The Systems Sandbox
Join Hosts Matt Healey and Tenille Moselen from First Person Consulting (FPC) to explore the world of systems thinking and complexity.
The Systems Sandbox has been developed as part of FPC's capacity building work with the Victorian Health Promotion Foundation (VicHealth)'s Local Government Partnership, but has been designed for any organisations or people grappling with complex problems and opportunities.
To learn more about VicHealth and their Local Government Partnership check out their website: https://www.vichealth.vic.gov.au/programs-and-projects/local-government-partnership
For more about FPC and their work check out their website: www.fpconsulting.com.au
The Systems Sandbox
#3 Determinants of... And The Pig Model
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We continue the theme of systems journeys, with hosts Tenille and Matt sharing how they each came to learn about the ideas and practices of systems thinking from public health and environmental disciplines. This includes the determinants of health, ecological ways of thinking and resilience, but also handy tips to help anchor our thinking in systemic ways.
Then, Tenille spends some time explaining The Pig Model, a useful and no-tech approach to reflecting on stakeholder perspectives. It's a great tool for the toolkit, and usable by individuals or groups as an icebreaker or conversation starter.
This episode promises to enrich your understanding of how systems-based concepts are embedded in our daily lives, and provide some ideas for reframing conversations.
For more about us and what we do check out our LinkedIn page.
Navigating Systems in Public Health
Speaker 1The Systems Sandbox is recorded and produced on the lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. We pay our respects to Elders past, present and extend our respects to all First Nations people listening.
Speaker 2Welcome to the Systems Sandbox where we chat all things systems and complexity. My name is Matt Healy and with me is Tenille Mosley. Hi, tenille.
Speaker 1Hey, matt, how's it going. Good, how are you?
Speaker 2Yeah, good, thank you, welcome back from your trip. You're off away somewhere.
Speaker 1Yeah, I've been up in the north of Queensland in the Cape York region. I had a fantastic time. I was up there with some traditional owners learning and living about their land in the Aboriginal community of Hopevale. Have you ever heard of Hopevale?
Speaker 2No, definitely cannot say that I have heard of Hope Vale, not that I've actually been to Far North Queensland either, so there's probably lots for me to still learn and see up there.
Speaker 1Yeah Well, it's about five hours inland from Cairns and it was beautiful. October's a great time of year. The humidity is low, but warm days and warm nights.
Speaker 2Tends to lifeful Well, while you were off enjoying yourself. So I had the pleasure of speaking to Jocelyn Bignole, the CEO of Macaulay Community Services for Women. You and I both know her quite well from some of the work that we've done with them. But we actually kind of kept the thread going from something that you and I spoke to Jess and Sam about in the very first episode around the idea of a systems journey, and it was really interesting speaking to Jocelyn about her journey, but it also got me thinking that maybe for this episode what we should actually do is kind of step back a little bit from speaking to everyone else about their journeys, their experiences Probably a good chance for everyone to hear a bit about ours and I think, in particular because we both come to this space from quite a different, almost disciplinary perspective. That's probably a good place for us to start today and I know maybe for those particularly in the health promotion context, your background will be potentially very interesting and relevant.
Speaker 1Yeah, sounds good. I think everyone has probably had a different entry point or introduction to systems, whether they've actually realized it was systems or not.
Speaker 2Yeah, true, Absolutely Okay. Let's start with that then.
Speaker 1Yeah. So I studied public health as my undergrad and I think that the social determinants of health is really aligned to systems thinking and understanding that there is different factors that have influence over your lives and the outcomes of individuals. And obviously the social determinants of health is quite refined. It looks at the five specific areas around economic stability, education, access to healthcare, the built environment and the community. And when we sort of thought about the social determinants and were taught about it when I was at university, we saw them as upstream and downstream social determinants, and the downstream determinants of those that can really affect an individual on a daily basis, versus the upstream, which is actually those system level factors. So we were always considering upstream determinants and their influences on health outcomes. We just weren't looking at it as systems effects and really that is the same thing. And some examples of those upstream determinants that we used to look at would be health policy or health insurance or water systems or the health system and understanding how that would trickle down and affect an individual.
Speaker 2What's an example, then, of a downstream determinant at an individual level, like, as distinct from some of those upstream ones that you were just talking about?
Speaker 1Yeah, so a downstream determinant could just be an individual's education level, or whether or not they are employed, or what their family socioeconomic status is.
