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Sense-making from visualising the field of systems change — Illuminate Systems

Sense-making from visualising the field of systems change

Introduction

Illuminate is a collaborative network designed to connect people committed to cultivating the field and practice of systems change towards a just, equitable and regenerative future for all.

We know that to achieve systems change there needs to be a high level of collaboration and coordination, access to valuable frameworks, processes and tools and practitioners from a wide range of lineages. However this emerging field is fragmented, with few connections, and has a greater influence from people and practitioners from a white, western and academic culture.

To tackle this, the Illuminate network set out to support the emergence of systems change practice by visualising the field with hopes to create stronger connections among people, organisations and resources, and to recognise the international field with equity at it’s core. As practitioners ourselves, we realised we needed to use our tools on ourselves to help us to see the wider whole. This project was initiated in 2020 with some initial questions like, as a small group of the larger whole building the field – who are the others? This project was led by the School of System Change, and designed by Eric Berlow – ecologist, complexity scientist and CEO of Vibrant Data Labs – a social impact data science group. We have identified 400 practitioners in the first iteration of the map. One year on we are writing about how we are sense-making and re-organising ourselves for the next stage.

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