is more accessible to them in the wake of the demise of traditional journalism. The theory goes that then if they are motivated to participate, they'll engage in elections systems but those elections have to have integrity. We have to believe that the results of them are accurate and reflect the will of the people. And that's Adam's program, now called Elections and Money in Politics but originally Responsive Politics and so he and his team, some of whom is up there, look at how to help elections work better and reflect the will of the people and have the trust of the people. And then if you've invested enough to go and vote, now the government that you've elected has to work and that's the governance program, that's where I come in and it's important for me to do my job otherwise you won't stay engaged and you won't continue to be informed and that circle's broken. So as Alexa mentioned, I came on board gosh almost a year and a half ago after a long career on Capitol Hill, wasn't really seeking to leave, actually felt like it was a wonderful job and that I had an opportunity to do a lot of good things but this was an exciting opportunity to come and see if I couldn't help the system in a different way. When I came on board, the governance program through Adam and our colleague Tom who ran informed participation had done some initial investments in what I like to call sort of the usual suspects, names that you all would know in the bipartisan governance space, the Bipartisan Policy Center, the Aspen Institute programs that are focused on legislators and building relationships. No labels, the Faith and Politics Institute, a wonderful program called Voice of the People that is a little bit smaller but has the potential for enormous impact. It brings people together, constituents together, everyday people to problem solve and sort of work through a lot of the challenges that legislators have to work through and the challenge that I had was to bring more and impactful grantees into the space at the same time that we were building a strategy using this systems mapping process. And I will confess to you, as a hardened political person having been in an increasingly transactional environment that I was pretty sure that I knew just how Congress worked or didn't work and I really didn't need the system stuff, thank you very much. It was clear to me that I had to do it and that was fine and I was prepared to do it but I was pretty skeptical to say the least and I sort of said to myself, okay, well this is why you came here, your brain and it literally for a while felt like my head was being pried open. And I think that was a good thing. It was probably what I needed after 25 years on the hill. And so we started about almost exactly a year ago bringing constituents, what I call constituents, different stakeholders in the process together to start to answer the question, how is Congress fulfilling or failing to fulfill its responsibility to the American people? And what we found as we went through all the looping process over months and months and months is that we would think we had the answer and then suddenly we would realize as we took our loops or our draft map to another group of people that they said, oh, no, no, no, no, you've got it all wrong. Or this part wrong and we go, oh my gosh, they're right. After all this thinking and it would sort of blow the thing apart and we'd put it back together again. But we got more and more excited about it as we worked through that process because we started to realize that there were these dynamics at work that while we maybe anticipated them, we didn't necessarily anticipate it how they affected the way Congress worked in the way we were starting to see that they did. And I guess that might be one of the challenges is that in our case, we were working in a system that in essence is already a system. It was established by the Constitution. It's actually pretty clear how it's supposed to work. And so we were really looking at how it did work but it was an established system that everyone already acknowledged as a system of government, if that makes sense. So we were having to put a slightly different frame on it. And then there was this moment, I think, probably in December when we thought we had the map just about right. And we were looking at how Congress was sort of starving itself institutionally and how what I call the political industrial complex was driving this arms race of campaign money and how hyper partisanship was sort of driving both of those loops. And somebody said, we're missing the role of the public in all of this. And I realized that we were only looking at the system through the eyes of the system and not through the eyes of the people who were using it, who were not on Capitol Hill. And that really changed the way the entire map looked. And I think what's important about that is that it led us to an overarching umbrella strategy that really has us ask the question, what are the incentives and rewards for the behavior of members of Congress and really required us to see that in order to undertake all the other strategies that we had identified, whether it was skill building or increasing our focus on building bipartisan relationships or strengthening the processes and the procedures of the institution, that we were really going to have to figure out how to change in essence the rewards and the incentives that members of Congress are gonna respond to because members of Congress will do what works. They all wanna be loved. And at the end of the day, if they don't feel love, they're gonna do what makes them feel love. And so that I do know after 25 years. So having the patience really to work through that was important. And in terms of where we are now, as we're building the strategy, I think as I've taken it to individual members, one of the things that's been quite surprising to me and I think would not actually have been true say five years ago is I take them, I have my little map and I take it with me to Capitol Hill. I'm usually up there one or two days a week and I'll show it to a couple of members or staff and they'll look at it and this sort of, they get this wide eye and they look at me like I'm conducting a therapy session and they say, you understand. And that has surprised me. I expected to have the same skepticism that I brought to the process. And I don't know whether it's a reflection of how serious the challenges are up there that they know they need help. But that has caught me a little bit by surprise. I'm actually curious to hear if Adam has had a similar experience with Incorporating Systems or if it's been different because you're on a different initiative team. Yeah, thank you. And I'd also like to recognize Natalie Adona from my team who's been working with me on the systems process for our elections team for a while. I think that, when I say elections in this context just so you all know, because we're framing it in the US democracy perspective, giving you the