systems practitioner

How my systems practice and my hobby follow a similar path

/ Pauline Roberts / Leave a comment

I am not a professional photographer, not by a long way, but it is my hobby and I thoroughly enjoy it.

It struck me how my hobby and my systems practice take similar paths. When I started out with photography I bought a good all round lens. One that would do macro photography and distance and in particular I wanted to photograph birds. Nearly 20 years on I still use that trusty lens. I know it inside out. I know how it performs. I know when to push it and when not to. It almost becomes a part of me as I scan the landscape for an interesting framing. It was a long time before I would move on from that lens and that was purposeful. I wanted to make sure I could master every setting it had to offer. I didn’t just want to use the easy, pre programmed settings but I wanted to savour everything it had to give. To understand it in depth. I had done the same in the past with a basic bridge camera, mastering it by continuously tinkering until I knew it inside and out. I was not frightened of getting things wrong. When they did go wrong I tried again until I got a result I liked. I never viewed it as failure, just learning and I loved the learning process. Getting a bad picture was just as satisfying because it taught me something else about me, the camera and how we operated together. It was exciting if things went wrong because it taught me what not to do next time.

Taken with a humble bridge camera in 2007-2008

My systems practice is the same and I use the same tactic when I train others: master the basics. Master them until you know them inside out. Learn when systems concepts and ideas are applicable and when they are not. Learn what they look like and feel like when they show up in public services or in a community setting. It takes years to master such concepts. I mean to really master them. If someone comes along and tells you they have mastered them in great depth only a few years, I would say that they probably haven’t mastered them at all. I started formal education in systems thinking in 2006. Today, in 2025 I still remind myself to go back to the basics and gain greater mastery of them.

My ethos when training and educating others is to encourage people to gain the best insights about the basics of systems thinking that you can and never stop learning. True application isn’t about using someone else’s approach but understanding the basics and developing your own approach, relevant to your own context. If you do use someone else’s approach, you can guarantee that you won’t get as much value from it without a strong understanding of basic systems thinking concepts and ideas.

Nowadays, my focus is on encouraging others on a path to deeply embodying systems thinking.

It is just like my photography – on an journey of deep and enjoyable learning.

Protecting your innovative work

/ Pauline Roberts / 3 Comments
Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay

As a systems thinking practitioner who has developed original ideas and work, the notion of Intellectual Property (IP) has often been at the forefront of my mind. I have fallen down some ‘holes’ in the past where I have overshared work and am now suffering the consequences. I have, however, been savvy enough to register my work with UK copyright services at multiple stages of its development. For example, the development of Creating the Conditions for Change© was registered right back from when it was in the early stages of ‘Situation problem structuring using a blended systems thinking approach’. This includes the development of my systemic inquiry framework, which is the most downloaded document from my website, closely followed by the Creating the Conditions for Change© booklet and Creating the Conditions for Change© progress update booklet. My narratives are registered, as are my diagrams and my workshop designs. A wise person, back in 2016 when I started my business, told me to log them at various stages of development to demonstrate how the work has progressed, which I did.

I would like to give newer practitioners some advice about protecting your own original ideas and work. You are surrounded by people who can benefit from your ideas, so you need to be as savvy as them about the value your work holds.

A useful blog

Firstly, I would recommend this blog by Professor Inger Mewburn (2022) that I have recently come across. It is about PhD students, but the precautions are somewhat relevant to systems practitioners creating original work/ ideas: https://thesiswhisperer.com/2022/04/05/defending-the-originality-of-your-phd-research/

Originality

As a practitioner, it is entirely feasible for you to independently create original work. In the world of academia, people would be worried about someone taking the ideas and publishing them first, therefore taking away the claim of originality. As a practitioner, you must also consider this. Practitioners are generally not affiliated with a university. Therefore, publishing your ideas is more difficult, particularly if you want them to be open access. This can have huge costs which render this option not feasible. Therefore, it is entirely possible for you to create original work and ideas, share them (because you want people to benefit from them) and then someone write up a version of them academically. The barrier to writing up officially for practitioners is something I had not contemplated when I first started out, so this is something practitioners should be aware of.

Sharing your ideas

So, does this mean that we should not share our ideas? No, it doesn’t mean that. It just means that you need to be careful if you want to protect your work. As stated in the blog above, ‘You can’t protect an idea under copyright law – you can only protect a form it takes’ (Mewburn, 2022). Even if you write your idea down, it doesn’t stop others from taking it and running with it themselves, but it can help you to evidence copying if you need to do that at any stage.

What if you want to take your ideas into an academic context – i.e. a doctorate?

