Systems thinking is analytical, relationship-oriented and holistic. Strategic planning is logical and ensures that an organization’s activities actually lead to its intended outcome, rather than busy work. Human centered design is action-oriented, deeply human, and experimental. We believe that social sector leaders and their leaders practitioners can, and should, use these methods together to see the bigger picture and the myriad of connections, while staying grounded in the lives and behaviors of real people, and determining where best to intervene. When each approach is applied independently, they are helpful but insufficient. When they are applied, they lead to more creative and impactful programs. We highlight each approach’s contributions, specifically to the social sector, while also addressing their shortcomings. We also discuss how to integrate the three approaches, and provide links to worksheets that simplifies their application and integration. We hope this helps practitioners answer the question, how can I orient, focus and innovate with limited time and resources?

Nonprofit leaders worldwide are tackling some of society’s most challenge problems – rampant homelessness, overwhelming climate change, sexual violence, and rising inequality, to name but a few. Constrained by limited resources, they are asked to understand the complex systems in which they work; strategize, in order to maximize their resources for greatest impact; and innovate, in order to come up with novel solutions to unrelenting challenges. These approaches often sit in tension. Systems thinking is analytical, relationship-oriented and holistic. Strategy is logical and ensures that an organization’s activities actually lead to its intended outcome, rather than busy work. Design is action-oriented, deeply human, and experimental. Nonprofit practitioners can use these methods together to see the bigger picture and the myriad of connections, while staying grounded in the lives and behaviors of real people, and determining where best to intervene.

We believe that actively moving between these approaches and working in this tension leads to more impactful programs. When each approach is applied independently, they are helpful but insufficient. When applied together, they lead to more creative and impactful programs. Although there is a plethora of resources that outline how to apply these approaches individually, we have spent our time designing new resources that help practitioners better understand how to apply these approaches and learn how to integrate them more seamlessly.

The Power and Peril of Human Centered Design

Human-centered design (HCD) is an invaluable tool for social sector organizations seeking to bring about meaningful and creative change in the world. Human-centered design is a process, mindset, and approach to identify meaningful challenges and creatively solve complex problems. It guides practitioners to understand and respond to the needs of specific people, question assumptions and reframe problems, and experiment to advance their solutions. Also known as design thinking, it is a philosophy that empowers an individual or team to design products, services, systems, and experiences that address the core needs of those who experience a problem.

HCD’s unique contribution to tackling social sector issues lies in its ability to:

• Put real people, the beneficiaries and stakeholders, back into the line of site. As organizations focus on impact and scale, real individuals can quickly become faceless, monolithic categories (children, teachers, government agencies, underrepresented communities…).  Design brings texture to understanding who practitioners are specifically designing for and with, and what’s needed. It helps team prioritize who they are trying to reach, given that most organizations do not have the resources to reach categories of people. 

• Uncover deep insights that can lead to novel solution spaces. HCD pushes past the explicit needs, and uncovers deeper, implicit needs below the surface.  By articulating emotional, cultural and relational needs, leaders can design programs targeting what is meaningful to people – which are more successful.

• Help teams generate a wide range of possible solutions and activities, before settling on the one in which they will invest.  

• Have teams build low resolution prototypes of potential concepts, helping teams build to think.  Teams work through some of the concepts complexities by building early and inexpensive versions of the concept, moving from words on paper to more tangible concepts they can put in people’s hands for more helpful feedback.

• Encourage teams to test their assumptions and questions by putting prototypes in real people’s hands for feedback. Rather than launching costly city-wide or nation-wide program, this approach ensures that teams have incorporated a critical feedback loop (beyond surveys), identifying egregious assumptions long before it is too late to change course.

Not only does HCD help teams clarify who they are designing for, the beneficiaries or stakeholders underlying needs, and build and test concepts early and often, the process also reinvigorates practitioners.  Past Stanford d.school DSS participants talk about how it helps them

• Reconnect with the “end beneficiaries” (the people) that inspired many of them to enter the social sector in the first place, or inspired to see beneficiaries and stakeholders in a new light;

• (Re)introduce practitioners to their creative side, which may have gone dormant, or may have never explored, as they maneuvered through the large bureaucracies of social change;

• Ignite a newfound agency around tackling some of the messiest problems by helping to break the process apart into more manageable pieces.

