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Sheryl CababaSheryl Cababa wants to help designers of all kinds cultivate a systems-thinking mindset.
Her new book – Closing the Loop: Systems Thinking for Designers – shows designers how they can expand their impact by adding a systems-thinking lens to their view of their work.
Rather than setting out specific methods or practices, Sheryl focuses on how to leverage systems concepts like interconnectedness, causality, and wholeness to help you design better experiences.
We talked about:
- her work as Chief Strategy Officer at Substantial, a design and software development consultancy in Seattle
- the scope her new book, “Closing the Loop: Systems Thinking for Designers” and its intent to help designers develop a systems-thinking mindset
- the three key concepts in her approach to systems thinking: interconnectedness, causality, and wholeness
- how systems thinking and design thinking can interact and intertwine in a designer’s practice
- how systems thinking can help you expand the purview and scope of your design work
- how her background as a design researcher helped her develop her approach to this work
- how cultivating a systems-thinking mindset has expanded the impact of her design work
- how involving academic researchers in your projects can reveal systemic insights that you wouldn’t have discovered otherwise
- how to involve multidisciplinary stakeholders in exercises like scenario planning, war games, and similar non-linear exercises to discover even more insights
- the importance of using techniques like causal loop diagramming judiciously
Sheryl’s bio
Sheryl drives a human-centered design practice that is focused on systems thinking and evidence-based design, working on everything from robotic surgery experience design to reimagining K-12 education through service design. In her work with consultancies such as Substantial, frog, and Adaptive Path, she has worked with a diverse base of clients including the Gates Foundation, Microsoft, IHME, and IKEA. She holds a B.A. in journalism and political science from Syracuse University.
Sheryl is an international speaker and workshop facilitator. When she’s not in the office, she can be found at the University of Washington helping educate the next generation of Human-Centered Design and Engineering students. You might also find her biking around Seattle, or talking about her most recent complicated baking project.
Connect with Sheryl online
Video
Here’s the video version of our conversation:
Podcast intro transcript
This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 141. When you first imagine systems thinking, you might picture Donella Meadows’ stocks-and-flows diagrams or technical practices like causal loop diagramming. Sheryl Cababa thinks designers benefit from a different look at systems thinking – an approach that cultivates a holistic mindset, rather than any specific methods or practices. Sheryl wrote her new book – Closing the Loop – specifically to help designers benefit from this powerful kind of thinking.
Interview transcript
Larry:
Hey, everyone. Welcome to episode number 141 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I am really excited today to welcome to the show Sheryl Cababa. Sheryl is the Chief Strategy Officer at Substantial, really a prominent agency in Seattle. Welcome to the show, Sheryl. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you’re doing these days at Substantial.
Sheryl:
Yeah, for sure. We are a basically design and software development consultancy, and we do research and strategy as well as software design and build, so end-to-end services. And a lot of our work is focused in education, so that’s where I spend a lot of my time and energy and attention, is working with edtech organizations as well as philanthropic organizations who fund edtech and other educational products and services. It’s really nice, because we get to use design strategy as a method to help, I don’t know, define and direct investments in the space. And so, I think it connects quite a bit to what I talk about in my book.
Larry:
Right. Well, and I got it. There are two quick things about that. One is your education includes, you teach in the HCD programs at the University of Washington, correct?
Sheryl:
I do, yeah. Yeah, so I’m an educator myself.
Larry:
Yeah. You have more than one role in the education role. But the real, and the main reason I wanted to have you on the show today is you just wrote this really amazing book called Closing the Loop: Systems Thinking for Designers. I just love it because it gives designers access to this thing we all have heard about and think we know a lot about, but you present the information in a way that I think is just really uniquely helpful. Can you tell the folks a little bit more about, well, just your top level view of the book? Like we’re at a cocktail party and you just want to get the first overview of the book out there. How would you describe it?
Sheryl:
Okay, so there’s this practice called systems thinking. I think it’s been around for decades now. It’s often used in combination with things like organizational change management as well as I guess systems design in engineering and other fields like that. I think one of the things that made me interested in systems thinking is that I was feeling like there were some gaps in my formal practices as a designer, which are really centered around design thinking and its methods and approach. And I thought that within my practice that I could benefit from systems thinking and some of the tools and methods there, as well as the mindset and try to integrate that into my practice.
