The SSM Vision

Social System Mapping is ultimately about systemic transformation. It's about supporting a shift that is becoming manifest in the world - from systems of dominance, extraction, and exploitation to systems of connection, reverence and re-generation. It exists in service to a global movement working to create the conditions that will enable systemic transformation at multiple and reinforcing scales - from visceral and intimate to socially, politically and geographically wide and deep.

Related Topics

Acknowledging the ethical implications of mapping

What IS Social System Mapping?

The Social System Mapping Origin Story

The foundational structure for this movement is strong networks of change agents.

Networks are the most ubiquitous and natural of structures, so effecting change through networks should come naturally. But in fact - humans doing aligned work in large numbers across scales and differences and distances (i.e. working in networks) is challenging for a variety of reasons. Most of which stem from two mental models that are fundamental to modern western cultures:

• The 'Separate Self' - the nearly-ubiquitous subconscious sense of human selves as separate from one another and everything else. Generative change in human systems happens at the speed of trust - and separate selves are deeply distrustful.
• A mechanistic, linear, formal-logic, top-down understanding of how things work and how things change. The systems we want to change are Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS), and mechanistic change models fail miserably when applied to a CAS.

Social System Mapping was designed to help shift those two fundamental mental models by helping to generate three new conditions within the context of change- or transformation-networks.

1. Stronger, more mutually-supportive, and more strategic relationships - (i.e. shifting the Separate Self model to a healthily-boundary'd, inter-being self):
   1. Understanding and developing relationships - which includes not just helping more people 'be connected', but helping them be strategic and healthy about connections, as well as understanding and grappling with the dynamics of power and privilege and trauma and history that impact our relationships and our ability to connect authentically, so that we're also generating conditions for trust and love to emerge.
2. An on-the-ground, actionable, shared understanding of how change actually happens in a CAS, and an ever-increasing collective capacity to work wisely within the constantly-shifting complexity facing us.
3. Lenses that help the whole network be able to see the rest of the network in all it's glorious multi-dimensionality. A tool to support the network in recognizing itself as a complex adaptive system and to enable members to coordinate and cooperate in ways that nurture not only each part, but that nurture the health of the whole. Tools that help us sense into and make sense of the parts, the whole, and the greater whole.

Social System Mapping at its best can help support relationship-building as well as understanding the deeper relational structures making up the network. It can be a pedagogic tool for learning about complex adaptive systems in a context that is relevant, meaningful and actionable to members of a network. And it can be that lens that enables the system to see itself. It can enable greater awareness of the social system mapped, and greater wisdom about needs and opportunities at all scales. And it can both support and reflect more effective action taken by system actors in all the scales and domains in which they pursue the network's purposes.

Its about leveraging visual thinking tools and a new visual language to combine a worldview of justice, equity, diversity and belonging with data-driven systems and complexity methodologies in ways that help both of those impulses move their work more fully into that re-generative system shift we're all seeking.

<aside> ✨ All of this is still largely aspirational - nonetheless:

If ever there was a time for boldness, it is now. If we're going to work for transformation, why not use every tool at our disposal that leverages our efforts?

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<aside> ℹ️ For more information contact [email protected]

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The Social System Mapping Community of Practice is supported by Greater than the Sum and sumApp | sumApp log-in | Social System Mapping Help Desk

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