However, without boundaries, design can guide teams on a wayward journey of discovering deep meaning without significant impact. For example, a team could speak to some end beneficiaries or critical stakeholders, which invariably will uncover an array of needs. Unsure of where to focus, teams may select needs that arose from the most compelling and heart-wrenching stories. While meaningful, this approach may guide this team away from organization’s desired short-term or long-term outcomes.  Focusing on the most emotionally-rich stories could lead teams to focus on challenges that are more symptomatic, rather than move up the ladder of leverage towards forces that could have greater impact with given resources. 

Teams can best leverage HCD’s unique contribution when they layer it onto a strategic program planning process and systems thinking process, in which the organization’s direction within the system are clarified and intermediate goals articulated, serving as a team’s bumper rails as they maneuver through the challenge’s complexities. 

The Power and Peril of Program Strategy Work

Strategy can intimidate people. Many social sector leaders shudder at its mention, conjuring memories of planning processes that consumed days, weeks and even months. Images arise of strategies that have ended as formidable, dust-collecting paper weights. 

However, a strategy process is necessary and valuable to orient, ground, and clarify a social sector organization’s work.  A good strategy process is not rigid or linear, but dynamic. It serves as a guide that teams return to periodically to remember and align themselves, while leaving room for shifts and pivots based on real-world experience and knowledge. Absent a good strategy, a team may have a lot of passionate, well-meaning people who are engaged in a series of efforts, but those efforts often do not lead towards significant impact. And when teams are engaged in constant action without clear impact, they burn out and dissolve quickly.  

In David La Piana’s Nonprofit Strategy Revolution, he outlines three levels of strategy.  

• Organizational strategies, which determine an organization’s market position,

• Programmatic strategies which determine how best to advance the organization’s mission; and 

• Operational strategies aimed at enhancing a nonprofit’s administrative efficiency, preparedness and execution.

These different levels of strategy are helpful.  We will cover organizational strategies below in our systems thinking approach, which helps identify the organization’s goals within a complex system.

When we talk about strategic planning here, we are referring to an organization’s programmatic strategy. What an organization will do, what activities will it carry out, in order to achieve its short and long-term goals?  This process assumes that an organization has already identified its organizational strategies and its overall direction within a complex system; then the programmatic strategy highlights the optimal activities that will help an organization achieve its goal leveraging its unique skills and within its limited resources.

The programmatic strategic planning process is uniquely useful in helping teams:

• Ground themselves in the reality of their existing resources.  Although a team can imagine what it would be like to acquire more resources, the strategic planning process roots a team in the reality of what it currently has, and gives a team the opportunity to explore what it might do with those existing resources;

• Helps teams and their leadership tell a coherent story rooted in a clear vision, goals and articulated assumptions;

• The process helps teams identify where they may have causal leaps that are due to faulty assumptions, or leaps in logic;

• The process helps teams ensure that they are aligned around a clear direction, returning to their articulated goals when they begin to experience mission creep or other distractions;

• Assists teams with making difficult decisions in the face a litany of competing needs.  A good strategy is the difference between a BUSY team and an IMPACTFUL team. 

From our experience, teams employing strategic processes share that  

• They wrestle with the emotions of having to narrow where they might focus, because they usually want to reach as many people as possible;

• But that narrowing actually brings them a relief because the scope does not feel as overwhelming and they can visualize the impact they are trying to make;

• Articulating their guiding star keeps their teams grounded and motivated.

Although clarifying, a programmatic strategy process can be limiting because it may fail to take into account the larger system in which an organization might be working.  

• Teams with a myopic lens may not see how their work is duplicating what already exists, or fail to see whether there are counteracting forces that are affecting the likelihood that their strategic plan will succeed.  

• The process can help teams narrow and focus, but teams may end up doing this prematurely – before exploring a range of options around possible programs.

• Too often strategies are created behind desks and refined in board rooms, and therefore, they are often based on poor assumptions about beneficiary and stakeholder behaviors and desires. Teams may identify programs that are not rooted in human behaviors, nor tested with real people, and therefore, the entire program strategy is lacking a grounding in human needs and insights.

• Organization’s strategic planning processes are often too long, such that by the time the strategy is completed, the context has changed considerably and the strategy is less relevant.

• If a strategy is not rooted in the situation on the ground, or drafted in a way that team members can apply the strategy to their everyday work and programs, a strategy can feel like buzzwords and platitudes and feel like a nuisance rather than a helpful guide.

