Bringing the System to Life: How to Build Support for Systems Change

You built the map. You identified the loops. You see why the problem keeps coming back despite everyone’s best efforts. Now what?

Here’s the uncomfortable truth from Chapter 8 of Systems Thinking for Social Change: understanding the system yourself is not enough. You need other people to see it too. And that turns out to be way harder than drawing arrows on a whiteboard.

David Peter Stroh opens this chapter with a problem that comes up constantly. After The After Prison Initiative retreat, some participants questioned the value of the systems map because the people who “really needed to change” (the policy makers supporting mass incarceration) weren’t in the room. Others wondered how to communicate insights drawn in a visual language that most people have never seen before.

The map might be brilliant. But if nobody buys in, it just sits there.

Why Systems Maps Don’t Sell Themselves

Systems maps have a few things working against them when it comes to getting buy-in.

First, not everyone thinks visually. The maps are a form of storytelling, but they can look abstract and cold when separated from the actual conversation about what they reveal.

Second, most maps ask people to take more responsibility than they’re comfortable with. “We have met the enemy, and he is us” is a hard sell. People would rather hear that someone else needs to change.

Third, even people who get the insights often don’t know how to explain them to others. The language feels foreign. Try explaining a reinforcing feedback loop at a community meeting and watch eyes glaze over.

Stroh offers three approaches to break through these barriers.

Approach 1: Let People Build Their Own Analysis

This is the big one. Instead of presenting a finished map and saying “here’s what’s really going on,” you let people arrive at the insights themselves.

The process works like this. Start by drafting your own initial analysis based on interviews, focus groups, and observations. Then invite a small group of representative stakeholders to comment on how the preliminary map both increases their understanding and could be improved.

But here’s the key move. Rather than showing your findings right away, think about how the group might reach similar conclusions on their own. You could:

• Show them a systems archetype template (like Shifting the Burden or Accidental Adversaries) and ask them to fill it in with their own situation
• Write key variables on sticky notes and ask them to draw the cause-and-effect relationships between them

After people develop their own insights, they can more readily interpret, internalize, and improve your draft. They own it now. It’s not some consultant’s diagram. It’s theirs.

When presenting to a larger group, Stroh says to start with a story. In Calhoun County, the story was about a man who had cycled through temporary shelters for years. Official shelters, the street, emergency rooms, jails, friends’ couches. The community wanted to help him find permanent housing but kept failing. Why? That question pulls people in better than any diagram.

How to Translate Systems Language Into Plain English

Before showing any map to a broader audience, Stroh recommends what he calls “reverse translation.” Convert the systems jargon back into everyday words. Here’s what that looks like in practice:

• Remove all jargon. Talk about “quick fixes,” “vicious cycles,” and “growth engines” instead of “balancing loops” and “reinforcing loops.” In one rural housing case, reinforcing loops were called “pumps” and balancing loops were called “seepage” to match an agricultural metaphor the audience already understood.

• Present archetypes as universal human stories. Not as something unique to this group. This helps people recognize the pattern without feeling ashamed about being caught in it.

• Honor people’s good intentions first. Acknowledge what they want to accomplish. They want to reduce homelessness. They want to help hungry people. Start there.

• Then show how those good intentions fall short because of factors and consequences that weren’t taken into account. People who send food aid to end starvation unintentionally undermine local farming by driving down food prices. The insight lands harder when you first validate the intention behind the action.

• Build the diagram in stages. Don’t throw the full complexity at people all at once. Show the partnership dynamic first. Then show how partners accidentally become adversaries. Let the story unfold step by step.

One way to know if your map is working? Stroh says a useful map often produces what he calls “palpable silence.” People go quiet as three feelings hit in quick succession: humility (we’re part of the problem), despair (we can’t keep doing what we’ve been doing), and hope (maybe we can find a better way).

Approach 2: Surface the Mental Models

Lily Tomlin once said, “Reality is nothing more than a collective hunch.” Systems thinking makes those hunches visible so you can actually question them.

Mental models are the hidden assumptions that drive behavior. They sit one level deeper than the systems structure on the iceberg model. And they explain why the same dynamics keep repeating.

Here’s a simple example. Does downsizing in an organization increase or decrease the morale of remaining staff? The answer depends entirely on assumptions. Some employees think, “I could be next,” and morale drops. Others think, “They finally got rid of the deadwood, and I’m still here,” and morale rises. Same event, opposite effects, driven by different mental models.