Speaker 2Yeah, okay, so essentially exactly like you were describing as upstream and downstream. It's not like you couldn't look at determinants at an individual level, but it's almost like the determinants at that individual level are going to be highly specific to that person, or maybe even to a very localized area, as opposed to, like a general bigger system, population level. Would that be right?
Speaker 1Yeah, exactly, and there's even midstream determinants as well, just to throw that one in there. So the midstream, which was also known as the meso level, and the downstream, obviously the micro level, and the upstream, the macro level. So some midstream examples would be the local economy or the housing quality in the area that you live in, neighborhood safety or what type of food is available to you locally.
Speaker 2That was like in your undergrad, like that. You were kind of introduced to that. But then you've got a master's.
Speaker 1I think right as well, you do. Yeah, I should know this, I do, I do. And yeah, then my master's further kind of delved into the, I guess, systems thinking and system influences on healthcare in particular. And so, yeah, my master's, I looked at global citizenship as a concept which is very ambiguous and there's many definitions, but essentially it's someone who understands their place in the world and understands their impact on the wider world as as well. And I did a whole thesis which was many nights awake late, and the thesis was about whether or not international experience in a low socio-economic country in typically the global south, whether that had any impact on an individual's global citizenship status. Almost oh, okay, yeah, and there were some pretty novel tools that had come out at that point in time where you could do a survey and it would tell you whether or not you were a global citizen based.
Speaker 1Oh, okay, yeah, and it was based on your perceptions, opinions and the way that you would react in certain situations. Oh okay, exposure had allowed them to widen their thinking and understand how their actions in Australia affect people in other countries, but in particular lower socioeconomic countries.
Speaker 2International experience like student exchange, I'm guessing is like the.
Speaker 1Yeah, student exchange or those study abroad trips or study tours, all those kinds of experiences.
Speaker 2Oh yeah, awesome. I mean, where did you then go? Sort of post-uni Like, were you then into public health roles, like were you doing some of this stuff or applying some of this stuff in practice?
Speaker 1Yeah, so my thesis did not take me around the world like I would have liked.
Speaker 1I this did not take me around the world like I would have liked I stayed here in Melbourne and I went into very typical public health work and I was a project officer in the alcohol and drug field for a number of years where I did a lot of research-based work and evaluation as well to understand whether or not alcohol and drug programs were working for the community that we were running them for. And that journey took me a bit further into research and I really was intrigued and interested in the value of evaluation in improving health programs. And I went across to Peter Mac the cancer hospital here in Melbourne and I was a researcher over there for a number of years as well and I actually sort of particularly worked in the voluntary assisted dying interventions that were first implemented in Victoria and then I did a lot of research in palliative care and patient well-being at the hospital and then I moved across to first-person consulting.
Speaker 2Just thinking about, say, your academic study of public health and the exposure to systems thinking there. How much, I guess, did you see it translated like, say, the determinants of health or some of those ideas like translated into the kind of doing?
Speaker 1Yeah, hugely. I think working in the alcohol and drug sector it's an uphill battle because a lot of the systems are working against you a lot of the time, and especially the justice system, which isn't necessarily set up to help vulnerable people that fall into alcohol and drugs. And understanding the different systems and how they affected the clients that we saw on a daily basis was critical to understanding how we could help them and how we can actually work within the system. But the thought of being able to actually map a system and potentially change a system and understand where we could impact the system the most was not something we had yet come across. That's very sort of new, I guess in the last kind of five years, so it would have been beneficial back then. Across in the cancer field we had really similar challenges and systems had a really similar effect as well. So a lot of patients were affected by financial situations and employment situations and we had to learn how to navigate really complex systems that weren't built to support our patients.
Speaker 2It sounds like basically, even though there were two different content areas, like in terms of, I guess, the nature of the health challenges or the health experiences, there are, I guess, different factors that are influencing whether it's harder or easier for people to get the sorts of care that they need.
Speaker 2The thing I was interested in actually was something that you started to allude to there around, I guess, that kind of point of things being harder or easier, and I think it was. I think Jocelyn might have mentioned this last episode around the idea of like sorts of barriers and enablers to different things and different experiences, things and different experiences, because I know that's something that you and I have come across like a fair bit. When people talk about systems work or intervening in systems, we talk about barriers and enablers and even if they're not sort of explicitly looking at something with a sort of systems lens, they might talk about an issue as trying to almost understand that issue from the perspective of the range of barriers and enablers that are influencing that experience or that thing from working in the way that we kind of wanted to, and I think that kind of comes up a lot and say, like the implementation science sort of space too. From what I understand of it, though I would not consider myself to be an expert.
