Towards Systemic Theories of Change: High-Leverage Strategies for Managing Wicked Problems

Design and design management are increasingly called to respond to the world’s complex, dynamic problems. Yet, no standards or methodology exists to help designers understand, model, and design solutions for complex wicked problems. Program theory and social innovation promote the use of theory of change models to develop linear pathways of outcomes to show how a change initiative will have its desired effects. However, critics of these models accuse them of being simplistic and reductively linear. Systems thinking models use influence maps and causal loop diagrams to create maps of systems that show their behaviour in their full, dynamic complexity. However, these diagrams are sometimes complicated, overwhelming to read and therefore impractical. In this paper, we combine these tools with a novel technique from systemic design called “leverage analysis” to help identify crucial features of a complex problem and help designers develop practical theories of systemic change.