Systems Thinking from the Margins

Systems Thinking from the Margins is a way of seeing, understanding, and engaging with systems from the perspective of those agents (often people) who are marginalized by institutions and social structures. Systems are typically mapped from the perspective of agents in power. STftM is built on the particular understanding of agents on the fringes. It has developed at the intersection of our work on Systems of Care and the Polycene.

Led by CfC fellow Jon Soske, this work comes out of trying to understand how a certain set of actors — peer recovery specialists and community healthcare workers — negotiate institutional crisis. These seemingly marginal agents have learned a set of skills and resources — individually and as a community — to navigate the healthcare system by mapping it in their own terms and building improvisational networks to bridge gaps for the people they represent. This represents an alternate epistemology with access to information that is invisible when mapping the system from the perspective of power. We face a global institutional crisis and our ability to respond to this crisis as designers is hampered by the limitations of classic systems theory.

Looking at these strategies, do they teach us something fundamental about institutional design?

• Do they teach us lessons that we can then incorporate in our overall understanding of institutions to make them more prepared to deal with the polycrisis?
• How can this “non-expert” knowledge be made commensurate with “expert” knowledge when identifying opportunities for systemic improvement?
• Can we build an analytical framework to distill and apply insights that have appeared in feminist and postcolonial theory and represent one of the central contributions of critical disability studies?

These questions will drive the work forwards as an important strand in our Polycene research core.