Mapping Systems for Health Outcomes
Speaker 1Yeah, you're absolutely right, matt.
Speaker 1So when I worked at Peter Mac, I was a part of the implementation science research team over there at the time and implementation science is something that's been really big in the health and clinical sciences field for a long time and we have seen it emerging recently in the evaluation field because it does complement systems thinking a lot.
Speaker 1And when you're talking about those barriers and enablers that Jocelyn mentioned last week, implementation science is really useful to understand the real world barriers and enablers.
Speaker 1So that means that it takes into consideration the type of environment that you're implementing something within and it considers the factors that are in the outer setting and the factors that are in the inner setting and how they can influence whether or not something is going to work or whether an intervention is going to work. And those barriers and enablers are a bit more nuanced than the general barriers and enablers that we might traditionally know, and I guess some examples could be in the outer context. If we think about alcohol and drug as an example in the outer context at the time, we know that the safe injecting rooms have been a hot topic and they've been in the newspapers and often that is around an intervention being accepted by the community, whereas the inner context or the inner setting might look at whether or not the people within the organization that has been tasked with delivering this intervention actually believe in it or actually think they have the skill set to deliver it or not.
Speaker 2Yeah, I actually I kind of like the nuance that talking about the sort of inner and outer context that introduces, because, like in the system space, we often talk about how, like context is key, but it's kind of good to maybe even think about that in a more specific way, cause I know, even just in a general sense, like inner, say, being like inside an organization, as distinct from outer as in, like outside of the organization, is kind of another way of just talking about boundaries.
Speaker 2So that's, I think, really interesting, but also kind of highlights to me as someone that doesn't really know much about implementation science, kind of these ideas that we can almost borrow from these other areas of study or practice just to make, uh, make, our lives a bit easier in terms of, you know, the terms that we want to use to describe something or the language that we want to use. Uh, you kind of mentioned just at the tail end, um, just before that you came across to fbc from peter mack, um, and I know like when you, when you started with us, you had a big focus on, I guess, the, the evaluation stuff that we do a lot of. But I mean, was there or has there been like a sort of systems project or experience that you've had that maybe is a bit of a I don't want to say like an epitome of your experience or exposure to systems thinking, but like one that kind of stands out for you.
Speaker 1Yeah, absolutely. I think, keeping in the theme of what we've been talking about, the Macaulay Safe at Home project is actually one of the first ones I worked on when I came across to FPC and at that point in time I jumped into the project to help finish building out the systems map of the system, which is essentially what would you call it, the justice system, the it's a great example of the importance of like naming systems, because I think when I talk about it as like a thing, I kind of call it like the safe at home system, because I think I kind of define it from the perspective of like topic that Macaulay was coming to it from.
Speaker 2But I think when I spoke to Jocelyn she described it as the homelessness and family violence systems. She kind of used both of those concepts together. But then the justice system, like you said, is actually in there as well. So I think what you've said is actually true, but also it's different to what I would call it and what Jocelyn would call it, which I think kind of speaks to the idea of like different perspectives, like where you're coming from means that you look at a thing maybe a bit differently, but I guess for context, for people that are listening as well.
Speaker 2So the Save at Home work that we did with Macaulay, we actually did it in two kind of stages. The safe at home work that we did with Macaulay, we actually did it in two kind of stages, and so the original project that I did with Macaulay was kind of like a base map of barriers and enablers and it was kind of after that process, that they wanted to actually delve a little bit deeper into some specific sort of, I guess, experiences for different groups, and I think that's where you came in. I basically said hey, we need some help doing this project and you seem to like this stuff. Tenille, can you basically tackle this part of this project or this kind of secondary not secondary, that's not quite right this second layer question or deeper question?
Speaker 1Yeah. So I came along and I jumped on board and I sort of led the secondary part of this project, which was, in my opinion, sort of delving a little bit deeper and helping to fill the gaps that we might have not been able to cover in the first round of building this systems map, able to cover in the first round of building this systems map. So, essentially, we had a systems map of the barriers and enablers to the safe at home system, which Matt has kindly just defined for us, and we realized that we hadn't had the opportunity to speak to different multicultural-led agencies that operate in this space and understand their more nuanced and specific experiences and barriers and enablers that they might face that traditionally not captured without these kinds of detailed interviews.
