Telling Systems Stories: How the Way We Talk About Problems Keeps Them Alive

Every problem comes with a story attached. Someone caused it. Someone should fix it. Someone is to blame.

That story feels right. It feels complete. But according to Chapter 3 of Systems Thinking for Social Change, that story is exactly what keeps the problem alive.

David Peter Stroh opens this chapter with a real example. In 2006, The After Prison Initiative brought together a hundred progressive leaders in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Activists, lawyers, researchers, policy analysts. All committed to ending mass incarceration in the US. All smart, passionate, experienced. And all stuck.

The US had 2.5 million people behind bars at that point (up from 200,000 in the 1970s). About 650,000 were released each year. Crime had actually dropped 25 percent since 1991. But incarceration rates kept climbing by 60 percent during the same period. Something was clearly broken. The question was: why couldn’t all these talented people fix it?

The answer starts with stories.

Two Types of Stories

Stroh says people who work in social change tend to share a common story. It goes like this:

1. The world needs our help, and we’re called to serve.
2. We’re not making the impact we want despite our best efforts.
3. The main obstacles are limited resources and other people’s behavior.

The first two parts of that story are fine. They motivate people. But the third part is the trap. When you believe the primary causes of a problem are beyond your control, you stop looking at how your own thinking and actions might be contributing to the mess.

That’s a conventional story. It’s linear. It blames someone else. It focuses on individual events instead of patterns. It looks at your piece of the puzzle and assumes you’re doing it right while others are dropping the ball.

A systems story works differently. It’s circular, not linear. It asks you to take responsibility instead of pointing fingers. It looks at patterns over time instead of reacting to the latest crisis. And it tries to see the whole picture, not just your corner of it.

Here’s the shift Stroh describes. To tell a systems story, you need three moves:

• From part to whole. Stop seeing just your piece of the system. See how everything connects, including why the system operates the way it does right now.
• From blaming others to changing yourself. Instead of hoping someone else will fix things, look at how you can change first.
• From reacting to events to redesigning structures. Stop putting out fires. Start understanding what keeps starting them.

The Blind Men and the Elephant

Stroh uses the old Sufi story to make this point land. Several blind men each touch a different part of an elephant. One feels the trunk and thinks it’s a snake. One feels a leg and thinks it’s a tree. Each one is convinced they know what the elephant is. None of them are wrong about their part. But none of them see the whole animal.

That’s what happened at the criminal justice retreat. Sentencing reform experts focused on reducing sentence lengths. Resettlement specialists focused on supportive services after release. Others worked on challenging the prison lobby. Still others tried to convince politicians that tough-on-crime laws make bad policy.

Each group entered through their own door. The challenge was helping them see that their success depended on everyone else’s success too. Including people who weren’t even in the room.

The Iceberg Model: Going Deeper Than Events

This is where the chapter gets really practical. Stroh introduces the iceberg model, which is one of the most useful tools in the whole book.

Think of any problem as an iceberg. What you see above the water is just the tip.

Events sit at the top. This is the news headline level. What just happened? Crime stats went up. Someone got re-arrested. A new law passed. Most people spend almost all their time here, reacting to whatever crisis shows up today.

Patterns and trends sit just below the surface. This is where you step back and ask: what has been happening over time? The TAPI participants noticed something wild here. Crime had been dropping for 15 years, but incarceration kept rising. That gap between falling crime and rising incarceration told a story that no single event could.

Systems structure is the deep part of the iceberg. This is the hidden 90 percent that actually drives everything above it. It includes the pressures, policies, and power dynamics that shape how people behave. It also includes less obvious things like perceptions and purposes.

For the criminal justice case, one huge structural insight was that public fear of crime mattered more than actual crime levels. Fear of being victimized kept rising even as crime fell. Politicians either fanned that fear to win votes or were afraid to look soft on crime. The fear drove the policies, and the policies drove mass incarceration. Not the actual crime rate.

