Building a Foundation for Change: Getting the Right People in the Room
You want to end homelessness in your community. You get a bunch of important people in a room. Everyone nods along about helping the homeless. Great start, right?
Except here’s what’s actually happening. Half the room came with a second agenda they’re not talking about. The shelter director wants to protect their funding. The government agency wants to show results for their specific program. The nonprofit leader wants to expand their org’s reach. Everyone says they’re here for the homeless. And they are. But they’re also here for themselves.
Chapter 6 of Systems Thinking for Social Change tackles the first stage of Stroh’s four-stage process: building the foundation. Before you can map systems, create strategies, or take action, you need the right people, a shared direction, and the ability to actually work together.
Sounds basic. It’s not.
Who Needs to Be in the Room
Key stakeholders are people and organizations that affect the issue and are affected by it. That includes anyone who can contribute to solving the problem. It also includes anyone who could blow it up if they’re left out.
For something like homelessness, that’s a long list. Shelter providers, obviously. But also: child welfare agencies, criminal justice, health care, transportation, education, local businesses, government officials at every level, the media, and homeless people themselves.
Stroh points to a practical tool: the stakeholder map. It’s a simple table where you list each stakeholder, rate how supportive they currently are (from -3 to +3), decide how supportive you need them to be, figure out what motivates them, and plan how to engage them.
The core group should include four types of people:
- Executive sponsors and decision makers who represent major constituencies and care deeply about the issue.
- Activists with personal passion for the cause.
- The people most affected who usually have little or no voice in the current system. Patients. Students. Homeless individuals.
- A professional facilitator to keep things on track.
That third group matters more than most conveners realize. If you’re redesigning a system that affects homeless people and no homeless people are in the room, you’re just guessing.
The People Who Are Part of the Problem
Here’s something uncomfortable. When you ask people to reform a system, they tend to think they’re outside the system. They see themselves as fixers, not contributors to the mess.
Systems thinking flips that. It helps people see how they are part of the problem. And that’s actually good news. Because if you’re contributing to the problem, you can change what you’re doing. That’s way more productive than waiting for someone else to change.
Stroh also addresses the elephant in the room: what about people who actively resist change? You have options. You can address their concerns directly. You can influence them through others. You can engage them at specific moments in the process. Or you can work around them.
The worst thing you can do is blame them for blocking progress while ignoring your own role in the status quo. As therapist Terrence Real puts it, you “oppress from the victim position.” You create unnecessary enemies when respect and inquiry would have opened more doors.
Establishing Common Ground
Getting people in the room is step one. Getting them pointed in the same direction is step two.
Common ground has three pieces:
A shared reason for being there. In the Collaborating for Iowa’s Kids project, everyone agreed that student performance wasn’t improving despite a decade of reform. For Calhoun County, it was an opportunity to get state funding for a ten-year plan to end homelessness. People need a clear “why are we here” that everyone can get behind.
A focusing question. This is key. The question takes the form: “Why, despite our best efforts, have we been unable to achieve X?” The word “why” is essential. It leads people toward root causes. “How to” questions, by contrast, push people to implement solutions for problems they don’t fully understand yet.
Here’s the paradox Stroh highlights: the purpose of systems mapping is to answer a focusing question, not to map an entire system. Answering a focused question gives you actionable insights. Mapping everything gives you confusion and paralysis.
A shared vision contrasted with current reality. The Calhoun County group created a vision of a comprehensive, integrated system to end homelessness. Then they honestly assessed where they stood: agencies working in silos, no public education about homelessness, a coalition of service providers without community or financial support, and agencies that didn’t even know what other agencies were doing.
That gap between vision and reality creates what Stroh calls “creative tension.” It’s what drives people to act.
Stroh offers a useful framework for mapping current reality at four levels. Level one: the triggering events that brought people together. Level two: trends over time, like rising incarceration despite declining crime. Level three: the pressures, policies, and power dynamics at play. Level four: the underlying assumptions, like “people want to be homeless” or “the individual is the problem, not the system.”