Speaker 2Yeah, that's right, Because I remember you saying after some of them that it highlighted that there were either kind of new or maybe slightly different interpretations to what the barrier or enabler was, but also that it wasn't that the barrier was different, but maybe that it was experienced in a disproportionate way to others. So a certain community might experience issues around like financial security in a way that is not the same at the sort of general population level.
Speaker 1Yeah, exactly, and also on the flip side, the enablers for some of these communities were actually barriers, and I think that was really important and it was really important for us to uncover through these secondary interviews, and I can give an example around that. So we spoke to an LGBTIQ plus, a led agency that works in this space, and they described how sometimes the police responding to a family violence incident in a same-sex relationship was feared or was perceived as a danger because it was difficult to identify the perpetrator and often the perpetrator was misidentified and sometimes because the perpetrator could be misidentified and typically a police response was labeled as an enabler for us, whereas in this situation it was actually a barrier.
Speaker 2Yeah. So it's kind of like okay, in a general population sense, a police response to a family violence incident would be seen as a neighbor, but actually in certain contexts. So, going back to that idea, that context is key it could actually be seen as a barrier, depending on that experience and that perspective.
Speaker 1Yeah.
Speaker 2That's what you're getting at.
Speaker 1Yeah, of course, and that transcends across multiple different communities as well. As you would understand, there's deep, deep cultural mistrust as well for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders of police. So it wasn't just a isolated barrier for one community, it was across multiple.
Speaker 2Yeah. So I mean, it sounds like you've had quite an interesting career to date, going from a, I guess, academic study context to learning about determinants of health and then, I guess, through almost like a service delivery organization into like the hospital context and now obviously in our sort of consulting based context, like just thinking about I don't want to say like your advice, but like for people maybe who don't have, who maybe have had the same sort of journey as you, like maybe have studied some of this stuff before yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 1Like I mentioned earlier, systems is kind of reframing those upstream determinants of health. But what we didn't know that we can do with systems now is that we can actually utilize different methodologies to map systems and understand at what point in the system could we have the most impact by rolling out an intervention or by connecting certain partners? And I think we have all this new knowledge on how to understand and use a system in a more interconnected way that can help improve health outcomes, whereas previously we just saw systems as upstream determinants that exist and they have an influence on us, but they exist over here and we don't need to think about them too much. We just need to know that they're there and know what influence they have, whereas we can reframe our thinking now that we actually do have the ability to change and influence systems through systems practice.
Speaker 2Yeah, awesome. I mean I really like hearing about people's journey through this stuff, because I think it also just highlights how different and also similar it can be. Thanks, sam.
Exploring Systems Thinking in Context
Speaker 1No worries. And what about you, Matt? I mean, you came from sort of the enviro side of the world, ecological.
Speaker 2So so I think this is an interesting question because I asked you kind of where you came to it from and, um, the way that I interpreted what you said was there was almost like a like an explicitness to your introduction, like it was almost like it was almost not phrased as systems, but there was a very clear link to it. I think for me there's almost two time points that I would think about where I was introduced to systems. The first, more formal stage would be kind of similar to yours. So in my master's, which is I did like an environmental science kind of master's degree, there was a particular subject that I studied and they, the lecturer, introduced us to this concept. Well, the whole subject was around the concept of resilience, but in like an ecological or socio-ecological context, or when I say ecological like I mean sort of hard environment, so talking about really the resilience of ecological systems, and so a really a really obvious example of this would be, say, like landscapes that experience bushfire. So you have bushfires and afterwards the landscape in inverted commas bounces back. So there is sort of a whole bunch of ecological processes that are activated post bushfire. In certain species you need bushfire to trigger the germination of seeds because the outer, the outer membranes of scenes, seeds are too hard and they can't germinate until bushfire kind of basically cracks them. I'm obviously glossing over it and probably using the wrong words, but that's general premise.