That insight changed everything for the people at the retreat. It helped them see that they needed to work on reducing fear, not just fighting policies.

Systems Thinking as a Language

Here’s a cool way Stroh frames it. Systems thinking isn’t just a method. It’s a language. A visual language that helps you understand and talk about the world differently than everyday speech allows.

He even drops this fun fact: the word abracadabra comes from either Aramaic (“I will create as I speak”) or Hebrew (“It came to pass as it was spoken”). Language literally shapes reality. The way we talk about problems determines what we see and what we do about them.

This language has three basic building blocks.

Nouns: Variables

The nouns of systems thinking are variables. Things that change over time. They increase, decrease, or bounce around. You can frame them as “level of ___.” Level of fear. Level of investment. Level of political resistance. Level of public safety.

Getting the variables right matters a lot. In the criminal justice case, the breakthrough was realizing that the key variable wasn’t “level of crime” but “level of fear of being victimized by crime.” Those are very different things, and they lead to very different strategies.

Stroh shares another example from Burundi’s civil war. NGOs originally thought the key variable was the resources of Tutsis versus Hutus. But when they dug deeper, they found the real driver was the power of elites versus everyone else. When Hutus took power from Tutsis, the new Hutu leaders did the exact same resource-hoarding. The ethnic framing was a tool the elites used to keep power. Finding the right variable changed the entire analysis.

Verbs: Causal Links

The verbs are the connections between variables. An increase in A causes an increase (or decrease) in B. Simple arrows.

When the change goes in the same direction, it’s marked with an “s” for similar. When it goes in the opposite direction, it’s marked with an “o” for opposite. So if more fear leads to more harsh sentencing, that’s an “s” link. If more investment in community programs leads to less recidivism, that’s an “o” link.

These links connect into loops. And the loops are where the real stories live.

Adverbs: Time Delays

How long it takes for A to affect B is critical. Stroh calls this out because short-term and long-term effects of the same action are often reversed. Something that looks like a win today might create a bigger problem in five years.

The criminal justice system has several painful time delays:

• Sentence length delay. Long sentences mean people re-enter society years later, often less prepared than when they went in.
• Fear perception delay. Crime dropped, but public fear kept rising because people didn’t know crime had declined.
• Cost awareness delay. The system costs $85 billion a year, but it took years for that cost to become politically painful enough to drive reform.
• Investment delay. Even when people agree to shift money from prisons to communities, it takes years for community investment to show results.

These delays create a trap. Leaders face constant pressure to show quick results. So they reach for quick fixes that feel good now but make things worse later. Stroh makes an important distinction here: quick fixes are not the same as short-term small wins. A quick fix produces short-run benefits that get erased by long-run consequences. A short-term small win is planned with the long view in mind from the start.

The Power of Changing Your Story

The most striking thing about the TAPI retreat is what happened when people started thinking systemically. Some participants became more motivated to collaborate when they saw how their work was connected to others’. Several realized that framing criminal justice reform as a way to help politicians win votes (by cutting prison costs and reducing recidivism) could actually help the reform movement. Instead of fighting politicians, work with their incentives.

That’s what a systems story does. It doesn’t just describe the problem differently. It opens up strategies that were invisible before.

When people shift from a conventional story to a systems story, they stop waiting for someone else to change. They stop competing with allies for resources. They start seeing their own blind spots. They find ways to improve the whole system, not just defend their part of it.

Why This Matters

The language we use shapes the problems we see. And the problems we see shape the solutions we try. If you’re stuck telling a story about blame and limited resources, you’ll keep getting the same results.

Systems thinking gives you a new story. One where you’re not just a character being pushed around by forces beyond your control. You’re part of the structure that creates those forces. And that means you have more power to change things than you thought.

It starts with being honest about the story you’re currently telling.

Book: Systems Thinking for Social Change by David Peter Stroh | ISBN: 978-1-60358-580-4 | Chelsea Green Publishing, 2015

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