Miguel Bello
Director
Jesús Ortíz
Systems Thinking
Jody Parra
Contributions & Review
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Systems thinking guide for public innovation
Public challenges rarely have simple solutions. Together with Bogotá’s Public Innovation Lab (iBO) we created a practical guide so that government teams can read the city’s complexity, shift the way they see it, and set in motion changes that last.
Partner
iBO · Bogotá’s Public Innovation Lab · Bloomberg Philanthropies
Year
2023
Services
Understand — Systemic reading; Training & capacity building
This guide translates systems thinking into the daily practice of public service. It is not a theoretical treatise: every concept arrives with exercises to apply it in the decision-maker’s own context, and it closes with a toolkit ready to bring into meetings and workshops.
CHALLENGE
Latin America’s large cities are systems: transport, housing, environment, economy and politics intertwine, change at a dizzying pace and do not obey linear formulas. The public sector tends to treat the symptoms — and a fix in one area ends up opening problems in another.
APPROACH
With iBO we designed a guide that translates systems thinking into the practice of public service. We organized it into three movements — understand the context, shift the way of seeing and manage change — each with exercises to apply in your own context.
IMPACT
A reference guide for public servants, published in iBO’s innovation series with support from Bloomberg Philanthropies. It democratizes a language once reserved for specialists and puts it at the service of fairer, more sustainable and resilient decisions.
Why is the city a system?
In a city, transport, housing, education, the economy and the environment are not independent problems: they are intrinsically connected. That is why an isolated intervention is rarely enough — and often, solving things at one point makes another worse.
Seen as a system, the city reveals the connections a fragmented view leaves out, and that is the first step to intervening with intelligence.
Understanding the system is not an academic luxury: it is what makes it possible to move from managing problems to transforming the conditions that generate them.
Shift the way you see: five ways to read the system
1) Holistic view — See the whole system and its interdependencies, not isolated pieces.
2) Critical view — Distinguish symptoms from causes and examine who holds power in the system.
3) Pluriversal view — Make room for a diversity of voices and knowledges, beyond a single dominant truth.
4) Multi-level view — Read the problem and its interventions from the household to the planet.
5) From “solving” to “dissolving” — Intervene in the dynamics that generate the problem, not just its symptoms.
Systems thinking offers no recipes: it offers a method to read complexity and act within it with judgment.
What the guide contains
01
The Context
Why the city is a system: open systems, complexity and change, and why public problems are not solved in a single stroke.
02
The View
Questioning paradigms and worldviews, seeing beyond the symptom and evolving from “solving” to “dissolving”; envisioning transitions with the Multi-Level Perspective.
03
The Process
Change management in practice: active stewardship of the system and cycles of re-knowing, experimenting (reframing and co-creating) and learning.
04
The Toolkit
Ready-to-use instruments: causal loop diagrams, problem tree, power analysis, scenario planning and a theory-of-change map.
“If you don’t change the way you see, you won’t be able to change anything.”
— The Pluriversa Team
Systems thinking is not an end in itself but a tool: it empowers us to dissolve problems by transforming the conditions that generate them, rather than only treating their symptoms.
Strengthen systems thinking in your organization
Talks, workshops, and hands-on support so your teams can read systems, question the way they see, and activate changes that last. What comes next is designed in conversation: 30 minutes, no slides, no commitment.
The Pluriversa Team
This guide was written by Pluriversa together with the team at Bogotá’s Public Innovation Lab (iBO):
We also extend our thanks to our allies and collaborators:
- Valentina Aceros (Contributions and review)
- Systems Innovation Network (visual resources, Creative Commons)