How much time you spend on visioning depends on the group. If relationships are fragile or people are overwhelmed, spend more time building a shared vision before looking hard at reality. If people are frustrated by obvious solutions that haven’t worked, move to the systems analysis faster.
Building the Capacity to Actually Collaborate
Having the right people with a shared direction still isn’t enough. They need to be able to work together. Stroh identifies three capacities that matter.
Thinking Systemically
People need the language and tools of systems thinking. When people start to see that they’re connected in non-obvious and often counterproductive ways, something shifts. They stop thinking about just their part of the system and start seeing the bigger picture.
At this stage, it helps to introduce concepts covered earlier in the book: good intentions aren’t enough, the characteristics of failed solutions, conventional versus systemic thinking, the iceberg model, feedback loops, time delays, and common archetypes. These give people a shared vocabulary for seeing patterns together.
Having Productive Conversations About Hard Things
Remember the blind men and the elephant? Everyone in the room has a different view of reality. Plus, even people with shared goals can have very different secondary agendas. The homeless coalition example from the start of this chapter proves that.
The core skill here is recognizing that the world is way more complex than any one person thinks. Your assumptions are useful, limited, and capable of becoming more accurate. All at the same time.
Take the assumption “street people prefer to be homeless.” There’s a grain of truth: some chronically homeless people do struggle with the transition to permanent housing. But the evidence shows that when given safe, affordable permanent housing with support services, most people take it. In one case, 96 percent were still living in the same housing a year later. The more accurate assumption changes everything about how you design solutions.
Stroh introduces two tools for better conversations:
The Ladder of Inference. This shows how people unconsciously jump from raw data to conclusions. You select certain facts from an ocean of available information, make assumptions based on those facts, draw conclusions, take action, and then look for new data that confirms what you already believe. Making this process visible helps people question their own reasoning.
Balancing advocacy and inquiry. Most people are better at stating their views than asking about others’. So Stroh suggests starting with inquiry. Ask people: What do you see? How do you feel about it? What do you think it means? What do you want? Then actually listen.
As Bryan Smith told Stroh years ago: people need to know that you care before they care what you know.
Once you’ve shown genuine interest in others’ views, your own advocacy becomes more effective. Share your reasoning openly so others can add to it and improve it. That’s how groups build a picture of reality that’s more complete than any individual could create alone.
Cultivating Responsibility
This is the deepest capacity. Both systemic thinking and productive conversations lead to a realization: you are responsible for the situation as it currently exists. Not just for solving it.
This doesn’t mean blaming yourself. It means empowering yourself. When you see how your intentions, assumptions, and actions have unintentionally contributed to the problem, you gain something powerful. It’s easier to change how you think and behave than to change everyone else.
Even if you’re not responsible for the problem’s origins, you can ask: how might my efforts to solve this problem actually be making it harder to solve? If you show up trying to prove others wrong and force them to change, you embed an adversarial dynamic. You create unnecessary opposition.
Respect, inquiry, and empathy are often the best keys to open the door of social change.
The Bottom Line
Stage 1 of Stroh’s process is about laying groundwork that most people skip or rush through. The key moves:
- Identify and involve the right stakeholders. Include people who are part of the problem, not just those who want to fix it.
- Recognize multiple ways to engage resisters. Don’t just write off people who oppose change.
- Establish common ground through a shared reason for coming together, a focusing question that drives toward root causes, and a vision contrasted with honest current reality.
- Build collaborative capacity by teaching systems thinking, developing skills for productive conversation across differences, and cultivating personal responsibility.
None of this is glamorous. It’s the patient, relational work that makes everything else possible. Skip it and your brilliant systems map will sit in a drawer. Your strategy will fall apart at the first real disagreement.
Get it right and you have a group of diverse stakeholders who understand the system they’re part of, can talk honestly about hard things, and feel responsible for both the problem and the solution. That’s a foundation worth building on.
This post is part of a series retelling “Systems Thinking for Social Change” by David Peter Stroh (ISBN: 978-1-60358-580-4). Follow along as we work through the book chapter by chapter.
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