context is best described by going through our core story. Basically the essence of what we're thinking about in the conduct of how we run elections in the United States perhaps best exemplified by what we all, I think reflect on when we think of a crisis in elections, what happens during Bush v. Gore. 2000 contested election where 500 votes separated the winner and the loser. A failure by all counts of how elections are run. That failure of election administration led to a decrease in public faith and trust in the system and a decrease in how people wanted to engage in the system through voting. That decrease if trust in the system led to media attention and public and political pressure such to the point that Congress or the decision makers had to act. And so you have this moment where what happened in Congress, what happened in Bush v. Gore and really forced decision makers to make a decision. And at that point in time, that could lead to one of two results we found. You either fix the problem by adopting bipartisan legislation that both sides can live with, both political parties in the United States. You can develop technologies to fix the problem, processes to solve some of these issues, which they started to do through the Help America Vote Act in 2002 providing funding and some processes to run elections better in the United States. Or alternatively, that pressure could lead to a point and we've seen this in other examples where politicians can take advantage of a crisis and attempt to bias the election rules to benefit their party or their side or their policy view or position. And that leads back. Both of those things either have complete the loop by if you solve the problem through bipartisan action or development through improving the quality of elections in the United States or if you take advantage of things through politics, you decrease the quality of elections in the United States. That was sort of our essence in our core story that we heard from intervening with a whole bunch of different folks. The challenges that we found in going through this process, some of it is dealing with the types of speakers and that we brought into the room. It's necessary to have academics and advocates and political figures and in our case, election administrators, the folks that actually run it, to tell their story as we're developing and generating these 60-some odd loops. We had all of those folks in the room but they all speak with different voices and they all have different views as to what the election system is for. And so as far as a challenge goes, trying to reconcile all those different voices into what is the unified story as we are talking about the map in an appropriate way. And because of that, the academics want to look at data and develop theories associated with it. The politicians want to have a system that runs quickly, efficiently, and maybe benefits the system towards their voters and the advocates obviously want to do GEO TV and voter registration and they fight about limitations associated with that. And so really trying to get all of that feedback and consolidate it and that leads to the second challenge, a question of Zoom. With all of these maps, you certainly can tell how far out or in you want to be. Initially, we could have had a 25-factor map focus just on voter registration in the United States and the challenges associated with that. That was important and perhaps it's important to know how these factors play with each other, but if we're looking to fix and try to identify leverage opportunities within the election system, we needed to Zoom up. And so we took 65 different factors, many, many detailed items and Zoom out. And that leads to the fight, I'll actually move on to the impactful and rewarding piece. I would say that as someone that's a funder and part of the job that we have is to convince other funders and other actors to come along with us in our journey and co-funding solutions to the problem, it's great to have a map there so that when we say, well, we're funding this piece and that piece focusing on loops in the map. And they say, well, we're more interested in this other problem that we think is more important. I can point to where that other problem exists within the systems map and say, well, what you're doing is actually really connected to this entire system. And as you can see, as we have laid it out, has an impact and has an influence and it allows you to bring people together into the process of trying to fix these issues. And so I would say that that probably was the most, I think what I hope to use as the most impactful and rewarding portion of the systems map process. For that, I'll let folks go on from there. Thanks. Thank you, Peter. Hi, and I'll see how quickly five minutes goes. I'm a systems curious, just so you know. I'm glad you said that I came to HumanityNet at the beginning in 2007 because at that time, there was just a few of us around the table. And so I've seen us live up to the great reputation of philanthropy of writing strategy and reiterating it and reiterating it and reiterating it until Rob has come along. A couple of years ago, Penn and Pierre took stock of their $1 billion with the philanthropic giving and they said, God, there's a lot of terrific projects here, some really great work. And I think that Humanity United is part of that great body of work. But they realized something bigger could be done that letting a thousand flowers bloom just wasn't quite saving the world. And that led us to the systems thinking. And it felt like we were on the pointy end of the spear at Humanity United because we had one of the first pilot projects there. And it got introduced to us at the beginning of 2014. Basically, we started that process, which was right after the Civil War erupted in South Sudan in December 2013. And we had been working since 2008 trying to help bring peace to that area. We had one of the nation's, I think, greatest experts working with a small group of people who are deeply curious, very creative and very knowledgeable, really tracking what was going on there. But with kind of a sole focus on the relationship between the South and the North. And I think we came up with all sorts of creative and good work there. But at the same time, we were missing what was taking place within South Sudan itself. And there was Civil War. And all the dynamics for Civil War were there. As soon as it happened, we could see it. All the dynamics popped up. Our experts, it was like an aha moment, like how did we miss this? We were completely caught flat-footed. And I tell that story because right as we were getting into this body of work and we were deeply concerned about what was happening in South Sudan, we took a pause on our work to take up the system challenge. And I'm talking about this because if any of you or your organizations are thinking about it, it's important to be mindful of the impact on the individuals who have to do it. Rob said something like it's not rocket