As stated in the blog, if you have over shared, it would be difficult to then shift your work into a more formal academic form (i.e. a peer reviewed journal) (Mewburn, 2022). As a practitioner, if you do not immediately go down an academic route, prepare to have your ideas used and written up by anyone. Of course, we can choose to share our work openly and ask people to develop our ideas but there is one precaution – many practitioners have asked me about becoming a consultant, as I have. To do this, it is your original ideas that give you your unique selling point. You have to market them but once you have, they are open for anyone to run with. The answer – do not over share. Give only that which is required to spark interest and keep the more developed things to yourself if you aim to use them in consultancy or if you want your ideas recognised. In the past, I have ‘thought out loud’ far too often because I did not know the pitfalls.. Yes, you are stuck in a bind: you want your work to be recognised, so you share, and then you risk losing control of it. Make your choices wisely.

Collaborating with others

Again, as the blog states, in academia there are rules around collaboration so that the creator of the work is recognised as such (Mewburn, 2022). As practitioners, we have no such protection. One of the ways people can be exposed to your work is by claiming to want to collaborate with you (or they want you to do a talk about your work). Once you have let your ideas out, your competitive advantage disappears, especially if others have larger work networks than you. My advice to practitioners is to ‘beware the love bombers!’. When you are a new practitioner, you want to be seen, so are likely to be more willing to fall for the requests for collaboration or for talks and sharing. If you share, do so wisely. Not everyone is your friend.

Summary

This is the start of work I am doing to bring awareness to systems thinking practitioners about the pitfalls of creating original ideas and work. I have made the mistakes so that you do not have to. In short:

  • Write you work up. I took my blogs and turned them into a self-published book to secure my ideas into one place.
  • If you think you want to make money from your ideas, copyright them. In reality, it is unlikely to stop others taking them but it does give you an evidence trail if you should ever need it.
  • Don’t over share. If it is valuable, be wise about who you share it with.
  • If you think you might want to go down an academic route, do so sooner rather than later. Learn about the idea of ‘original work’ and take any precautions you might need to take.
  • Beware of collaborations where the power dynamic is imbalanced. If you cannot keep control of how your own work is used in the collaboration, then the power dynamic is imbalanced.

Systems thinking practitioners can be leaders in the field but we need to be savvy about the pitfalls that can harm us.

Reference

Mewburn, I (2022) ‘How to stop your ideas from being ‘stolen’’ Available at: https://thesiswhisperer.com/2022/04/05/defending-the-originality-of-your-phd-research/ (Accessed 18/01/25)

The introverted systems thinker

/ Pauline Roberts / 1 Comment

It’s Sunday morning and I’m in my favourite place – my office. It’s warm and cosy. I’m surrounded by personal artefacts that have great meaning. I have plants and ambient lighting. I have a window and I can see trees and bushes and I can hear the birds on my roof. I have my books and my notepads and pens. I have music and my computer and I am doing the things that give me most joy (alongside swimming, which is my other love) – reading, learning and writing. My creative brain is alive and the possibilities endless.

I have just watched a TED talk by Susan Cain (2012) on the power of introverts and my heart came alive at the words, ‘put yourself in the zone of stimulation that works for you’. This……this place and this time is my place of stimulation and I love it. I love my solitude where I can think and contemplate and create.

But I am also a little frustrated. I am frustrated because consistently and persistently people tell me to ‘go out more’ ‘do more’ ‘be with people more’. But these things do not bring me pleasure. I usually just spend my time looking at the time, wondering when I can escape. I’m not shy, I don’t fear social judgement. Nor am I antisocial. I don’t hate people and there is nothing wrong with me. I just prefer my own zone of stimulation – my comfortable places where I can quietly contemplate.

I am often expected by others to be loud, prominent, be the talker in the room and yes, at times, I have to be this person to be able to do my work. This is not, however, my zone of comfort. As a systems thinker, I am cognizant of embracing multiple perspectives. So, who is considering my perspective? Who is allowing the more introverted systems thinkers to shine? Who is asking them what they think? Not many, I can tell you. Instead the masses prefer those with a charismatic personality, the talkers who seem to be taking action. But action without contemplation, as Cain (2012) tells us is not always the best way and those with the biggest voices are not generally those who get the best result.

So what happens when an introvert creates something exciting or gets big results? Disbelief, that’s what. People didn’t see where it came from, so they can’t believe it. Sadly, this is a common thing to see in workplaces. The challenge I put forward today is, who is listening to the introverted systems thinkers? Who is appreciating their creativity and who is inviting them in, in a way that works for them, rather than it only working for you? Imagine how much you are missing if you don’t create the right conditions for a more diverse group of thinkers, whose creativity emerges in different ways.

Reference Cain, S. (2012) The power of introverts Available at: https://www.ted.com/talks/susan_cain_the_power_of_introverts?subtitle=en

Systems thinking practitioners – who are they?

/ Pauline Roberts / 4 Comments

Video link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gvsoS5Paduk

I’ve been liaising with a number of systems thinking practitioners lately who are new to the field or may still be going through their training. Many are keen to know what it’s really like to be a systems thinking practitioner. It isn’t a well-known profession, although there have been systems thinkers in existence probably for the whole of history. It isn’t a well-known profession because in the past it hasn’t been classed as a profession. Putting the debate about whether or not it should be a profession to one side (I will leave that for another day) I can tell about the context of my work and that of other practitioners I know.

