Stirring the Sediment: The material practices of systemic design

ARC25 SIGHTLINES | Anthology of Reflexive Contributors

Exploring the materiality of systemic design practice in organisations

Systemic design has the potential to help organisations more effectively deal with complexity. However, some perceive its primary value to be in the production of system maps or gigamaps. Although system maps are valuable at communicating a complex context, these are not the sum total of systemic design outcomes. What matters is what they do to people. Focusing on these visual outputs as an end in themselves can overlook this fundamentally relational practice’s potential to create real and sustainable organisational and behavioural change.

System mapping helps to articulate complexity in organisations and their contexts. The materiality of a map creates the opportunity to make sense of something intangible, create engagement and locate conversations and opportunities for change. Such activities generate strategic insights and provide relevant data points to articulate an organisation’s strategic choices. The participatory engagement of stakeholders in designing system maps and understanding systems is crucial to highlight. This is because complexity is a relational phenomenon as much as it is about colliding forces that shape the environments we live and work in. This relational complexity unfolds between people within the organisation and other stakeholders involved in the work, and there is nothing predictable about those interactions.

Further, the materials used in organisational activities, for example, protocols, contribute to this relational aspect of complexity. Systems and organisations are socio-material as they are brought to life by the words, physical environments, and materials that form a culture created to organise people. Material objects have agency as part of this social context, but they do not control it. For example, in practice, protocols may not be followed as written; their application is heavily influenced by the relational dynamics and tacit knowledge that is formed over time and contextually situated. Therefore, despite the intention to create boundaries to better control, manage and measure organisation activities, the material components often designed to reduce complexity are not the territory itself.

Material things are part of, and shape organisational systems

Strategic management approaches tend to overlook the significance of social processes in organisations by focusing on metrics and economic rationality to support decision-making (Awati & Nikolova, 2022; Mowles, 2017). So if mainstream “rational” management approaches are overlooking the relational complexities in management life, then what approaches may complement them?

Systemic design is intrinsically human in the search to address human needs and their relationships to the problem space. Seeing organisations as socio-material systems implies understanding the relational aspects of navigating change, where material and social elements influence each other. Therefore, the “shape” we are forming is not a static physical form or tangible object, making it challenging to align with the common definition of materiality.

Judith Butler, a philosopher and scholar of gender studies, conceptualises materiality as an ongoing construction emerging from the repetition of discursive practices (Butler, 1993). In our context, discursive practices refer to the social element of organisations; it’s the sum of behaviours and interpretative practices. Once these behaviours happen time and time again, they become normative and give “shape” to a system. The same interpretation can be found in pragmatist philosophy, for example, that of Bruno Latour’s description in Science in Action, defining that once things hold between the social and material worlds, they become “true” (Latour, 1987). This idea of materiality as an ongoing repetition of behaviours aligns with the concept of social-material systems; however, its theoretical construct requires deconstruction to become more accessible and relatable in practical terms.

Inspired by last year’s RSD theme, Rivers of Conversations, referring to the interdisciplinary nature of systemic design as uniting flows, I considered that the river, as a natural system, offers an easy-to-grasp perspective to explore the definition of materiality and systemic outcomes, to explain the power of systemic design in practice, and to explain its strategic potential to support organisational change and fluxes in navigating complexity.

Riverbeds and flow as a metaphor for the material and social sides of organisations navigating complexity

A riverbed is the channel bottom where sediments are deposited, eroded, and transported by the river’s current (Figures 1 & 2). The riverbed’s features are the material: shaped by a constant interaction between the sediments, and the water current moving downstream. The materiality of a riverbed is ever evolving as it forms, shifts and reforms, co-dependent on the stream flows, the river’s inhabitants and its broader environment. When the current changes, so does the river bed, and when the bed changes, it influences the current into new behaviours in a reinforcing loop of adaptation (Figure 3).

In this system, nothing rests; the river takes one form at a moment in time, as a product of all the forces at play. The next moment, it is shaped again. The Greek philosopher Heraclitus theorised that stepping into the river changes the river’s shape to the extent that one could never walk in the same river twice (Plutarch & Babbitt, 1936). For the feminist theorist and physicist Karen Barad and her agential realism, one’s observation is already a step in the river, because the observer’s presence is inevitably influencing the system (Orlikowski & Scott, 2015). When working with organisations, our presence as designers, through investigative processes like interviews and workshops, is already an active intervention. One observes, problematises, ideates, tests, and produces artefacts, whether it is physical (system maps) or not (social engagement). Systemic design practices ever so slightly intervene in the river on both sides the material (riverbed), and social (flows). They co-evolve from their mutual disruption and create a new form of the system (Figure 4).

‍Systemic design focuses on this interaction between the water and the riverbed, through iterative intervention and observation. Each learning loop is an interaction that changes the flow, or changes the riverbed. By meticulously stirring the surface on targeted points, it allows us to lift the sediment, aerating the floor in depth to explore the riverbed deeper, to make room for new elements, and to create movement for change. This process of moving targeted elements around creates a long-term shift in the river channel (Figure 5)‍.

In more tangible terms, systemic designers are influencing organisations through long-lasting behavioural shifts, by simultaneously inducing early interventions and social engagement, while building an understanding of the organisation. While we focus on the riverbed, we also know that the broader ecosystem can also affect the flows and currents. Organisations face the same challenges, and the internal systems are also heavily influenced by external factors and challenges, which can change the course.

For us at Snowmelt, we see the powerful role of the material to shape the social and vice versa. To hold or shift the patterns of organisational systems. We continue to reflect on our work, case by case, to better understand the system dynamics and organisational conditions that shape practice, much like the environment and conditions that shape a river’s formation and reformation. We will excitedly share our insights during the RSD14 to support effective work with client partners in the systemic design community.