science, but I think it's harder than rocket science at first. It has its own nomenclature. At one point, I think Leah called it Systems Esperanto. And you saw the bewildering maps. I brought one, but I didn't realize Rob was going to show it. And even that video with the advertising and marketing music and sound made me feel creepily like we had discovered magic or something like that. All that said, it has been a terrific help once we've worked through the process. One of the members at the time we were first starting this, and I was asked to raise this to kind of the hard thing, right as we were getting into this, he said, we're going to stop our grant making and our work in South Sudan so that we can write some bullet points and some bubbles and boxes that we will then read to ourselves. And he said it in a deeply frustrated way, and it was kind of the nadir of the transition. That said, he couldn't argue with the logic that if we had been taking a systems approach, we would not have been caught as flatfooted as we were on South Sudan. That's not to say that a systems approach would have saved South Sudan or prevented it. But in fact, it's kept us disjointed for a couple of years. It's taken us a long time to catch up. So I think it's worth saying it takes some sensitivity and working with teams. Our experts felt like their understanding was being questioned, which was never the intent. But rather to take the broader picture, I'll try to raise the head because I know there's a lot to say. The first pilot project we did was on our human trafficking side, and we've been doing some work paying attention to the well-being of Nepali workers that go from Nepal to Qatar. And as many of you know, Qatar got the World Cup in 2022, and there's massive construction taking place, which requires massive influx of more labor. There's already more Nepalese in Qatar than Qatari citizens, just to give you a sense of that. And in Qatar, there is a system of a guess worker program that's called the kafala system. And the essence of that system is what creates the conditions of human trafficking, because it means that once you go there, you cannot change employers, and you cannot leave, and they take your passport. And that means if you pay the thousands of dollars for a certain type of job and a certain type of pain you get there, and the job is different, and the pay is different, you're stuck. And our typical approach as humanity of the United might have been, hey, we've got some money. Let's go in. Let's just bang the hell out of the problem of kafala and make it go away, and then we'll be done. But in Qatar, the world's richest country per capita, our money doesn't buy us influence. They don't need any grant making from us, and frankly they don't need to have us in the country at all. The system of kafala isn't a regulatory visa system. It's embedded in their culture. And when we started the pilot project, taking assistance approach, we recognized that there are other ways, other leverage points that we could use to affect the way the kafala system and the way the migrant workers would be treated in Nepal. And yes, of course, we look at the government. We see what we can do with policies, and we are very much interacting with government. But business, US business in particular, has a lot to offer in terms of the incentives and influence they can play. The migrant workers themselves can leave Nepal with a different mindset, and we're working with them. And the attitudes of Qatari citizens themselves is something we're trying to work with. I won't go into great detail about that, but the notion was we could zoom back and see that the field was bigger than we thought initially. Just take a couple more seconds, just talk more generally about the benefits. At a foundation where you're taking someone else's money and spending it, and this might be that much more true when it's your own money, you wanna say, hey, I've got this idea, it's certainly going to work. Yes, we're trying to save the world with this money and we'll show you results next quarter. Our funders and our board members realized that was a fool's errand, and we were making a mockery of ourselves by making those sorts of assertions. And they said, take this approach. The idea is that it is the foster experimentation, foster risk-taking, knowing that we will fail, as Rob said at the beginning, but fail smart. So that failure goes right back into the learning loops and we can adjust and adapt our approaches in hopes of getting closer to success. It's really important for us because in the past, I think we had the sense that the monitoring and evaluation team put us in us versus them in dynamic and we weren't really learning together. We weren't understanding what we could learn from our failures and we didn't really understand what we were learning from our successes. And so there's a real benefit to this more integrated feedback loop process that's really changed the way we work. Finally, I'll just say the timeframes for impact for us are hugely important. Of course, we're not gonna show that we've changed more piece, added more piece to the world in a quarter or even in a year, probably not even in three years. But this process has helped our funders realize it's gonna take time, they're with us at the long haul and they're part of the conversation because in addition to everything else that that map does, it can serve as a communications tool and a point of entry for our board members. I'll stop there because I know there's a lot more to say. Great, thanks Peter. So I've worked with several teams at Humanity United on different systems related projects. First the pilot project on Cutter and Nepal that Peter referenced and then I've gotten pulled in on a variety of other initiatives over time. I'll just start by echoing Peter's point on the transition process. I think that part of what we faced when we were first sort of coming to this work was this resistance, this sense that we had always been working on systemic change. We'd always been angling for transformational change and so thus we were working, we were taking a systems approach. And I think that was sort of a limited perspective on what we were doing. I think if your mission, like you choose mission is to address grave intractable problems, you tend to start by saying what's the problem. What's the toolkit, how do we address it? And that's good, but if that's how you frame things then you have sort of a set toolbox of actions and answers that you take in response. So if you say, how are we gonna stop the trafficking and abuse and migrant workers in Nepal and Cutter and that's just the only way that you enter the problem. You have this immediate set of actions about ending the kafala, about regulatory and reform, about rights reporting, all which is important. But if instead of saying here's the problem, how do we solve it, you say, what are the set of patterns that are interacting within this migration quarter that are having these