Theories of Change are one of the fundamental tools of changemakers and program evaluation (Mackinnon, 2006). However, when addressing wicked problems (Rittel & Webber, 1973), theories of change are too reductive and linear to properly account for the systemic phenomena, structures, and dynamics that perpetuate the issues we’re trying to address (Murphy & Jones, 2020).

Theories of Systemic Change and Action (ToSCA) are a systemic design tool that combine theories of change with systemic understanding. The result is a theory of change that is useful for understanding, communicating, and evaluating systemic change projects.

Here’s a rough guide to develop a ToSCA:

1. Model the system (e.g., with causal loop diagrams; Kim, 1992).
2. Develop systemic strategies from the model.
3. Reorganize the modelled phenomena. From left to right:
   1. Capability building and resource mobilization for the initiative (Inputs)
   2. Inteventional activities the initiative will take on (Activities)
   3. Immediate outputs of those activities (Outputs)
   4. Results of those outputs on the overall system (Outcomes)
   5. Downstream effects of those outcomes on higher-system structures (Impacts)
4. Reiterate on step 3 as necessary.

The resulting diagram will look somewhat like an iceberg model (Stroh, 2015, p. 46] on its side: visible events and behaviour are on the left, while the actual patterns and structures in the system fall to the right.

The ToSCA can then be simplified as necessary to suit different needs. For instance, if presenting the model briefly to a potential funder, you may want to collapse major feedback loops into one element on the model with a “loop” icon. This way you can still show inputs and outputs on that loop while obscuring the complexity within it for the purposes of the presentation.

Systemic evaluation is the developmental evaluation (Guijt et al., 2012) of systemic change.

Techniques for systemic evaluation combine conventional principles and tools of developmental evaluation with concepts from systemic design. These techniques provide changemakers with the ability to assess the accuracy and completeness of their theories of systemic change and action (Murphy & Jones, 2020). They also allow evaluators to examine the progress of systemic strategies (Murphy et al., 2021).

We seek leverage to find the best ways of making change.

Leverage points are places in systems where a little effort yields a big effect (Meadows, 1997). They are also ideas that help us grab on to strategic ways forward when we’re working in complexity (Klein & Wolf, 1998).

Acting on leverage points may accelerate systemic change towards progress and reform, but acting on the wrong ones may instead accelerate systemic change towards regression and deformity. Well-designed leverage strategies may be catalyzing or even transformative, but poorly designed ones may merely be futile (figure 1).

One way of finding leverage points is to think through your system with reference to Meadows’s (1997) 12 types:

Table 1. Twelve types of leverage points, in order of increasing power (adapted from Meadows, 1997).

Another approach, which may be complementary to the above, is to model the system as a causal loop diagram (e.g., Kim, 1992) and then to conduct leverage analysis (Murphy & Jones, 2020) on the model.

An understanding of leverage in a system allows us to generate systemic strategies (Murphy & Jones, 2020). These strategies can also be adapted into Theories of Systemic Change (Murphy & Jones, 2020).

Donella Meadows (1997) popularized the idea of leverage in systemic change with her essay “Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in Complex Systems.” She proposed a typology of phenomena in a system, suggesting that acting on certain types of phenomena are higher-leverage than others.

In an article published in the Contexts journal of systemic design, I challenged Meadows’s (1997) paradigm, proposing a few other possible ways of viewing leverage. My aim was to link the search for leverage directly to the design of powerful strategies for systemic change, and to propose a few ways forward in advancing our understanding of leverage in complex systems.

• Leverage analysis in systemic design
• 𖠫 Towards Systemic Theories of Change- High-Leverage Strategies for Managing Wicked Problems - Murphy, Jones - 2021

The map represents your current mental model of how this system works.

Leverage analysis examines the patterns of connection between phenomena (using algorithms adapted from social network analysis and graph theory) in order to present relative rankings of the phenomena of the system.

