The Story of Systems Games

My dad was a systems thinker from before I was born, so unbeknownst to me I was imbued with this interconnected way of understanding the world. I trained as a physicist as I wanted to understand how the world worked but it wasn’t until I started my MSc in Holistic Science at Schumacher College that I discovered complexity theory and systems thinking, and everything slotted into place. To me the systems dynamics of feedback loops, emergence, and coherence seem to describe the inner workings of nearly everything that is important to us in our lives including: how our brains work, our bodies, our family relationships, our organisations, our economic system, ecosystems, climate system and how societies and cultures change.

This was really exciting to me because, since I was a child in the 80’s, I had been concerned about environmental and social problems like drought in Africa, the threat of nuclear war, and the destruction of rainforests. In systems thinking I saw not only a way of understanding why our global industrialised culture has caused so many of these self-destructive problems but also it gave very clear solutions as to how we can change the way we do things, to create a genuinely sustainable and high well-being society.

The only problem with complexity and systems thinking is that it sounds very complicated and people often switch off when they hear about it. So when Brian Goodwin one of my tutors introduced a game that revealed many of the systems dynamics he was teaching us about, this was an ‘a-ha’ moment for me. Over the next few years I gathered more of these games and created my own to build a set of interactive group activities that give participants really tangible experiences of things like feedback loops, tipping points, emergent properties, and order emerging out of chaos.

 I found people came alive during these games and we had lively discussions about how those dynamics occur in our work and lives. Suddenly systems thinking became very real, relevant and useful.

So in 2008 I set up Systems Games so I could help people in businesses, organisations, government, schools and universities to really get their heads around some of the most important concepts for the 21st-century. I have found understanding systems dynamics to be enlightening and empowering, as solutions based on systems thinking are creative, innovative, tackle the fundamental cause of a problem and often find win-win solutions.

I want to share these systems thinking skills with as many people as possible and I’ve found Systems Games to be a powerful way to do this, creating transformative change and mindset shifts in many of the groups I work with.