Gerald Midgley
Esteemed scholar and systems thinker Gerald Midgley presents two RSD14 keynotes—one online and one in-person in Toronto—that reflect his extensive work on marginalisation and his recent development of a three-layered systems approach.
Tackling Marginalisation in Systemic Design
RSD14-RSDX ONLINE
Marginalisation can bias stakeholder engagement. Some people are not heard because their identities and what matters to them in the design context are derogated or derided by those with the power to marginalise them. Therefore, tackling marginalisation in the design process really matters. Otherwise, we may believe we are being open and participative when this is not really the case. We also need to tackle marginalisation in relation to what is being designed: i.e., we must avoid reproducing harmful marginalisations in our designs, which requires systemic awareness. There is a systems theory of marginalisation that can inform systemic design, and because it is specifically a systems theory, it enhances our systemic capabilities as designers. A set of intervention strategies, based on the theory, is available to prevent, tackle or mitigate marginalisation in design projects. These have been tested in a thirty-four-year research program, with many examples of practice to illustrate the theory and its relevance to systemic design.
Forthcoming book: Systems of Marginalization and Identity (Routledge, 2026)
Beyond Systemic Design Methodologies: Systems thinking as an everyday practice
RSD14-TORONTO
If we want systems thinking to be widely used, then it’s essential to make it both accessible to newcomers and useful for all discussion and decision-making contexts, not just formally constituted design projects. Two barriers stand in the way. First, our methodologies contain an initially bewildering variety of theories, techniques and terminologies, making their utility seem uncertain and the work involved in learning them look daunting. Second, increasingly intense and geographically dispersed working practices make it almost impossible to apply existing systems methodologies outside specially constituted design projects, so they are unsuitable for most situations. In this presentation, I show how both barriers can be tackled by a new, three-layered systems approach. The first layer offers an accessible story of systems thinking, bringing together the systems idea with contemporary science on embodied cognition. Layer two offers quickly learned skills that can be used in most discussion and decision-making contexts to help people rethink their individual and collective assumptions. The third layer is the methodologies and their methods, which remain a useful resource, together with a practice of embodied self-reflection that deepens the practitioner’s awareness of their own situated partiality. The utility of layer two gives people confidence that level three is worth learning. If we fail to offer an accessible, everyday practice, then nothing less than the future of systems thinking is at stake, as well as our ability to make design more systemic in an increasingly turbulent world.
Related Sightlines Article: Three Layers of Systems Thinking
PROFILE
Gerald Midgley
University of Hull | Birmingham Leadership Institute
Gerald Midgley is an Emeritus Professor in the Centre for Systems Studies at the University of Hull, UK. He is an independent consultant, and also holds Visiting Professorships at the Birmingham Leadership Institute, University of Birmingham (UK); the School of Cybernetics, College of Systems and Society, Australian National University; and the Department of Informatics, Linnaeus University (Sweden).
Gerald has held research leadership roles in academia and government, including fourteen years as Director of the Centre for Systems Studies at Hull and seven years as a Senior Science Leader in the Institute for Environmental Science and Research (ESR), New Zealand. He has written almost 400 papers for academics and practitioners on systems thinking, systemic leadership and community operational research, and has been involved in a wide variety of public policy, health service, natural resource management, community development and technology foresight projects. While most of these have been in the UK or New Zealand, he has also led or collaborated with systemic interventions on every continent worldwide.
Gerald was the 2013/14 President of the International Society for the Systems Sciences, and has written or edited twelve books, including Systemic Intervention: Philosophy, Methodology, and Practice (Kluwer, 2000); Systems Thinking, Volumes I-IV (Sage, 2003); Community Operational Research: OR and Systems Thinking for Community Development (Kluwer, 2004); The Handbook of Systems Thinking (Open Science, 2023); and Systems of Marginalization and Identity (Routledge, 2026, forthcoming).