Firstly, I should say that the definition and context of our work is very wide and varied. We might be someone who works in an organisation, doesn’t have ‘systems thinking practitioner’ in their official title but uses systems thinking in their work and has embedded systems thinking habits into their own way of being. We might be a scholar, someone with or working towards a Doctorate, who studies and/ or practices systems thinking. We might be an academic who teaches systems thinking. We might be one of the few who have a job title that states ‘systems thinking practitioner’. We might be someone working on systems change who clearly works in a systems thinking informed way but doesn’t hold a formal title of systems thinking practitioner. We might be a consultant who has a qualification in systems thinking. We might be a bit of all of these things. Generally, though, a systems thinking practitioner, who works professionally as such, is both qualified (often to postgraduate level) and experienced in the field.

And how do we carry out or work? Well, this too is very wide and varied. I’ve heard a lot of systems thinking practitioners in training or those aspiring to be systems thinking practitioners in the future believe that we’re given special projects to do. That they’re labelled as systems thinking, have a beginning and end and we are given the time and space to enact them as we see fit. This might be true sometimes but generally, the reality can be quite different. This is especially the case if we work as an employee in an organisation and we don’t have ‘systems thinking’ in the title of our job (and most people don’t).  The reality is that we might work on several overlapping projects or programmes at the same time. We might be quickly moved around from project to project. We might start something and never get to finish it because the context has changed or because the actual change takes many years. We might be moved from department to department, from site to site from organisation to organisation. Just because you don’t have a separate systems thinking project, with a flag sticking in the top of it saying ‘systems thinking’, it doesn’t mean you’re not a systems thinking practitioner. I have tutored hundreds of people who have gained the MSc in systems thinking in practice who are now systems thinking practitioners but who have never had ‘systems thinking’ or ‘systems thinker’ in their official work title.

Usually a practitioner’s work is messy, boundaries change. We’re pulled in many different directions and at the same time. We might have to contend with a very frantic day to day operational management situation or a situation of high risk or anything where we have to give focused and targeted attention to something.  Our systems thinking comes into play if and when the time is right. Then, we might take one bit of one approach, apply it, swiftly move on, apply something else. That’s part of our skill – to know what’s useful and when.

We might have to compromise around how we use our systems thinking to flex to the developing situation. Our practice is all different and might play out in very different ways. Of course, some people are asked to do specific systems thinking orientated projects or pieces of work but in my experience these happen far less frequently than the day-to-day application of systems thinking in an organisation that you might do as part of any job.

Remember, systems thinking is not an exclusive club. Anyone trying to make it such a thing are probably working towards their own self-promoting goals.  Yes, there are qualifications that can give you the validation of your practice and these should be considered when hiring a systems thinking practitioner for a specific professional role. However, systems thinking is for everyone. It is a way of thinking that can be adopted by anyone who has the curiosity and determination to consider another way of thinking about complex situations.

Don’t be put off if you don’t have a specific ‘systems thinking’ titled project or piece of work. If you have the qualification and you can put systems thinking into practice, then you are in the same place as a lot of other practitioners. They key thing is to make it count. Apply systems thinking well and make a difference.

…and never give up.

What value can a systems thinking practitioner bring to your workplace?

/ Pauline Roberts / Leave a comment

Provided that the systems thinking practitioner has been appropriately trained and/ or educated in the field and has a degree of experiential learning, the value they bring to your workplace can be significant.

That value can be threefold

  1. Value in helping you move towards your goal. They get stuff done.
  2. Value generated in the way the systems thinking practitioner works with you. Their perspective and ways of thinking can open up value you never expected and take you to places you never contemplated.
  3. Value for each individual and value generated in the relationships that are formed. Their thinking, the framings they use and the perspective they engage with generates value for them and for you. It also generates value in forming relationships as they reveal their authentic selves and encourage others to do the same.

Part of that value is in supporting you to achieve triple loop learning, ensuring that you consider efficacy, efficiency and effectiveness.

Single loop learning

Single loop learning is linked to efficacy and efficiency – this is where they help you to get things done. But, how do you know you are doing the right things?

Double loop learning

Double loop learning is linked to effectiveness. Systems thinking practitioners have a keen focus on effectiveness, so that you are not just achieving something, you have a greater chance of achieving the right thing. Systems thinking practitioners, however, go even further than this.

Triple loop learning

They help you to enter into triple loop learning. They are skilled in considering why you believe it to be the right thing. They question motivations, judgements and legitimacy and bring in a variety of perspectives to challenge mindsets, framings and decision making.

Despite popular belief, systems thinking practitioners are not all business consultants with fancy approaches and buzz words for you to jump on board with. Many are members of staff, working in organisations, often going largely unrecognised.

Systems thinking is a way of thinking about situations. It is the way of thinking that generates the value.