These rankings are entirely dependent on the structure of the map. All phenomena are equal, and all connections are equal. It is theoretically possible to encode the degrees to which one phenomena influences another in strict mathematical terms and formulae. In turn, we could represent the map as a systems dynamics model and use it to simulate the behaviour of the system. However, this is usually impractical, especially with imprecisely-understood or hard-to-quantify concepts (e.g., what exactly is the rate of change in wildlife due to climate change, or how exactly does culture influence conspicuous consumption?)

For this reason, using leverage analysis is a fuzzy procedure. It depends on your intuition. Fortunately, the goal of leverage analysis is not to inductively estimate how the system will change, nor deductively falsify hypotheses about the system. Instead, using leverage analysis for strategic planning involves abductive logic: the generation of creative, useful conclusions from a set of observations.

The goal here is to look at the model as it is rendered and to think creatively about strategic opportunities. Broadly, this means asking several questions:

• “What is missing?”
  • If some major gap in the logic of the model is missing, it means that the associated phenomena haven’t been adequately discussed in this process. Why is that? What might it mean for strategic planning?
• “What must be true?”
  • If this is how the system currently works, what must be true about how it should work?
• “Where do we work?”
  • Based on your organization’s strategic capabilities and advantages, what phenomena do you hold influence over? How do the effects you have on the system relate to these phenomena?
• “What do we aim to influence?”
  • In other words, what phenomena do you really want to change? In what way should they change?

These questions can be answered via the following process.

The systems map represents a kind of high-complexity theory of change: it describes how all of these phenomena interlock and respond to one another. We can therefore use leverage analysis to weave systemic theories of action:

1. Identify the goal phenomena. What do we want to influence? What’s the ultimate impact we aim to have?
2. Identify the opportunities within our control. What phenomena are we already influencing? What could we be influencing without developing a lot of new capacity?
3. “Walk” the paths on the map between your chosen opportunities, any possible high-leverage phenomena, and your goals. As you do:
   1. Identify any key strategic options along the path. What kinds of activities or programs could you engage in to influence these phenomena in the right way?
   2. Identify any feedback loops. How do these paths grow, shrink, or maintain balance over time?

The chains of phenomena (and any loops they connect with) that result from the three steps above are the seeds of systemic strategy. Use them to identify key intervention points for programming (e.g., how might you take advantage of high-leverage phenomena? how might you address bottlenecks?), signals for monitoring and evaluation, and to communicate your theory of change/theory of action to others.

Systemic strategies use system phenomena, structure, and dynamics to help changemakers achieve their goals. These goals may simply be some specific outcome or objective, or they may include systemic change.

One approach to designing systemic strategies is:

1. map the system
2. analyze the system for features of leverage, possibly using leverage analysis
3. identify any “goal” phenomena: the events or behaviours you seek to change
4. identify any “intervention” phenomena: things you have direct influence over
5. “walk” from the the interventions to your goals to identify a theory of change, incorporating the features of leverage you find along the way

Each pathway you walk forms a strategy tree.

Are there other interventions that lead to the same goal? These are different roots for the same overall strategy.

Strategy trees can be combined into a strategy “forest”. A strategy forest is a collection of paths from interventions to goals in the system. Strategy forests can be assessed for different qualities to gauge which strategies an initiative should pursue.

1. Different strategies that share common interventions may be the easiest to invest in and implement.
2. Combinations of strategies that are the self-perpetuating (e.g., that contain feedback loops that will innately drive their success) may be more valuable to pursue.
3. These forests can also be tested (e.g., with wind-tunneling; Van der Heijden, 1997, p. 23) to identify the best combinations of strategies to follow.

Once strategies have been selected, identify the capabilities or resources that need to be invested in/mobilized in order to effectively target the chosen interventions, and set up systemic evaluation processes to continually test the completeness and accuracy of your strategic theories and to assess progress towards achieving the strategies’ goals.

Similar to Notes/A Shortcut for quickly and easily opening published notes in Obsidian, this macro makes it easy to jump from viewing a published note on the web to editing it in Obsidian.