negative impacts that are ultimately leading to the status quo and that are ultimately sort of repulsing these direct efforts that change, you can start interacting with and influencing those patterns and you start having a really different conversation. So if you're the kind of person who clenches at sort of simple linear explanations for complex phenomena, then moving to a systems approach is a really fascinating opportunity because it gives you this chance to develop sort of an organizational understanding and buy-in to this approach that doesn't lose the nuance and complexity along the way. So my own role has been primarily working with teams that sort of the initial analysis and mapping process and so I'm gonna sort of reflect particularly on that and how it sort of interacts with the strategy process. I think that there is sort of an aha moment that a lot of folks within our organization has gone through or have gone through in the process and that's that moment when you realize that this approach starts to help you articulate and connect patterns that you sort of understood intuitively but she would have had an enormous amount of trouble pulling out in sort of a standard strategy process or a standard strategy paper. There's sort of this breakthrough moment where you are basically saying, oh this is what I've been saying all along but now it's represented and it's sort of the visual representation of it's more complicated than that, which is really cool. And the other thing that's incredible about this process is that the process sort of promotes this continual openness to change and sort of sense of self-evaluation as a perk, not a failure. It gives you a framework for taking in new information and adapting to new developments in the system without suggesting that changing your approach is a failure. So to take one big example and sort of maybe in contrast to the South Sudan example, we developed our original system strategy on Nepal Qatar in 2014 and then in April 2015 Nepal suffered a massive earthquake and so in addition to being a massive human tragedy it was a huge political and economic shock and there was this sort of temptation to say everything's changed, what do we do, how do we respond to sort of this massive change to the political environment that we're operating in. And because we had this strategy worked out, we could go back to our original analysis and we could say, here are dynamics that we've already identified, some of these are gonna get stronger in the wake of this earthquake. So household financial insecurity is going up, that's gonna lead to more demand for migration most likely unless for example there's more demand for jobs in Nepal, et cetera. But we were able to sort of use the map as our guide to what should we be thinking about right now and how are those things gonna interact. And we were also able to sort of think through what dynamics had we either sort of under analyzed or left off or just generally sort of interpreted as not super important because they were sort of fixed or frozen and in this case it was the Nepali political context which Nepal had been in sort of a prolonged period of political gridlock and so we hadn't been sort of focusing on that as a potential area for leverage. So basically the systems approach gave us a template to sort of go back to our assumptions, figure out how a new development really interacted with them and figure out whether we needed to be pivoting and what that would mean. Let's see. I think in terms of what's most challenging, I think initiating new staff, oh and I'm out of time. Okay, well sure, initiating new staff is a challenge because I think most people expect to come into an organization and they get a strategy paper or they get sort of a basic understanding of your theory of change. It's a little bit bewildering to be handed a map and say this is the strategy. But so we've definitely sort of started strategizing about how to help staff understand sort of the theory behind it before confronting them with the full map but people are getting to eventually. Great, well thank you and I appreciate everyone's candor and honesty up here. I think you guys have really underscored the risks of embracing systems but also the profound rewards and just to underscore a few things that I heard that the audience might wanna chew on a little bit on the risk side of the equation, especially in this town, it's rewarded to be a subject matter expert and subject matter expertise has really held very passionately, whether you're coming from the hill or you've been working on South Sudan for a long, long time, it can feel hard to feel like you're having to learn all over again or challenge what you thought you knew and anytime someone says this is harder than rocket science, that feels very, very daunting but I appreciate you guys also highlighting in an honest way the rewards of this and of embracing systems, the ability to see in a different way and to respectfully and collaboratively make your assumptions visible through the mapping process and challenge those assumptions but also to build constituencies as you're making those assumptions visual and we talked earlier in one of the panels about the challenges and the opportunities of multi-stakeholder processes. So you're creating a set of products but this is really very much about the process. I wonder if I could ask you to reflect, not everyone has to answer this but if you have a strong desire to, please feel free to jump in and then we'll open it up to the audience. How much systems is enough systems? So when you think about kind of these risks and these rewards, the opportunity cost, I think you guys have made a great case for how much richer and on point your engagement is as you walk through this process. Do you simply say yes, I'm all in and you dive all the way in to systems or is there a more kind of gradual process where we've deepened our systems practice enough relative to the context of the problem? It means to get halfway pregnant in a sense. You know, it feels like, we did that to some extent we still are, we had programs at Humane, I think we started operating in 2007 and the systems work takes a lot of time to get and to each one of our initiative areas is going through it and we're not finished. So we're able to continue doing what we're doing as we're getting into it but the more we get into it, the more it feels like the old stuff, the old approach doesn't make sense and we need to either find a way to integrate it into what we're doing or wrap it up. So I don't know if others have a different sense. No, I think that's the right question to be asking and I'm not sure that we, at least on our team have quite figured out the answer yet. I think there was a point at which I sort of felt like I was going down the rabbit hole and was just kind of continuing to dig because I thought it was so fascinating and I had to stop and say, all right, a strategy has to come out of this that's at least an initial strategy