Speaker 2Um, but there was a. There was actually a book, a textbook that we had to read, called resilience thinking, which is written by brian walker and david salt, so this would have been sort of around 2009 that I studied this. No, that can't be right. 2011, 2011, it would have been. 2009 was my undergrad, and they had a follow-up book called Resilience Practice as well, which was a bit more of a sort of getting into the actual practical application of resilience thinking, but it was really all around that idea of recovery or sort of snapping back or how systems recover after some sort of shock or impact, and they were really focused on ecology. That was the context. So to me that was kind of my first formal introduction and in later stages of my master's thesis supervisor.
Speaker 2She comes from a sort of design and architecture background, but she had a very big focus on regenerative practice, so regenerative in the sense that architecture and design has a role in effectively regenerating landscapes, and so she would talk about things like sort of mechanistic and ecological ways of thinking. So design used to be very mechanistic, so you would break things down into its component parts, but also everything was in isolation. So if you think of, like, say, a building being constructed mechanistically, it would be constructed without any cognizance of the broader context or environment that it's in. You see this sometimes with buildings that are kind of put in place and then it will create like wind tunnels because they've kind of designed the building without any awareness of the impact it's going to have on the wider space around it. And so you will find this sometimes in, say, melbourne, where certain parts of it will have like big wind tunnels because of the nature of the buildings that are being constructed. The sort of ecological mode would be more like systems thinking in practice. So that's really where we're talking about, like context. So you take things like a building or something that's been created but you're contextualizing its design. So you're saying, well, building or something that's been created, but you're contextualizing its design. So you're saying, well, what design makes sense for this building, given the place that we want to put it in effectively? And so the regenerative practice end is not just contextualizing it but it's almost like from value adding to its placement back in that context.
Speaker 2If you ever are curious, there's an organization in the I think they're based in the States called Regenesis and they were really, I think, the pioneers of a lot of that sort of stuff and there's lots of case studies of their work where they I think there was one I mean it was kind of well-known, even sort of back then when I was learning about this but they basically were engaged to develop like a resort in, I think it was in Mexico. They basically were engaged to develop like a resort in, I think it was in Mexico and the developers wanted to make it like an eco resort and the Regenesis were like landscape architects, designers, those sorts of things basically took it one step further and it was, you know, pre and post, like a sort of very not nice to look at landscape. That was, you know, very low ecological value, and afterwards it was, you know, here's a, here's a resort in this landscape, but it's also like environmentally bountiful, so the fish have come back, the water is clean, all these sorts of things. So it was all that sort of stuff and I think for me that's the sort of lens that I came to with systems was like again, that's why I use that phrase context is key so often, but it was very much from an environmental perspective.
Unlocking Systems Thinking in Practice
Speaker 2But the other one that I mentioned, which was maybe my sort of informal seeding of some of these ideas, was more so in anthropology, which is in the sense that it was talking about because this was at a sort of undergraduate level. So you get a lot of the foundational stuff and it was all about kinship systems. So you were talking about different cultural systems and the ways in which they view kinship structures or family systems. So it's kind of interesting to think about and we've been kind of forced to do it a little bit by how we've wanted to think about this conversation.
Speaker 2But I find it so fascinating to think about, like, the very different ends of our even just our academic study study. So, like you studied public health, and whilst you were studying public health, um, I mean, I'm a little bit older, so a few years before you were doing your studies, I was studying like environmental stuff, um, but actually you can still apply the same sorts of concepts, uh as well, like the ecological ways of thinking, um, that I was learning about, for instance, in terms of, say, like landscape resilience, or like designing buildings in a way that integrates into like a cityscape or a landscape and things like that. Like you were talking about determinants of health before, and it's almost like you could just take the phrase determinants of and then put like dot dot dot after it, and actually that kind of opens up the chance to just think about determinants of anything.
Speaker 1Yeah, that's a very interesting way of thinking about it. I love it. Determinants of dot dot dot.
Speaker 2You mentioned before the idea of if you were in your role previously and you know, had you mapped the system or done some of that stuff, like it would have been of benefit. But there is that kind of more traditional maybe not traditional, not quite the right word more formal kind of systems thinking processes. But there's definitely, like lots of other things that people can do as well, to almost think systemically. And I know for me, like I always go back to this sort of divide between a mechanistic and an ecological way of viewing something as kind of like my trigger to myself or like my brain to look at something Like whether it's developing a logic model, or to developing like a project plan or something, or even thinking about like partnerships, for instance. And I actually find myself using these concepts of like mechanistic and ecological to like think about situations differently to help, I guess, prime my brain to think about it in that way.