Sheryl:
And one of the things that I would like to emphasize about this particular book is that it’s not a book that’s aimed at people who are already doing systems thinking as analysts or in a formal practice. It’s really aimed at design practitioners who are really versed in design approaches like design thinking, human-centered design, as well as user experience design. And the idea is that you can shift your mindset towards using a systems lens while still sort of integrating this humanistic approach that is embodied within design thinking.
Sheryl:
And I hadn’t seen any sort of text that had done that up until this point. I mean I think there’s quite a few organizations in the design world that are focused on integrating systems thinking. I think there’s a network of those who think of themselves as systemic designers. And I just wanted to maybe bring to the table how I approach integrating systems thinking in my own practice, and also from a practical standpoint just thinking about what do we have time for? What can we actually do without it taking over and replacing all of our other tools and methods that we use as designers?
Larry:
Yeah, as you said that I’m thinking, yeah, we all have all this spare time to just learn whole new practices like this and it’s really not about… One of the things I love about your approach is that it’s not so much about learning a new practice as it is about cultivating a new mindset. Is that an accurate way to portray it?
Sheryl:
Yeah, I would definitely agree with that. One of the things I was saying to another practitioner the other day is I feel like once you engage in a systems thinking mindset, you see systems everywhere. So I have these sidebars in my book called system spotting, and they’re really oriented around gleaning information from the things that are around you. So understanding why does one neighborhood in this city have lots of trees and another neighborhood doesn’t? What story is that telling you about the underlying system? What is that telling you about how things are interconnected? Also, causality. So I can talk about the three key principles or concepts, which is there’s interconnectedness, there’s causality and there’s wholeness.
Sheryl:
And so you can look at examples like that and think about those things from those lenses, like how everything is interconnected, whether it’s sociocultural, understanding or tendencies combined with political outputs like policy. And then there’s causality, so how one thing leads to another, leads to another and has certain radiating effects. And then lastly, there’s wholeness. Like what is just beyond your purview that you have not acknowledged or could expand your thinking in terms of how decisions are made or the effects that decisions beyond your purview are having on the world? And so I think just adopting that mindset maybe helps designers to expand their thinking around how do we problem solve? You might actually expand who you think about as your end users or end beneficiaries just by doing some of these exercises for example. And I think that’s a really good starting point for anyone looking to engage in systems thinking.
Larry:
Yeah, the way you just said that, I mean I love that you started with this story about why there are more trees in one neighborhood another, and then immediately in… Because you were going to tell a story that showed how you’ve embodied and adopted this notion of interconnecting this causality and wholeness and you just see it everywhere, but then you have the presence of mind to back out and explain that to us. I love that. That was like you modeled everything that we need right there. But what’s interesting about that to me and the way you said that this is, I think you said something about a starting point. I almost feel like this is the pond in the pool, and it ripples out. And that’s like these are ways to identify the ripples it seems like. Because so much product design or UX design there feels like there’s limits to it. I guess that gets mainly to the interconnectedness point, but it seems like it’s relevant to the causality and wholeness points as well.
Sheryl:
Yeah, There’s a friction. For example, if you are a digital designer, you’re working on a digital product, you’re shaping the design of a screen-based thing and you’re working on where do the buttons go, how is this thing structured or what have you. It might feel incredibly limited. And so a question that I get a lot of the time is, okay, I mean, I can expand my thinking, but I don’t have any control. I’m not part of the decision making about things like our business model or what have you. And I understand that tension.
Sheryl:
I feel like there’s a couple of answers to that. One is, well, it’s easy to say, but you should be part of those conversations. If you care about this and you’re executing on something and you don’t agree with the more systemic decisions that have been made about what it is you’re designing, then you should be part of those conversations. If you’re not part of those conversations, I do think there are still ways of sort of integrating systems thinking into the way that you execute in your work. And it might be just thinking more broadly about who your user base is. It could be just thinking about again, those things that are just beyond your purview that might manifest as a feature or something in your work.