HCD ensures that the strategic process is grounded in real people and remains relevant. By adding the systems thinking process to the strategy work, it ensures that the organization’s programmatic strategy is connected to the efforts and forces at play in the broader system in which the problem sits. By using a strategic planning as a guiding process, and enhancing strategy with design thinking and systems thinking methods, social sector leaders create bounded spaces for exploration and innovation, with a dynamic feedback loop that ensures the strategy does not get too far from the field itself. The irony is that by narrowing, space emerges for greater creativity.

The Power and Peril of Systems Thinking Work

Most often, social sector practitioners feel overwhelmed with tackling complex systems-level challenges. Because so many issues have multiple and interrelated causes and effects, it can be hard to get one’s head around the challenge, its symptoms and root causes – let alone how to identify the most impactful actions and investments given limited resources.  A systems thinking approach helps social sector leaders take a step back and visualize the system in which they are working, understand the relationships in the system, and help clarify which part of the system they are trying to tackle. 

Systems thinking is uniquely able to 

• Visualize the broader system in which they are working – to see connections between stakeholders and their relationships to one another;

• Identify all the forces that are affecting a challenge, in order for leaders and teams to root their intervention in a humble understanding of the complexities and the fact that no one organization is able to tackle all of these forces at once;

• Help teams identify unintended consequences that appear when teams map out causal links when different forces are applied within the system;

• helps teams negotiate their point of greatest leverage.  A team can become busy working on multiple levers within a system, but setting aside time for a team to intentionally debate, review data, and weigh where they might have an outsized impact.

We have heard teams talk about how effectively applying a systems lens feels

• Less overwhelming, because they can articulate the forces at play in the system and isolate which force they are trying to tackle, rather than trying to address all of them at once;

• Generative, because it allows them to visualize all the stakeholders who are relevant to the system, helping them see parts of the system they may have never thought to engage and grounds where they will focus their energy;

• Gives them a sense of agency, because they can understand the complexity of the problem but identify where they have the ability to act.

But as with the other two approaches, there are potential drawbacks to a systems thinking approach. 

• Practitioners can get overwhelmed when they spend too long in a systems framework.  The visuals reinforce the complexity of the challenge within the broader system, leaving some practitioners unsure of where to start.  

• While you see the relationships between stakeholders and forces at a macro level, it can be difficult to understand what is motivating people to act. Understanding people’s motivations is essential to changing their behavior. 

• The systems thinking process, when engaging multiple stakeholders, can be time consuming and parties may not see immediate results and get discouraged or doubtful about the process.

• A systems approach reveals a snapshot of the dynamics in the system at a moment in time, but does not provide a real-time feedback loop for how an intervention can change the dynamics within the system.  

Human-centered design and strategy help ensure a systems practice is not just a wonky, intellectual exercise, but an approach that helps teams visualize and feel the system in which they work. Leaning on human-centered design, teams can layer real people onto their stakeholder maps and in doing so, bring them to life.  Stakeholder interviews from a human-centered design process adds layers of texture to describing the forces at play in the system. Design’s prototyping process helps test ideas within parts of the system, rather than feeling a need to change the entire system at once.  Strategic planning builds on the systems insights; organizations can combine the system’s view with the constraints, capabilities, and mission of their organization to make decisions best suited to them.

Integrating Programmatic Strategic Planning, Human Centered Design, and Systems Thinking Approaches

When organizations integrate these three approaches, they are able to identify organizational programmatic activities, rooted in real human insights, that help an organization use its limited resources to achieve clearly defined goals, that contribute to tackling critical forces alongside other organizations within a complex system.

However, not all three methods are necessary in all situations. Your context is the best determinant for which approaches to use. Over the past five years of coaching social sector leaders with these three approaches, we have found the following recurring contexts:

1. You are tasked with designing or redesigning an existing program, but you are constrained by what types of program you can offer.  Either your grant agreement or your organizational mission pre-determines what types of programs you can offer, and therefore, you are not identifying new points of leverage in the system or new offerings, but instead you are trying to find better ways to connect your existing offer to your end beneficiary or redesigning the offering to meet your end beneficiary’s behaviors and underlying needs.