To surface these assumptions, ask people to look at the systems map and answer: “What are the key assumptions that keep this dynamic in place?” Start by identifying why people believe current solutions should work. “This quick fix should solve the problem because…”

Stroh recommends placing mental models directly on the causal loop diagram. In Calhoun County, they mapped the assumptions different stakeholders held about homelessness. Everyone had reasonable beliefs that unexpectedly contributed to the very problem they wanted to solve.

Sometimes assumptions are so deeply embedded that you need to list them separately. In Connecticut, people redesigning the early-childhood education system uncovered beliefs from their political sponsors that constrained their thinking:

• Formal structures (new laws, institutions) matter more than informal ones (social networks in poor communities)
• State control is more important than local control
• Quantitative measures trump qualitative ones

These beliefs shaped what solutions were even considered possible. Making them explicit opened up new options.

One doctor, Jon Walz, mapped six different paradigms that stakeholders brought to smoking cessation: defiance, fear, entitlement, desperation, ignorance, and recognition. Only the lens of recognition promised a constructive solution. The others just kept the cycle going. These paradigms probably show up in most social issues, not just smoking.

Approach 3: Create Catalytic Conversations

The whole point of systems mapping and surfacing mental models is to make new conversations possible. Not the usual ones about limited resources, who’s to blame, and who else needs to change. New ones that actually go somewhere.

Stroh breaks these catalytic conversations into three parts.

Deepening Awareness

The map helps people see the non-obvious connections and long-term consequences they’ve been missing. Good questions for this stage include:

• What new insights have come up about why the problem persists despite our best efforts?
• What is surprising?
• How is our group partly responsible, even if unintentionally, for the issue?
• What challenges do these dynamics present?
• What new opportunities do they offer?

You can also design questions specific to the situation. A school district trying to close the achievement gap between rich and poor students found huge value in asking: Why do some kids from privileged families perform poorly? And why do some kids from families with limited means perform well? These questions led them to identify critical success factors that help all students regardless of background: mentors who believe in them, family and community support, resilience and self-regulation, and honoring different learning styles.

Cultivating Acceptance

This is where it gets personal. Understanding the system means moving from blame to responsibility. From independence to interdependence. From short-term to long-term thinking.

Stroh says acceptance requires two things that seem contradictory: compassion and confrontation.

Compassion because most problems are self-created, but unintentionally. Nobody sets out to increase starvation or perpetuate homelessness. It helps to assume everyone is doing the best they can with what they know at the time.

Confrontation because people are often their own worst enemies. They implement quick fixes and assume short-term improvements will last. They build engines of success and assume growth will sustain itself forever. They optimize their piece of the system thinking that’s the best way to optimize the whole.

The goal is not to replace blaming others with blaming yourself. It’s to help people see that changing yourself is ultimately easier than changing others, even though blaming others feels more satisfying.

Stroh makes an important distinction here: confrontation without contempt. Confrontation means raising awareness of someone’s actions to help them achieve what matters to them. It’s founded on compassion. Contempt means shaming people into doing what serves you. Contempt shows up a lot when people deal with politicians, and it almost always backfires. It creates defensiveness, not willingness to change.

He gives a great example. A former congressman explained that he viewed getting reelected as a baseline requirement to serve his constituency, not as an end in itself. Like Peter Drucker’s observation about profit: it’s a necessary condition for business success, not its purpose. Just as breathing is necessary for life but not the purpose of life.

And then the bigger point. Leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela confronted power structures while empathizing with the people in them. They appealed to the dignity and higher aspirations of those in power. When collaboration failed initially, they were willing to fight harder, but they always returned to partnership when their adversaries showed willingness to engage.

Developing New Alternatives

When people see why their previous solutions failed and accept their role in those failures, they genuinely open up to new ways of thinking. Stroh says this happens naturally when you follow the previous steps. Awareness plus acceptance creates readiness for change.

But there’s one more obstacle. Most people have competing commitments. They want to serve higher aspirations and meet immediate self-interests. When those commitments conflict, people feel pulled in opposite directions. They try to move forward, get drawn back, and end up stuck.

That tension between short-term interests and long-term aspirations is what the next chapter addresses.

The Bottom Line

Building a systems map is only half the work. Getting people to actually use it requires a different kind of effort. You need to let people build their own understanding instead of handing them yours. You need to make hidden assumptions visible. And you need to create conversations that move from blame to responsibility, from defensiveness to genuine openness.

The language of systems thinking can feel foreign. The message of shared responsibility can feel threatening. But when people experience that moment of palpable silence, when they see themselves in the system for the first time, that’s when real change becomes possible.

This is post 9 in a series retelling “Systems Thinking for Social Change” by David Peter Stroh (ISBN: 978-1-60358-580-4). Browse the full series on this site.

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