Putting Systems Thinking into Practice Toolkit

A system is a set of interrelated elements that interact to achieve a purpose. A public transportation system, for example, may include various buses and trains that work together to get people around a city. When problem solving, we often focus on the individual elements of a system—if buses on a specific route are consistently running late, we might look closely at that bus route.

But systems thinking involves looking at the big picture, including the patterns, structures, and relationships that might contribute to a complex problem—for example, the traffic patterns on that bus route, the bus driver’s habits, and whether any connecting buses also experience delays. In taking a systems thinking approach, we’re often more likely to uncover real causes and identify effective solutions.

Systems thinking is most effective when there is a strong commitment to learning; a willingness to be open to seeing, doing, and thinking differently; and an openness to multiple perspectives, including those of TPP project participants, staff, partners, and other stakeholders.¹

When implementing systems thinking, it’s important to:

• Work with others—build movements or networks to amplify your efforts
• Understand your and others’ mental models, which  inform how we think and act
• Act on leverage points where there is a realistic prospect of changing the system
• Learn—and use that learning to adapt what you do²

This section of the toolkit aims to help you become familiar with and assess your staff’s familiarity with systems thinking. It also offers strategies and resources to support your entire team in applying a systems thinking approach to TPP work.

All TPP projects—regardless of their tier or focus—support the health and well-being of adolescents. Given the impact that this work has on both individual youth and the community, your project plays an integral role in the system of clinical and community-based services and supports designed to help adolescents make healthy decisions.

But even the most successful organizations have space to iterate and improve. By taking stock of your project’s strengths and barriers, you can get confirmation about what you’re doing well and identify both your gaps and opportunities to address them. As part of this assessment, it’s important to determine which current partnerships are serving your project’s needs and which potential partnerships could strengthen your project. Developing and sustaining the right partnerships will not only enhance your TPP project, but will also make the entire system more robust.

This section of the toolkit aims to help you assess your project’s strengths and barriers and create a partnership strategy. Using a partnership strategy, you can address fragmentation within the system and strengthen it to better serve youth in the community.

Partners form the backbone of a strong community network. Your project can benefit from both referral partnerships as well as other types of partners, such as schools that recruit participants on your behalf or foundations that provide funding.

When your TPP project builds and sustains relationships with compatible partners that share your goals, compensate for your barriers, and complement your strengths, you will support components of the system that work and repair those that don’t. Ultimately, your partnerships can fundamentally change the system, so that it can have a more meaningful impact on adolescents and their families.³

This section of the toolkit aims to support you in attracting, establishing, and formalizing new partnerships that will strengthen the system and lead to systems change.

By enhancing your TPP project evaluation with systems change principles, you can capture complexity such as:

• Relationships, influence, context, and emerging patterns
• The extent to which your TPP project is furthering equity in your community
• The conditions of systems that hold problems in place⁴

This complexity can help track your TPP project’s progress and impact within a changing system. Systems change evaluation is different from evaluating project outcomes in that systems change often takes longer and outcomes are often non-linear and counterintuitive (the size of the outcome does not correlate with the size of the input).⁵ Systems thinking resources, such as a learning agenda, can inform your TPP project monitoring and evaluation plans through ongoing improvement and feedback.

This section of the toolkit aims to strengthen your ability to apply systems change evaluation approaches and principles to your work.

For a step-by-step guide on systems change evaluation, refer to the comprehensive A Practical Guide to Evaluating Systems Change in a Human Services Systems Context.

1. Senge, P. M. (2006). The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization. Random House.
2. Abercrombie, R., Harries, E., & Wharton, R. (2015). Systems change: A guide to what it is and how to do it. https://www.thinknpc.org/resource-hub/systems-change-a-guide-to-what-it-is-and-how-to-do-it/
3. Institute of Medicine of the National Academies. (2012, March). Primary Care and Public Health: Exploring Integration to Improve Population Health. https://www.nap.edu/catalog/13381/primary-care-and-public-health-exploring-integration-to-improve-population
4. Cook, J. & Preskill, Hallie. How Do You Evaluate Systems Change? A Place to Start. FSG. https://www.fsg.org/blog/how-do-you-evaluate-systems-change-place-start
5. Patton, M.Q. (2011). Developmental Evaluation: Applying Complexity Concepts to Enhance Innovation and Use. The Guilford Press.