Sheryl:
So recently my team was working on a courseware for higher ed, this digital courseware. And oftentimes you’re thinking about just walking through the course and how it unfolds in front of you as a student, and knowing we live in the space of user advocacy, so you’re thinking about how the student might experience this, but engaging in systems thinking upfront from determining what that UI looks like, you can maybe even design and integrate features that might affect outcomes more widely.
Sheryl:
So there could be things that don’t have anything to do with how the course progresses. It could have to do with how people communicate with each other on the platform or how the platform is one way to communicate of many. So could students get in touch with their advisor on this platform, for example. Maybe that’s not the best idea, but maybe it is actually a really good idea. It just depends on the context. So it is about as well expanding the context in which your work sits, and thinking just in general learning how to think more broadly about what it is you’re doing and what it is you’re trying to create.
Larry:
Yeah, and that example you just gave, it really illustrates I think what you’re getting at. That even if it’s not in your control or technically in your purview, that as long as you’re thinking this way you can do stuff that other stakeholders or customers or whoever might recognize is like, oh yeah, that makes perfect sense. And that’s just because it’s not like you’re getting out of your lane, you’re just expanding your approach to the design issue at hand. And so I’m starting to see it was in… Before we started talking, I was like, I got conceptually when you talk in the book about how you, not contrast, but show how systems thinking and design thinking are different beasts and you can apply the systems thinking to your design process. Anyhow, I think that was a great example of that. Can you talk a little bit more about how you cultivate it? Because you’ve already exhibited three or four times just in this short conversation that you’ve completely embodied and internalized this new mindset. Can you help other people along just a little bit in that journey?
Sheryl:
Yeah, I mean I think feel very lucky to be based foundationally a design researcher, because I think that automatically has given me the ability to shape things like what the objectives of my research are. And so, I’m trying to think about how do you have people expand their lens if they’re not in that mindset? And it’s interesting because I think people in our field, they’re just craving this because they’re working on things that the tools that we have for working on those solutions or products or what have you are designed to think about an individual in the moment of using a product. That’s usually how we’re designing things and trying to make products better. And it feels like there’s some tension between that and what we feel like is some of the broader issues. What happens at scale with what I’m designing.
Sheryl:
Let’s say you’re working on the social media platform, there’s going to be some radiating effects of whatever it is you’re doing as you’re designing for an individual using things in the moment. An example I is, if you think about infinite scroll, so infinite scroll is when you’re scrolling through Instagram and it’s giving you just enough variety to keep scrolling forever. So it’s just called infinite, and Aza Raskin who was in charge of designing that feature has basically said, “I don’t think this feature is actually good for humanity.” In hindsight because of those radiating effects that it has.
Sheryl:
And I think we all seem to have a desire to be able to anticipate that sort of thing or think about that in the moment as we’re designing something and trying to better understand what will happen. So I think maybe that’s a motivating factor, is you’re not just going more broad for the sake of going more broad. You’re trying to be more thoughtful about what are the outcomes that we want? Maybe even as a society, from the work that I’m doing. I think it’s a way for designers to potentially have more impact. And there’s different levels at which you can use systems thinking. So one of the things that I describe is just I feel like my work, for example, has really flipped from a designer who is in the weeds of designing something.
Sheryl:
I was a product designer for probably almost 15 years. It sounds like a really long time, thinking about it now. And I was in the space of basically designing screeny things for a lot of my career. And now I think of myself as using design and design methods to, as a facilitator, basically helping to facilitate other people’s knowledge and expertise. So what that means is using these strategic lenses to help those who are in the position of decision making to be better informed, to be better aligned, and ensuring that the people in the room are multidisciplinary stakeholders who are involved in decision making at various points in the system. So I think basically just expanding who your stakeholders are in terms of your decision making process is one step you can take, whether that’s your end users around beneficiaries or the people who are actually within your organization or outside of it who could have an impact on some of what you’re deciding to do.
Larry:
That sounds like a really interesting, maybe a little gateway drug into this or something like that. That notion of just talk to two stakeholders that you wouldn’t have otherwise in this project and then start, that’s one way you could begin to cultivate this?