Speaker 2It's what works for me and maybe that would be my like if I had to give a tip to someone. It's almost just like find your, find your anchor for thinking about things in a systemic way and like what is it that you can use to bring yourself back to thinking about things in that way. Or you know, you could use other analogies, like zooming out or looking at the big picture or looking at the determinants of dot dot dot. But what's a thing that you can do to help, I guess, remind yourself to do that when you're in the weeds of a situation. I mean, is there something that you do to help you kind of do that.
Speaker 1Yeah, I think the zoom out is a good one. That's usually how I would think about it for sure, especially when you are feeling a bit bogged down and hearing you speak about needing to kind of remind yourself or take a second and think about the bigger picture. The best thing about anyone who's studied public health is that I think it is almost programmed into you to think systemically by the time you come out of that degree. So I feel like a lot of the listeners would already have this type of thinking embedded in the way they approach their work, and it's probably just reminding yourself every now and again to take that step back, but it's not necessarily having to learn a whole different way of thinking or necessarily approaching things a lot of the time. If, in particular, like I said, you did public health, you would know it very well.
Speaker 2Yeah, and I mean, maybe that's the key message that we finish on here, which is that a lot of this stuff is programmed into you or like you've learned it, whether you've learned it from a public health perspective or, like me, from like environmental science or environmental studies, like a lot of these systems-based concepts are kind of there, and sometimes it's just about remembering that they are there, but maybe they just need to either be called out like explicitly, or at least recognizing that, like they don't have to be extra, like it's not extra work necessarily. It could just be about how you're thinking, about what you're already doing.
Speaker 1Sometimes, when I think about the bigger picture, I remind myself of how I used to describe my thesis to people that really didn't have any kind of understanding about global citizenship or where I was coming from, and I would use the analogy if you have a piece of rubbish and you drop it on the ground here in Australia in your backyard, you know what it's immediately going to do it might wash into the waterways, it might add to landfill, it might make your neighborhood dirty, it might attract rats to your neighborhood. But do you also understand that that will contribute to climate change, global warming and the rising sea levels in Vanuatu, one of our closest neighbors, and that really opens a whole new conversation as well, where they become really interested and want to understand how that works. So sometimes I use that one in my head about the piece of rubbish and dropping it on the ground.
Speaker 2I mean that's also a good kind of example of the role that thinking about things systemically can play in helping you like reframe a conversation or like ask about a concept or a question or pose something differently. So I think again, just having those reminders or those things that you can pull out, like your example just there, that you can pull out and share with people, just to help trigger even that thinking for them as well, that's really really helpful.
Speaker 1We've had a great chat, Matt, about our different journeys into systems thinking and different ways you can remind yourself to look at the big picture or approach systems practice, but I thought let's do a practical activity.
Speaker 2I'm always keen to try stuff. Hang on, I've got my pen, I've got my paper. You just tell me what I need to do.
Speaker 1All right. So pen and paper tick. What we're going to do is the pig model.
Speaker 2Pig. Like as in like the animal.
Speaker 1As in the animal yep.
Speaker 2Okay, all right, sounds good.
Speaker 1So don't worry, it doesn't necessarily require any expertise or any specialist um knowledge around systems thinking. Anyone can do it. Uh, it's only going to take like five minutes, uh, and it's a good way just to get you thinking in the systems mindset sounds good.
Speaker 2What do I need to do first?
Speaker 1so we are gonna think of a pig. Can you do that?
Speaker 2Right, yep, I've thought of a pig. Do I draw the pig or do I just think of a pig?
Speaker 1You can draw the pig and you can even name the pig if you want All right Sure. What did you name your pig?
Speaker 2Brian.
Speaker 1Great. So we've got Brian and we need to understand the simple question of what is Brian? And Brian the pig could be many things at once, so we want to understand, for different people or different stakeholders, what Brian might be.
Speaker 2Okay, so just to make sure that I understand. So it sounds like we're trying to almost introduce the idea of perspectives, or looking at things from different perspectives. Is that what we're getting towards?
Speaker 1That's right. So a pig can be seen as many different things, through a different lens and different perspectives, depending on who's looking at it. So I might look at a pig and I see it as bacon or food, and you might look at a pig and see it as something else.