that then we can continue to test but there's a point of diminishing returns and it's not always in the eye of every beholder at exactly the same point. And so in terms of like learning, I would say that one thing that's important and helpful is to have sort of all the decision makers have a common understanding of when that point is and if you have a common understanding of how it will be used and what the purpose of this is, then I think some of those other more difficult decisions are easier to make and become sort of more transparent and more collaborative if everyone's going in with the North Star, not just for the map and the system that you're working in, but for the system of your organization. So, thank you. I wonder whether or not the question might be how much systems are too much systems? I mean, you need when you adopt it to sort of go all in, but as Betsy illustrated, you can spend endless hours and days thinking and rethinking, second guessing, finding another expert that has a slightly different frame on how the loop is connected. And so I really think it takes a while to get up to date in the lingo and how to do the mapping. And what I'm interested in is for future work, now that we know this, how can we expedite the process? Without cutting corners, how do you establish a way of thinking about a map or an issue that we can do in a way that's perhaps less rigorous than a multi-million dollar grant-making portfolio but is good enough to get a good understanding of a small campaign that you wanna run for a policy agenda. And I think we've found that because we've done this in exercises, we were talking about a particular issue in the office and said, well, let's see if we can spend a morning and get a basic map together on it. And some of us that have been through the process before, not experts on all parts of the map that we were focused on, but smart people that knew how to do systems work, pulled together what was a good enough map to really start to think about this process in a meaningful way. And so I do think it does become easier and I do think we need to, as folks that are actors in the world and actually want to get to the point of using the leveraged points to effect change, we can't be captured by the thought that it is endless systems process or else it'll just be frustrating for folks internal and out. Anyone else wanna jump in on this or? Sure, so I'll just echo Adam's point. I think there's sort of an initial upfront investment in getting everyone up to a certain level so otherwise you're really sort of speaking different languages once you are trying to communicate it outwards or across your organization. I think that to go to Betsy's point, at some point when you're doing your analysis it's not just a matter of diminishing returns, it's a matter of sort of starting to get counterproductive because at some point adding more detail starts to sort of distill or starts to obscure the underlying logic of what you're analyzing. And so I think that in our experiences that point has become apparent. It's sort of a know it when you feel that moment but it is definitely there. I just want to follow up on that and listen to you all. One thing that's happened to us internally is to conflate the mapping process with the systems approach and I think it's quite clear that you can keep going and going and iterating. You can never come to the end of mapping. But I think in a broader systems approach you can get to good enough and then you start to engage the system and see how it changes and you continually evolve it. So in that sense I feel like you're all in. On the mapping process side we like that it has to come in a day when you start to act. That's the rob cycle in terms of the clarity, leverage, adapt, repeat, right? I mean and I think that's a really important point. The mapping process is not a systems practice. It's a tool in a broader process. So let's turn it to the audience. What questions are out there when I hear from you all? And so why don't I take these three here? I'd like to take them kind of in groupings if you guys could each articulate the three gentlemen here in this row. We'll whoever wants to jump in on the question and then we'll come over to the set of room. My name is Tatsushi Arai, school for Internet Science Training, working on piece building. My question goes to the first speaker, Roberto. I think it's a little bit nuts on both but as part of your presentation you mentioned that at certain stage of the process there's gonna be multiple feedback loops emerge and you come up with an overarching story. And that sort of stuck with me because when we work on conflict, say you worked on Afghanistan and we work, let's say, the Taliban, government of national unity, emerging IS and the different ethnic groups, they try to come up with a story. And I want you to sort of give me some practical experience as to how the competing stories are emerging, how you actually reconcile that practical process. Yeah, so, oh we want to take two more questions. So that was kind of about how do you reconcile the competing stories. Hello, Bob Rieck with Peace Reaction USA. Interested if maybe Rob could, but whoever's best equipped to talk about how this applies in a multi-organization context because I'm hearing you all talk about, oh we did this in our organization, but no offense, but you're not the only one working on human trafficking. So gosh, wow, we really have to include other countries, other organizations and other countries, et cetera. And how do you see this playing out in a truly multi-sector, multi-national way? Great, how do you think about systems in a system? Organizations and then this one and then open it up. Mel Duncan from Nonviolent Peace Force. Peter, I was struck when you said you were caught flat footed with the re-ignition of the war in South Sudan. And maybe this is a question for both Peter and Adam. If you would have done the full process, how might you have responded differently in December of 2013? And Adam, if you were engaged, had done this fully, how might you respond differently to our current electoral process? Why don't we start with you on the first two questions? Yeah, so in light of the first question about when you've got competing narratives going on, so this version of systems, dynamic systems mapping, there's many other kinds which are much more quantitative and have differential equations in them, but this is fundamentally about producing a narrative. And so the whole, the map really just becomes a table of contents for a rich narrative. And if you change that narrative, and Mubetsu was referring to this, when you change that narrative, it helps people in the system change their narrative of what is happening and what they should do about it. So when I think it was, remember your team was saying, you presented to someone on the Republican side, say, and they look at this and they figure, freeze me now from blame. I don't have to blame the other side because I now understand