Sheryl:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, one of the things that I like doing for any of my project work is finding academic experts who work in that particular field or have a certain lens on whatever it is we’re doing. So in education, there’s lots of people that we can talk to who are maybe working at the intersection of equity and math education, for example, and even more specifically maybe in K-12. And I think just reaching out, I’ve yet to meet a researcher doesn’t want to talk about their research and finding out from them. I think a lot of them have a systems lens on what’s going on that you can’t achieve just by talking to end users. Just by talking to teachers in the system or talking to students, they can understand what’s going on at the intersection of policy and educational institutions, for example. And that’ll give you a lens on whatever it is you’re working on that could result in very different ideas of what innovation might look like or very different ideas of what problem solving looks like in that space.
Larry:
Yeah, the way you just said that, the academics, any one of them can do off the top of their head the review of the literature in their field and just know infinitely more than you could, and there’s other kinds of researchers you could approach as well. I want to back up just a little bit, the start of this little part here. You were talking about the infinite scroll and the unintended, and that reminded me of the chapter, I think it’s chapter eight in the book of Unintended Consequences. And it seems like, again, back to the ripple idea earlier and that idea, that what you just said about the research, that’s a beneficial unintended consequence, but the infinite scroll seems like a, oh my God, what have we done? We can never end the internet now. How do you approach that? How do you put on your new systems-thinking hat and anticipate good and bad consequences like that?
Sheryl:
Yeah, I mean think I often tell the story of somebody coming up to me after one of my talks where I was talking about designing for outcomes and saying to me, well, we can’t anticipate everything though, so what do we do? And I’m just like, it’s weird way to frame it because if you can’t anticipate everything, doesn’t mean you don’t want to anticipate anything. We should want to better understand what could happen. One thing I didn’t write about in the book, which I find really fascinating are war games and exercises like that, where you have multidisciplinary stakeholders playing out a scenario. So I remember hearing about how a bunch of different people were playing out a scenario about the 2020 election, and there were several people involved in that who were like, well, the president isn’t going to accept the election results.
Sheryl:
And I remember there was a lot of, before that election, there was a lot of denial in the air like that won’t happen, that has never happened. How can that be? How can that be? And people who were saying, I think that’s going to happen, were viewed as almost like, oh my gosh, don’t pull us into the hysteria. But that’s exactly what ended up happening. And I think those who are doing a lot of those modeling exercises that are the equivalent of war games, had actually surfaced those worst case scenarios. And so I do think, and maybe that’s a case of, okay, there’s a distinction between doing that kind of analysis and being like, okay, these are the things that could happen and actually doing something about it. Maybe that was a scale on which it was hard to do things about it.
Sheryl:
But I do think in your frame of decision making, you’re an individual designer in this field or what have you or design strategist or something, and you’re trying to figure out how things might shake out. I have a tool in there, for example, called the features wheel, which I use a lot in my design practice, that just helps you play out how things might happen. And it might be based on some assumptions or what have you, but I do think it might surface some lines of thought that you might not have had before. And this can be used for everything from should our company… I think the example I used in the book is what happens if we have everybody come back to the office? It could be just a very… What feels a small example like that, but then you realize as you’re going through this exercise, there’s all sorts of weird radiating effects or what if our company just went fully remote?
Sheryl:
And I think a lot of us in the working world have had experiences with either of those at this point and can probably rattle off the radiating effects for either of those decisions. And I think these are just tools that activate that mindset of thinking more broadly than just a linear way that things might happen or play out or stopping your thinking at your output. Basically, this is the decision we’re going to make, I guess we’ll see how things shake out. Which isn’t always a bad thing, but I think just being able to respond to what might happen helps make all of us better equipped.
Larry:
You reminded me, I had a guest on, God a few years ago, Eric Best, who used to be a scenario planner at Morgan Stanley, and that’s what they do. Is they get in room and imagine things like imagine an American election that just went completely sideways. And he cited an example of a banker who saved his bank $2 billion by not making some dumb decision because they identified it in that scenario. So I guess one of the points of instilling this systems-thinking mindset is that you’re not doing full-blown scenario planning, but you have a better chance of anticipating. Like you said, you want to be outcomes focused, but you also want to be outcome-influencing aware. I don’t know, I’m trying to think through how the dynamics of it.