Speaker 2Right, okay, okay, so that makes sense. So, different perspectives, people or whatever looking at Brian the pig what's like a good way to think about who's looking at Brian. Like, how do I think about who's looking at him?
Speaker 1Yeah, great question. So we've drawn Brian on our page in the middle and now the people that are looking at Brian or those things are our stakeholders. So things within the system For this exercise. I'll just give you some examples. So let's say we draw an arrow going away from Brian.
Speaker 2Like just up or something.
Speaker 1Up is fine Yep.
Speaker 2Okay, great, perfect Done.
Speaker 1And at the end of that arrow we have a farmer.
Speaker 2Okay, you can draw a farmer or you can write the word farmer yeah, I'll attempt to draw a farmer with a pitchfork, but I'm not great at stick figures. I'm not going to lie.
Speaker 1So we have the pig in the middle which is being seen by the farmer, and then we can draw another arrow from the farmer that says what do you think the farmer sees the pig as? What's their perspective of this pig?
Speaker 2yeah, okay. So I mean I come from a farming background um, not pigs, but uh and so I guess I look at this and I would see, almost like the farmer is like, um, like my dad, for instance, and so I think he would look at brian as like my dad, for instance, and so I think he would look at Brian as like a livelihood or like income maybe is the way I'd describe him. So I just like write that down at the end of that.
Speaker 1Yeah, so your farmer sees the pig as income. So you can write that down next to your farmer or as an arrow from your farmer wherever it makes sense for you.
Speaker 2Okay, all right, perfect Done.
Speaker 1Great. So I'm going to give you three more stakeholders to draw. So draw the arrow out from your pig and then draw the stakeholder at the end, and then you can tell me what do you think that stakeholder sees the pig as?
Speaker 2Okay, and so just because I love clear instructions, so like the first arrow I drew was like straight up, so maybe, just like you know, right down left, so they're kind of spaced evenly around.
Speaker 1Yeah, of course. So just put them coming out from the pig, space them out evenly, so you've got enough room to draw your pictures.
Speaker 2Okay, great, all right, so you're going to give me the stakeholders, yep.
Speaker 1So we've also got a wolf. That's a stakeholder. Okay, it's probably going to look more like a dog than a wolf, but I'll try and we're going to have a vet.
Speaker 2A vet, yeah.
Speaker 1Okay, it kind of looks very similar to my farmer, actually, and the last one we'll do is a poet. So you've got four different stakeholders surrounding your pig and your farmer can see the pig and from their perspective that's income or livelihood, as you mentioned. And now have a think about the wolf and the vet and the poet and what they might see the pig as from their perspective.
Speaker 2Okay, I'm going to write them all down first and then I'll go through them afterwards. Okay, so that's the wolf Poet. Okay, poet's quite hard actually. What was the third one? A vet, yeah, okay, I think I've got it.
Speaker 1Okay, let's start with the wolf. Okay, so I mean I probably went for the obvious answer. So I said food, yep, yeah, and I had. For the farmer I had the pig as food and for the wolf I had the pig as just a neighbor, just a friendly neighbor.
Speaker 2A friendly neighbor? Is the wolf a vegetarian?
Speaker 1Well, I sort of pictured the pig on a farm and the wolf in the forest around the farm, and they were just neighbors. That didn't harm one another.
Speaker 2Yeah, yeah, yeah, like everyone just gets along in my world, um. So then the next one that you had was the the vet. I kind of viewed it, uh, almost as like. I actually initially was like, oh, it's kind of like work, um. But then it actually kind of triggered a thought for me which was like, oh, actually, you'd almost look at at, like, say the, if the vet was looking at the farmer you might be like, oh, actually, that's probably more like the farmer would be work for the vet, because, like the, the vet bring sorry, the farmer brings the vet like animals to see. So then I kind of changed it and made the vet um see the pig as like a patient rather than like work. That seemed to make more sense to me, yeah.
Speaker 1So you went with patient.
Speaker 2Patient yeah.
Speaker 1For the vet.
Speaker 2For the vet, that's right.
Speaker 1I also thought patient, but I also then thought well. Also then thought well, maybe the vet sees the pig as a pet, because I feel like the vet would get a lot of pigs come in that are pet pigs that need tending to as well as farm pigs.