we're both stuck in this. The piece I didn't talk about here that is really, really important about the whole process is it's, I had a mathematician who looked at our work somewhat critically and said, oh, what you do is performance art. And I don't know whether I should be insulted or go with that, but it was exactly right, which is what's really valuable here is the narratives and the competing narratives and the changing narratives that happen when people talk about what is a particular pattern. We did a process on education reform and we had charter schools as one of the thematic clusters that they wanted to do their upstream downstream analysis on and build their loops on. There were four people in that group. Two people thought charter schools are the answer and two people thought charter schools were the devil. And they came and said, well, what do we do? And I said, well, both. So when charter schools work, what happens? And when charter schools don't work, what happens? And what was really good is that by the time they got through all that, they could see each other's narrative and actually now had a combined narrative of how you could actually tell the story of charter schools work can work both ways. And these factors tend to make them work and these factors tend to make them not work. So I think it's an ongoing process, right? So the more people you bring in, which kind of goes to the next story, the next question about the system of organizations in the system. And I think one of the great experiences I've seen with all the teams has been how it has affected what other organizations have done. I know with the informed participation map, especially it's affecting what funders in this space are realigning their funding. It led to a session we did with people who teach journalism on bringing systems thinking into how they teach journalists. So it had all these knock on ripple effects that happen when you start to engage the community with your systems understanding. When they get that view, it sort of helps them realign and influence what they do. So I think it's kind of infinitely scalable to bring in these different stories. And if one of them wants to take that map back home and they want to take Betsy's map and reform it, go for it, like great, right? Yeah, I mean we started with a number of our stakeholders, both funders, organizations that are grantees, as well as other stakeholders in really involving them in the process from the beginning. And then as we developed a more final map, we've taken it out, again, both to other funders and to grantees. And I think it's, you know, we're not all gonna be working off the same map necessarily, but it helps create a common understanding and a common, with at least one funder, a fairly common direction that helps us, I think will help us build collective impact over time. And I think the goal is not to have one narrative that everybody in the Congress base or everybody in the local journalism space or atrocity prevention space is saying, it's actually helping them connect their story with the story, right? And it becomes a harmonious kind of, but diverse still ecosystem. Adam, Peter, do you all wanna comment on what role systems would have played for preparedness and anticipation? I think that in the South Sudan question, I'll have a relatively unsatisfactory response because it's not my area of expertise. I will say that, and I don't believe it's the case that we would have necessarily stopped it if we had the maps. There's an analogy to our work in the atrocity prevention space, and I didn't have a chance to go into that in any great detail, but as we started to map out the system such as it is that exists to prevent conflict, what we found is pretty simple, but actually powerful observation, which is that the system is designed to respond to the crisis once it's already emerged. And I think in South Sudan, that's the case as well. Before the blow-ups in December, 2013, the vice president was already starting to be disempowered. There were fractures in the parties again, I was speaking relatively limited knowledge, but there were warning signs that were earlier than that, and we were deeply operating there, and I think even the US government was very focused on how can we help support the South in its issues with the North? And we belittled to some extent unintentionally the significance of the events that were taking place until it was too late. I don't know precisely what we would have done differently, and I said we were flat footed because we were caught unaware. Being aware would have been better, but I don't know exactly what we would have done. Yeah, if we think of the whole series of things that went wrong, and there were many in Florida in 2000, although that story is not unique, you had the butterfly ballads that was an incredibly poorly designed ballad that caused lots of problems. You had a punch card system that led, if you recall, to the hanging chads and dimpled chads and poll workers holding up magnifying glasses. We had problems with registration systems where a number of folks that thought they were on the rolls were not on the rolls. All of it speak to the capacity preparedness of election officials to respond to situations where elections are close. And when elections are close, we still need the count to be right, or as right as we possibly can get to be. And so what we learned from hearing from constituents and stakeholders, not just about the Florida circumstance, but there are recounts in the Oregon governor's race in 04 and in the Al Franken race in 08, the capacity of election administrators at the local level needs to be bolstered through budget, through personnel, through training. And many of the cases that those things don't exist. And so right now the process is trying to find out how do you think about what is the best leverage point to give support to those local election officials? How do you scale it and transfer the information to folks that can use it to improve process? And you're talking about folks acting within the government and within government resources, but maybe not doing it efficiently or effectively. And so the process now is, how do we figure out those leverage points that support, you're never gonna be able to solve all elections, but you can give people the tools to respond to crises and prepare for crises in a much better way than they did and that they have capacity to do right now. So Rob, does you wanna put a footnote on that? Just one quick point. One of my favorite systems quotes is, a systems view stands back from reality just far enough to blur discrete events and to patterns of behavior. So every time you see a big dramatic event, you gotta ask, is this just part of the sign curve? Is it part of the dynamics? So it's an ebb of an ebb and flow cycle or is it a sign that the system is fundamentally shifted? And so you wanna resist the temptation to just react to those big events because you gotta step back and say what