Mami Yoda and Tomohide Mizuuchi
The inquiry and analysis phase in systemic design has long prioritised cognitive understanding of system structure through tools such as causal loop diagrams and gigamaps. Yet these tools are limited in their capacity to address the emotional and somatic dimensions of how actors experientially inhabit a system. This paper reports an experiment in which improvised roleplay was introduced into the ‘listening to and understanding the system’ phase of the systemic design process as outlined by Jones and van Ael (2022). The specific method introduced is the Systems Awareness (SA) roleplay developed by Yokoyama. SA integrates Mindell’s process-oriented psychology with systems thinking, enabling participants to embody the roles within a system and sense its relational dynamics from within. The experiment was conducted on 8 May 2026 in a workshop of approximately 96 minutes involving four university students. The topic—a part-time job situation (handling customer complaints) chosen as a context in which participants felt ‘unable to be themselves’—served as the basis for two sequential phases: (a) dialogue-based iceberg model construction, and (b) embodied exploration through roleplay.
The roleplay surfaced several elements that had not been articulated through dialogue alone: a somatic response of ‘freezing up’ when facing a complaint; an inability to intervene due to fear of becoming collateral damage; a chain of responsibility deflection; and a pattern of voluntary withdrawal from the organisation. That a participant spontaneously expressed a desire to revisit and update the iceberg model following the roleplay indicates that embodied inquiry can contribute to a deepened structural understanding.
Whereas prior work (Hay et al., 2024; van Amstel, 2023) employs theatrical methods to facilitate transformation or critical practice, this experiment is distinctive in introducing roleplay in the early inquiry phase, with all participants performing multiple roles themselves, and in demonstrating the effect of voluntary analytical tool revision. Acknowledging the experiment’s limitations as a small-scale experiment with a homogeneous participant pool, this paper presents both the potential value that embodied methods can add to the inquiry process in systemic design and the questions remaining for future investigation.
Keywords: Systemic design, embodied methods, roleplay, iceberg model, systems sensing, impro, action research