Don’t forget to switch Mainframe to your vault’s name!

Download the macro here.

I have it tied to a Stream Deck button, but you can configure it to trigger however you’d like.

See a screenshot of the macro

I had originally designed these shortcuts to make it easier to get Markdown tables into and then out of classic spreadsheet apps (e.g., Excel/Numbers).

However, I recently learned (that link’ll only work if you’re in the Obsidian Discord server) that this song and dance is unnecessary.

Convert the Markdown table to HTML (e.g., view it in Reading or Preview mode in the app of your choice), select it and copy it, then paste it into your spreadsheet. Presto! When you’re done editing, copy the rows and columns in the spreadsheet and paste it back into your markdown editor (at least, this works in Obsidian and it’ll paste as a markdown table.

I’m leaving the Shortcuts here in case they’re still helpful for some reason. Maybe someday I’ll adapt them to be able to copy certain formatting (e.g., highlighting) back and forth.

Note: these don’t work on iOS. ☹️

• Spreadsheet to Markdown Table
• Markdown Table to Spreadsheet

• Adapt Viticci’s 2014 shortcut to automatically generate header rows
• Create a shortcut to generate actual tables paste-able into Numbers/Sheets/Excel from markdown tables
• Test the shortcuts more on iOS

I presented a follow-up to Leverage is Fractal, Relative, and what else? We need a theory of leverage in systemic design at Systems Thinking Ontario in mid-November: https://wiki.st-on.org/2022-11-14

To design for leverage is to identify the most powerful opportunities for innovation in systems change. In this talk, I presented a brief history on the origins of leverage theory — especially Donella Meadows’s “Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System” — and covered recent developments in designing for leverage. Then, I outlined some challenges to our current understanding of leverage, calling for a modern theory of leverage in systemic design. I concluded with some ideas on what might be addressed by such a theory.

Here’s the slides!

The discussion following the talk was exhiliarating and so productive. You can watch the talk and the discussion on Youtube.

If you publish your notes to the web in any way and you are on iOS/macOS, here’s a simple shortcut that lets you quickly and easily open a note from your website in Obsidian:

https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/da4da1d4409e4dff9183b70ce6d56558

See the shortcut in action

This Keyboard Maestro macro demonstrates how to insert text into a specific section in Markdown.

The core idea is simply to replace a heading with the heading plus the new content and some new lines in between.

Download the macro here.

The Popclip Extension below makes highlighting selected text quick and easy in both PDF Expert and DEVONthink. (If you use something else to review PDFs, it should be trivial to edit the script to use that application and its menu items instead.)

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# PopClip Highlight
name: Highlight
required apps: [com.devon-technologies.think3, com.readdle.PDFExpert-Mac]
icon: symbol:highlighter
applescript: | # pipe character begins a multi-line string
  tell application "System Events"
    set frontApp to first application process whose frontmost is true
    set frontAppName to name of frontApp as string
    if frontAppName contains "PDF Expert" then
      tell application "System Events"
        tell application process "PDF Expert"
          click menu item "Highlight" of menu of menu bar item "Annotate" of menu bar 1
        end tell
      end tell
    else if frontAppName contains "DEVONthink 3" then
      tell application "System Events"
        tell application process "DEVONthink 3"
          click menu item "Highlight" of menu of menu bar item "Format" of menu bar 1
        end tell
      end tell
    end if
  end tell Popclip Extension for highlighting in DEVONthink and PDF Expert
  

• Develop a list of needs and options
  • This ended up being quite an involved process. The options are recursive… everything is about $5/month and seems to work basically the same until I actually start using it. Trouble is, using these things without knowing the gaps might mean painful and troublesome switching around later on.
• Try hosting on Render
  • Didn’t work. Render can’t easily install “apps” like Quartz. Same will go for Netlify/etc — any host that uses GitHub Pages will not be a full server, and so I won’t necessarily have full control over what I can install.
• Try hosting on Linode
  • Notes/△ Set up Quartz on a VPS