Sheryl:
Yeah, yeah. I mean the book is divided into two parts. One is understanding the status quo. So in order to make decisions about where you can make change, you need to understand what’s going on in whatever the problem space is today, and more thoroughly analyzing that than we probably do in a lot of cases. And then the second part of the book is envisioning the future. And so there’s both some practical ways of doing that and very provocation-oriented ways of doing that. And I think the practical ways are creating things like a theory of change. We see this quite often in policy spaces, like global health and what have you, but I think it’s actually a really nice tool for designers to use. Because it’s meant to consider not just what you plan to happen when people are using whatever it is you’re designing, but also what should the outcomes and impact be beyond that?
Sheryl:
What are you seeking far beyond whatever it is you’re designing? And then you go into the space of, okay, then now what are the potential unintended consequences of this? And so what’s nice about creating a theory of change is you can identify areas that might not actually fall into the design space. You might be dependent on… If you’re doing civic design, you might be dependent on certain policy decisions in order for there to be success. If you’re thinking about, okay, how can we communicate and educate people about getting the latest vaccine booster, one thing that can grease the wheels on that is what are the policy decisions in that municipality or state? What are the things that can help this be successful?
Sheryl:
I think there was a recent example of that very thing in Seattle of the Seattle school district did some very specific outreach things about getting one of the vaccine boosters. And the vaccination rate was like 80% or something in those specific communities. And it had to do with basically using the school as a point of communication. And I think it’s really hard to come up with ways of holistically problem solving without really understanding first about what are all the different points of intervention. Because you could set up a vaccine stand on some street, and maybe that doesn’t have a dent in vaccination rates. Because it’s just not combined with anything else that might make that successful. So it is really problem solving in the context of other problem solving.
Larry:
Right, because you’re reminding me now, I think a lot of designers and content people come up against government stuff in terms of regulation and compliance and things like that. But you’re talking about going, this is more not policy analysis, but understanding how you can leverage things that are going on in that bigger system to accomplish a goal that… Like, you might just be designing an app to help people sign up to get a booster. But it becomes something much bigger because of that insight.
Larry:
Hey, Sheryl, I can’t believe it. There’s like a thousand other things I want to ask you about, but we’re coming up close to time and I like to keep these around a half hour. I just want to make sure though, before we wrap up, is there anything last, anything that we haven’t got to yet that you want to make sure we cover or that’s just on your mind about integrating systems thinking and a design practice?
Sheryl:
I don’t think so. I do think there is an aspect about systems thinking that people find really intimidating. Which is like they usually associate it with causal loop diagramming, which can be these dynamic maps that people create that map forces, and then you plug in an intervention or something and then see how the map might change. I don’t do any of that. I do sometimes create causal loop diagrams, but not always. And I just want to reinforce there are many other tools in systems thinking. And then also if you are using causal loop diagrams, it can literally be two causal loops that are telling the story about root cause. I think the point of using these tools is as a means of both analysis and alignment with your stakeholders. They’re not meant to be an end in and of itself. They’re meant to lead to how you make decisions in order to solve the problems that you’re identifying. So I just wanted to reinforce that because it comes up quite often actually.
Larry:
Yeah, no, and you’re reminding me why I keep these to a half hour, because I could nerd out on tools and techniques, all that stuff. Because you have that whole… And I’ll just plug some of the stuff in the book. You talk about the hard… And I think that’s where the causal loop stuff comes in. That hard systems analysis versus a softer approach that you talk about. And also Karl Popper’s “is this a clock thing or a cloud thing”. So I’ll just hint at some of the benefits of the book that there’s other explorations of that concept you just mentioned. Well, thanks so much, Sheryl. I really appreciate this conversation and I really do wish we could continue, but I just hope folks get a chance to read the book and benefit from it. Because I really do feel like this is a truly unique advance in our profession, and I’m excited to see more systems thinking take hold here.
Sheryl:
Yeah, I agree. I would love to see more of that.
Larry:
Well, fingers crossed. Thanks so much, Sheryl.
Sheryl:
Yeah, thank you so much for having me. This was a fun conversation.
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