is behind this? Is this the pattern or is this a new pattern that's emerged? So let's take, there's a lot of hands. If you can keep your question short and to the point, I'll try to take four or five and then have the panel react. We've got about 10 minutes and we wanna have a couple minutes for Rob to close us out here. So here in the front. So quick, one quick question on substance and one on practical matter. How do you account, you just sort of spoke to intangibles, say, Rumsfeld's unknown unknowns. How can you account for that in your map because I think leadership, our vision, we didn't know about we are all colored Saeed until or was easy until it happened. How do you account for that in a systems mapping process? Secondly, can we get the software? I got a quote to do a systems map. I'm at the Carter Center in Atlanta and it was $300,000 from a consultant. So I was like, I love to do it but we could never afford it. So is there a software that could prompt us? Yeah, fake a partner. Kuma, which I'll show you the address for, is free for public projects. Great. So this gentleman here in the green shirt. Here, the woman in the pink. Hearing about South Sudan, Peter, I'm wondering, you know, in that part of the world they have the conflict early warning, early response system. What would happen if you combine the two tools? What would happen if you use the sewers but you built it on a platform of what you guys are describing? What would that look like? Great. Right here in the white? Yes. Hi, I'm Jen Hig, I'm an independent consultant and thank you, this was like the clearest laying out of the process of systems mapping and I really appreciate at the end how you said that there, you know, there's a bit of conflation here with systems mapping and systems thinking. I used to work in LER learning evaluation and research at USAID and we had a whole complexity aware monitoring initiative which is a completely separate part of systems thinking with, you know, we had five different processes very different from mapping. Now I'm at FHI 360 for a little bit and there's a scale plus system, whole systems in the room process they have. So to keep this quick, I guess my question is what strikes me here is this looks like it's really great for headquarters, for the people who are designing the strategy whereas at AID with our complexity aware monitoring, for example, that was really meant for the quote unquote field to work with the implementers and to work with communities. So I'm curious if you could reflect on where you see the applicability of this and how much it translates to outside of HQ. Okay, so two questions, fire round and then we'll take all five at once. The woman here in the black and the pink. Hi, thank you, my name is Sarah Dunn. I'm with the National Democratic Institute. I have a question about neutrality and self reflection while you're doing the systems mapping. I noticed that, and forgive me if this isn't a chronological order of your steps but I noticed that you do your defining of your north and your near star at the beginning. I'm wondering is there a risk of doing that before you start doing your mapping if you already have an outcome or a direction in mind? Can that influence how you map and the narrative that emerges? How much self reflection do you leave space for that during the mapping process in order to make sure that your mapping, the narrative that you're building is neutral and not a self-fulfilling prophecy or self-serving? Thank you. Thank you, and final question. Mary Fitzstuff from Branda's University. I worked on Northern Ireland for quite some time and we very much use this kind of mapping and systems approach. However, the problem arose when we talked about implementation because inevitably we had to involve scores of institutions, scores of bodies, whether it's security forces, firefighters, educations, et cetera. So in a way the work almost only begins once you have the systems analysis done. And I think the real task is what we found was first of all the courage to actually look at your part in this plan. The second thing was different timelines. Some organisations were much more willing to move faster than others. And actually it goes well beyond the capacity of your organisation to do this. It really is talking about sort of a major implementation process. So how do you encourage people to undertake this? And also they're not left with a table full of possibilities but not the energy or the will or the ability to actually implement it? All great questions. We won't have time obviously for everyone to answer every one of them. So why don't we start Rob with you and work our way down and you can decide what you wanna engage. Good, so remind me if I've forgotten something that I should have responded to. So again, I mentioned the software platform that we use is something called KUMU which is, I'll give you the address in a minute. But it is, if you wanna have projects that anyone can see, it's public, it's free. If there's a subscription rate, if you wanna have private projects. So depending on the confidentiality of what you're doing, you're the one that's best. But that's fairly reasonable. It is, I think, free for academic institutions. We use it at UW Milwaukee and it's a free service for academic courses. On the sort of the role of sort of actors and these sort of outliers and so on, we use a framework to try to get us to push our understanding of a system so that we're not looking at any one dimension of a system. So anybody who's seen my book, you know the structural-attitudinal-transactional approach which basically looks at the big structures in the society, attitudes around culture and beliefs and norms and then transactions around the role of key people, leaders, influencers and what they do in the short term and how they impact and influence others. So we try to use that framework to make sure that we're going wide. It is a bit of the performance art as well though, which is to bring in, this is the kind of level. In all these perspectives, you wanna bring in people that have different perspectives and are gonna challenge your thinking and you wanna legitimize and encourage people to say, really, I don't see it that way. Why do you see it that way? I mean, Betsy talks to me about this. But it has been used. This process and things like it have been used at the community level and I mentioned this to some other folks before but so a leading practitioner in community-based participatory systems mapping is a man named Danny Burns, B-U-R-N-S. He's in the UK but has written a lot and you can get his stuff online. So Danny does this at that level. These tools are, again, infinitely scalable. I think, one of you mentioned that, I think Betsy might have mentioned that. What we're using as a version that we think is up to the task of saying, look, if you're gonna invest for five to 10 years and you're gonna put millions of dollars against a strategy, you need a certain level of rigor to what you're