Questions for Getting Started

To make meaningful progress on highly complex challenges, it’s useful for you and your partners to get clear about four key questions:

• Practice: What are we trying to accomplish?
• Capacity building: How do we need to grow and develop, individually and collectively?
• Community: Who is the “we”—the people who need to be part of our change process and who are part of the larger system we seek to influence, including those we often forget to include?
• Research: What are we trying to learn, especially that could help others beyond our immediate group and setting?

We refer to this image and these areas of inquiry as the Systems Change mandala. Start with what these questions mean for you individually, then for your team, organization, and the system you care about.

Based on your responses, review the list of Modules. Does one area stand out for you to focus on first as you and your partners begin to address your issue? If so, work your way through the topics in that area. If the answer is “no” and you or your team want to:

• Develop new or refresh your capacities, go to the Tools Library.
• Learn how others may have addressed something similar, go to the Stories of Practice.
• Engage with other people and organizations, go Community Links.
• Access additional material about some of the tools and practices, go to the list of Resources.

Navigating All of the Facets

It is natural for people’s energy to be stronger around some of these question than others. For example, most change initiatives are motivated by practical problems and aspirations. But for genuine system change, all facets of the mandala are ultimately needed. Think of it like a compass. You do not need to head in all directions at the same time, but sooner or later in a complex journey, you will need to navigate all of them.

Embracing all four of these dimensions can be challenging, because it means holding the natural tensions that arise between them, such as:

• The pragmatic demands of practice versus the more long-term and conceptual aims of research
• The deep personal aspirations that drive capacity building and the social pressures of conserving relationships to support community building
  

These tensions are not necessarily bad. Indeed, learning how to embrace them can generate energy for real change.