boundaries Archives

A recent trip to baseball’s legendary Fenway Park provided the ideal example of understanding systems and how they can create public health problems like obesity through structural means. Being aware of these systems, their boundaries, and their activities can help us better find the causes of individual activity by looking at what encourages behaviour not just what people do.

design innovation systems thinking

Wet and Dry Design for Social Innovation

May 28, 2012May 28, 2012 Cameron D. Norman 943 Viewsboundaries, change, change leadership, complex systems, complexity, design, design thinking, emergence, Facebook, innovation, leadership, learning, scale, self-organization, social innovation, social networks

Create systems that are too bounded (dry) and we risk sucking the moisture from the human elements (the wet) that make real social innovation happen. Our challenge is finding the right balance between the controlled, stable environments that these new technologies afford and the self-organized, emergent and innovative environments needed to implement and scale our initiatives more effectively.

systems thinking

Boundaries: The Food Example

June 8, 2011 Cameron D. Norman 1057 Viewsboundaries, complexity, food, food systems, systems thinking

Identifying boundaries and setting them in moving forward with modeling and planning is a critical step in systems thinking practice so much so that it may be time to consider seeing boundaries as a core skill or competency for work in complex systems.