doing. And as Adam said, yeah, but if you wanna do a quick systems reflection, you can do that fairly quickly too. So that's very scalable and it goes to the level because different types of tools will be appropriate at different levels. And sorry, just to remind folks the questions because I know we got a cluster of questions, unknown unknowns, difference between headquarters and community, neutrality or bias and the role that plays, courage to act, and then the specific question on Sudan. So, great. So I'll sort of pick up on the unknown unknowns and the neutrality question. I think that that's definitely a concern for us. It's particularly sort of the neutrality question. As you define your North Star, you really like that itself is a process of really intense debate and back and forth because I think we are very aware that that can sort of send you down a specific path. I think there are a couple of sort of general ways that you can prove along the way. One is the dynamic sort of the mapping process and the analysis process itself does really help you surface gaps in your understanding. Sometimes a lot of times you'll have the experience of sort of trying to tell a story that you think is important and it doesn't make sense and you have to figure out why it doesn't make sense and that forces you to question sort of the underlying assumptions and take that back outwards and reflect it out. The other is the role of stakeholders, outside experts, grantees, et cetera, in weighing in and sort of challenging the assumptions that we would come to, we would come to the process with and that's just really important. And the specific Sudan question, early warning. It's a great idea. And in fact, in our atresia prevention work right now, we're just about to embark on a four country tour for about five weeks, four or five countries actually, to really look at, we're calling it risk forecasting to slightly nuance the difference between early warning to say that we're trying to catch is the, we wanna respond to the risk, not to the crisis. And we see things like in South Sudan where there are actually specific indicators of risk, sparks before the fire, so to speak, and try to figure out how we can operate on a platform, as you said, to act earlier. It's a great idea. For us, at least, and I didn't see that it reflected that in the slides, we waited until after the process was done to circle around our North Star and our Near Star. And so we do wait till the process is over and we really try during both the map development and then once the map is draft, we then go back out to a bunch of folks, some that we talked to the first time around, some that we didn't, and test our assumptions. And we really try to get people in there that might be prone to disagree with us. Sometimes we take suggestions and feedback and sometimes we can't because you have to have some confining principles for this map or else it would just be too expansive. And we've had to change the level of, tweak the level of zoom multiple times, but I do think that you have to wait till you're done with the mapping to get to that point. I also do think in reflection of taking the map and its applicability out to the folks that will be using it, either grantees or people that are working in politics or on the ground delivering aid, I think one of the challenges of the field is one of communication. And we saw a great three-minute video that is incredibly useful for thoughtful people like yourself who know a little bit, most of you, about systems thinking and really helps sort of provide a good synopsis of what it is and how it's powerful. I think we need to try to think in organizations that are dealing with very discreet communities how to even abstract it a little bit further and talk about why it's relevant to their work and why it might be useful in their particular field. I think communications to folks that don't really need to necessarily know about systems thinking, but need to know why they're trying to solve this problem in a different way is really useful and important. And I think those were the questions that I wanted to answer, so. That's a good place to end. Great, I think that is a great place to end. Rob is gonna provide one or two final points for us. And after he does, we will conclude. So one of the things that we're producing is a mapping of systems practice workbook. And so this is a couple of pages from that. Follows the outline that I presented earlier. It is, we're working with a design firm that has made us articulate what they call the peanut butter and jelly standard, which is we have to simplify this as if we were talking someone through making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. It's like open the peanut butter, pick up the knife. So it's trying to be very operational for folks. I think it's not quite gonna be, pick it up and do it. I think you still need someone who's probably been through this process before to help you. So in terms of resources, that's an email address. You can email, if you'd like to be connected to the work that we're doing, if you'd like the resources that we're producing or the video that we showed, please let us know that. Just email systems.omdrgroup.com. So that's the address for Kumu, which is a systems mapping platform. Also, if you Google Democracy Fund, Democracy Fund has published two of their systems maps with really great narratives that help walk you through the map when you can see their map. So if you just wanted to get a little more detail on what a map would look like. I also want to, we have a networking hour, half hour coming up after this session. So we've got our panel here, but I also want to rat out other members of Democracy Fund and Humanity United that are here. So if you're from Democracy Fund, can you raise your hands? So Tom is in the back. We've got several people, Denata, Natalie, Chris, in that row, Bill Patapatuk here. Tom is also with the outward, on the board of the outward bound Center for Peace Building. Is that correct Tom? Got it, right? And then Humanity United folks, where are you? Mary, where's Steven around? He was here, Amy's here. These are folks you should pigeonhole if you want to find out more. If you need immediate help, MSP students. So students that have been to the program that I helped co-found at Milwaukee, raise your hands if you're looking for employment. No. But I also want to thank another person in the, I think she's still here, is Jalili here? Jalili Kohler's right here. So Jalili Kohler has been funding the work that the program that we have in Milwaukee and funded a lot of my work. And without whom, I wouldn't have put written the things that caught the attention of the mid-yard group that led to me coming to them, that led to these people being here and this work. So I also want to thank Jalili and her vision for making all this happen. Thank you, and please join me in thanking our illustrative panel. We really appreciate all of their insights. Thank you.