Speaker 2This is true. I mean, this exercise kind of already hurts me. The importance of context, because the first thing I think of when I think of a pig is, I guess me the importance of context because, like, the first thing I think of when I think of a pig is, I guess, the experiences of pigs that I had growing up, which was, uh, you know, they were kind of pet like or pet adjacent, but they were very much like livestock in the sense that we had quite a few of them, um, which, you know, we only had them when I was very young. But it's interesting to think about, like, yeah, some people would have like a pig as a pet, for instance. So, like there is that kind of like important distinction. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1And what did you put for poet?
Speaker 2This one was quite challenging because I don't know many poets and it kind of made me think about the stereotypes of what I have as poets, which is like dreamy eyed thinkers, and so I thought that a poet would look at a pig as something more like, um I actually wrote the word fuel, uh, and that was partly because like fuel for their practice or for their, their writing or for their artistry. So, um, yeah, not so much like food, which maybe would have been a bit too general, um, from the perspective of a poet. So I was trying to think more about like, what is it that fuels poetry, and so that's why I kind of settled on like fuel yeah, yeah, I actually had something really similar.
Speaker 1So I immediately thought of actually an author, not a poet, but it's adjacent. But I thought of George Orwell and Animal Farm and I guess the pigs were kind of inspiration for the story. So yeah, I had inspiration.
Speaker 2Okay, I thought you were just going to say George Orwell. I was like that's a very specific response to a pig. This has been quite interesting and I can't say I've really come across this before. But yeah, I think it's kind of interesting to just take a moment and think about having at the center like the question or like the thing so in this case, brian the pig and then to try and almost question who are the different views or stakeholders looking at this, and then like what would they? It's almost like value or like function or purpose, like what would they attribute to that thing? Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 1And I think the exercise having both of us do it has demonstrated that, firstly, we make assumptions around stakeholders' perspectives and we also have our own perspectives that are influenced by our own context. So you know, you gave the example of how you grew up and your experience on a farm and how that are influenced by our own context. So you know, you gave the example of how you grew up and your experience on a farm and how that has influenced your response to the farmer and the pig and the vet and things like that. So I think the exercise is really great in understanding that, firstly, there is more than one way to view something and that when you put yourself in the shoes of a stakeholder, you can understand what value they might see in this instance, in the pig but also understanding that there is multiple perspectives that can be held about the same concept or question or problem that we're looking at. Yeah, question or problem that we're looking at.
Speaker 2Yeah, and I mean this immediately brings to mind and I guess this is maybe more the consultant in me a little bit, but like the ability to use something like this I mean we just kind of did this on the back of a piece of paper, you know in kind of real time like your ability to use something like this as, say, like an icebreaker exercise or something at the start of like a workshop type process where, like you know, you and a whole bunch of different people are getting together to talk about something or try to figure something out, and even just doing something like this and having that articulation of like whose perspective it is.
Speaker 2But actually, yeah, how general you might be when you talk about, like, oh, a farmer, but that's a very general perspective, as opposed to there are hobby farmers or people that have small holdings versus large scale operations. I mean, we don't have wolves in necessarily the same way, but the biodiversity element in that case is quite interesting and to think about in that I actually quite like bringing my ecological hat into this the environment as a stakeholder as well is quite interesting and to think about in that I actually quite like bringing my ecological hat into this the environment as a stakeholder as well is quite interesting there and what perspective that has. So, yeah, this is really cool and very so like I don't want to say low tech, but like no tech almost.
Speaker 1Yeah, I love that idea of kicking off a brainstorming session with this activity, just to get everyone on the same page and get their minds thinking systematically from the get-go.
Speaker 2I just love almost treating some of these processes as not inaccessible as well, because I think systems thinking has a bit of a danger attached to it where it gets treated as a bit like not elite, but a bit like, oh, it's so different and so special in some ways, and actually this is literally just a scrap bit of paper in front of me, so definitely something that you know you could just do in any sort of context, whether it's a workshop or even just some brainstorming about something you might be grappling with. You've given me a bit of an unspoken challenge now, because now I'm going to have to find a tool or a process and introduce it to you next time.
Speaker 1Well, I look forward to seeing what you come back with.
Speaker 2Yeah, all right, challenge accepted.
Speaker 1The System Sandbox is a first-person consulting, production and creation a part of our work with VicHealth on their local government partnership capacity support program. That's it for today's episode of the System Sandbox. Thanks for tuning in. I'm Tenille and with me was Matt. Until next time.