2. You are building a new venture, or you are questioning whether you have been tackling the appropriate leverage point in the system, and you have some space and time to explore a range of possibilities. Your board and leadership team have some spaciousness around the direction of the organization and its programs. Therefore, you have permission to take a step back and consider all the possible ways your organization, with its unique talent and resources, can contribute to making a chance in the system.  Your team is not working under an intense pressure cooker, and has some time dedicated to this exploratory process.

Context I:  You want to design a new or better program, but you have existing programmatic constraints ———> apply a programmatic strategic process interspersed with human centered design expeditions

If you are tasked with launching a new program, but your team is bound by a set of predetermined activities or deliverables, then we recommend applying programmatic strategic planning and HCD approaches together. For example, let’s say your organization is committed to delivering a food service program, but you want to figure out why more people are not utilizing your service or benefiting as you intended. We recommend to outline a programmatic strategic arc and then use human-centered design cycles (we refer to these as expeditions) to identify your end beneficiaries’ needs and wants. Then reconceptualize and adapt your offering to more effectively meet those needs or overcome barriers. 

You may be familiar with using human-centered design to complete a full cycle of work from research to prototyped and tested solutions. We have found it useful to also think of design in three different expeditions or ‘phases’ of work, to be employed at different times in one’s work. 

We’ve outlined three common human centered design expeditions: 

• Ethnographic Expedition to uncover user/beneficiary needs, behaviors, or beliefs in relevant to the desired goal;

• Ideation Expedition to generate a range of activities/interventions, select fruitful ones, and begin bringing form to them; and 

• Experiment Expedition to prototype and test some activities or interventions for desirability, usability or impact.

Depending on the stage of the project and questions you have, you may employ any one of these to best advance your thinking. Pairing strategy and human-centered design allows each to inform the others. The questions or assumptions identified in strategy work help dictate what design work would be most effective; the learning from design expeditions gives you better information and confidence in your strategy.

We would still recommend that the team in this scenario complete a simplified systems thinking activity in order to better anchor their team in the broader system in which they are working. But we have found that teams under pressure to deliver a new program may not have the spaciousness needed to benefit from the systems work. Therefore, the systems work may need to come after the program (re)design process has been completed and the time-bound deliverable has been met.

Context II:  You are reconsidering whether you have identified the right intermediate goal, and you have some space to shift your goals and program, apply a systems thinking analysis and programmatic strategy process, interspersed with human-centered design expeditions

For teams that are not bound by a set of pre-determined activities or deliverables, they can spend time exploring the points of greatest leverage for their organization in a system – a point where a small amount of change applied to an existing system, causes a large change in that system. Once they have hypothesize a place of greatest leverage, then they can apply a human-centered design approach to align their activities with their end beneficiaries’ and stakeholders’ needs and behaviors. Alternatively, insights from design work may help the team see a potential point of leverage to consider in their systems analysis. 

No single organization can tackle, messy, complex systemic challenges on their own. Organizations need to identify what part of the system they are best suited to tackle, and how they are providing complementary efforts to the broader sector. A systems thinking exercise can help teams do just that. Once a leverage point has been identified an organization can use that to articulate intermediate goals into its programmatic strategy arc. This process sets an organization’s direction, while allowing space to explore an organization’s activities, or programmatic offerings. By identifying the direction without pre-determining the form and function of the offering, there is room to design the most appropriate program that ensures the targeted stakeholders and beneficiaries arrive at the desired intermediate goals. The team will integrate human centered design expeditions (ethnographic, ideation or testing) expeditions, as outlined above, in order to ground the programmatic strategy with deep human insights, and create more effective interventions.

Conclusion

The insights and lessons from each approach – strategy, design and systems – inform one another. They each contribute a unique piece to a complex puzzle, and integrating these three methods is a fluid process. Using them in conjunction allows a team to make and examine strategic choices, uncover and integrate insights to determine actions, test assumptions and new ideas, and question which potential interventions and intermediate outcomes best lead to the desired impact in the world. 

Each of these three approaches alone can be overwhelming to teams, who are struggling to balance complexity with urgency.  Our goal has been to find ways to help teams dive into each approach, without getting lost in the process.  We have designed structured activities that help teams tackle each approach in a time-bound way, so as to introduce the complexity long enough to obtain context, but not so long that teams become overwhelmed.  We have found that teams that intersperse these three methods end with greater clarity about their contribution, greater confidence in where they can add value, and an enhanced learning culture within the organization that strives to continuously rethink the programmatic offerings for better ways to meet their desired end goals.