20tretti Bergen, fall 2020

Miro board: https://miro.com/app/board/o9J_klmT-HY=/

As part of a larger project aimed at sustainability oriented innovation within 20tretti, Brooke and Lars-Kristian ran a problem-definition workshop that supports innovation that would contribute to an overarching goal of being fossil fuel free by 2030. The problem definition workshop included teams of representatives from four different companies representing different industries and a public management body from the city of Bergen.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Brooke and Lars-Kristian explaining a feedback loop

 

Participant comments about the workshop:

“If you solve a problem for a single user, that’s great, but if you don’t include some of the important issues, for example at the regulatory level, then it’s really not valuable. One must work with the system and entirety.”

“We saw complexity in the issue that we hadn’t seen before, especially as we came from different perspectives. We saw that there could be different solutions for the same problem. We saw that we could come to a completely different solution than what we had originally thought.”

 

Systems Thinking crash course in collaboration with the Municipality of Bergen, spring 2020

This was our very first application. We have described it in detail in this Notes&Insights article published in the System Dynamics Review.

For this application, some of the key success factors were not so much about how we ran the session online but how we recruited participants. Lars-Kristian spent a lot of time calling people in Bergen and emphasizing that:

• Participants would learn something useful.
• They would receive a a crash-course in systems thinking. This clearly attracted talent.
• The online format reduces barriers for participation of busy people.

It also became obvious that systems thinking and system dynamics are gaining momentum beyond the systems community but that easy access training is limited. This is another motivation behind the Online System Dynamics Collaborative!