Nested and dynamic systems
A free mapping tool for seeing the system you work in, the wider ecosystem it is part of, and the systems operating within it.
Before you get started, quick logistics
Why this matters
Most of us carry a detailed picture of the inside of our own system and a vague one of everything around it.
Most of us work inside a system we can name. A team. A company. A coalition. A sector. We often point our attention within its boundary, on the people and the work in front of us.
Living systems have boundaries as well. A forest has an edge. Animals move within that forest and across its boundaries into neighboring habitats. The watershed it drains into and the meadow beside it have boundaries of their own. Each of these is its own system operating at its own scale, and each one sits in relationship with the others.
The systems we work in behave the same way. What influences and shapes a system is located both inside and outside it. Funding conditions, regulatory shifts, political weather, the sector or movement it belongs to, other groups working the same terrain from a different angle, the communities and markets it depends on. All of that is part of how the system actually operates. Some of it carries resources you may be able to draw on. Some of it will act on your work whether or not you are watching for it.
This tool helps you map that wider picture. Seeing the system in context makes it easier to understand what is shaping it, what it depends on, and where change in one place may create effects somewhere else. You will name the system you work in, zoom out to what contains it, zoom in to what it contains, and look sideways at adjacent systems. Then you will trace what moves across those boundaries.
Donella Meadows described a system as a set of interconnected elements organized in a way that achieves something. Systems thinking has a long lineage across ecology, engineering, public health, economics, organizational design, urban planning, and governance. In nature, living systems are often nested within larger systems and composed of smaller ones. Matter, energy, and information move across their boundaries, and processes at one scale can shape what happens at others. Living systems have been organizing across scales for billions of years, which makes the living world a powerful place to learn how to see these relationships.
Four positions
This tool uses one diagram throughout. Everything else is built on it.
Adapted from the Systems Explorer developed by Curt McNamara and published through The Biomimicry Institute’s Biomimicry Toolbox.
The system of interest is the system you are choosing to examine. That choice sets the frame for everything else. The same organization could be the system of interest, a sub-system, or a parallel system depending on what you are focusing on.
The super-system is the larger environment your system sits inside. It supplies energy, material, and information. In a forest, the super-system might be the watershed it sits within, or at a larger scale, the biome it is part of. In your work it might be a sector, an industry, a movement, a market, or a regulatory environment.
Sub-systems are the systems operating inside your system of interest. Teams, roles, programs, routines, policies, informal networks. A forest contains root networks, soil communities, canopy layers, and the animals moving within it.
Parallel systems sit beside yours, inside the same super-system, at roughly the same scale. Other organizations, other departments, other groups working the same terrain. They have their own sub-systems, and those matter too.
The diagram shows two parallel systems. Real super-systems hold many more. Two is enough to practice with, while remembering that the picture is a sample rather than a complete accounting.
Three things that are true of this arrangement
Every system sits inside a larger one and contains smaller ones. This produces a hierarchy of scales, and each level has its own properties and behaviors.
Some higher-level properties cannot be reduced to or predicted from the parts in isolation. They arise from interactions among the parts, from how those parts are organized within the system, and from how the parts interact with the system’s environment. An ant colony builds ventilated architecture, farms fungus, and allocates labor across castes. Study one ant and none of that appears. These emergent properties arise from many ants following simple rules within a shared environment and organizational structure. Culture, trust, and collective intelligence can work the same way in human systems. They emerge at the group or organizational level from recurring patterns of interaction, norms, incentives, and structures. That is why changing the parts alone, without changing how they relate and are organized, may not change the system overall.
Systems at different scales do not simply sit alongside one another. Resources, forces, and information move between them constantly, sideways as well as up and down. Pressure from a larger system can reshape what sits within it, while enough change within smaller systems can eventually reshape the larger system itself.
One filled-in example
The paragraphs below describe what moves between these systems.
Wholesale prices arrive from the super-system and set what the store can charge. Zoning and rent decide whether it can stay.
A sub-system learns which items people ask for weeks before the buying decisions catch up.
Takes some of the same customers on Saturdays, and also brings people into the neighborhood who then shop on the way home.
Surplus produce that would otherwise be thrown out, which lowers the store’s waste costs.
People run into their neighbors in the aisles. It comes from the store’s location, hours, and regulars, and it is a large part of why the store survives competition from a larger chain a mile away.
Notice how much of what determines this store's future sits outside its walls. That is a key point of the exercise.
Before you begin
Time. Plan for 30 to 60 minutes on your own. With a group, plan for at least twice that.
What you need. Something to write with.
Nothing you write leaves your browser. This tool runs entirely on your own device. If you choose to enter your answers directly into the tool, nothing is submitted, stored, or sent anywhere. There is no account and no live AI. Your place in the tool and your answers stay on this device, so you can close the tab and come back. Start over clears them. Use Print / Save as PDF if you want to keep a copy.
You can print a blank copy and complete it by hand. This works well for a group session.
Working with others. Two or three people mapping the same system separately, then comparing, tends to surface more than any of them would find alone. Where people place the same element at different scales, or disagree about what sits inside the boundary, you have found something worth talking about.
Now name your own system
Choose the system you want to map. Something you can observe and influence. A team, a program, a company, a coalition, a department, a place-based community.
Scale matters less than consistency. Once you choose, stay with that choice throughout. If you start with your team and drift into your whole organization, the map stops describing anything.
The sample for reference
System of interest: an independent grocery store serving one neighborhood.
The definition of a system is adapted from Donella Meadows, Thinking in Systems (2008). The framing, prompts, and application to organizational and social systems are Terradigm's.
Terradigm is a nature-informed strategy platform translating 3.8 billion years of evolutionary intelligence to reimagine the complex systems we depend on. terradigm.org
This tool shows you the shape of the system around your system. It does not tell you what to build.
If mapping surfaced a challenge worth working on, the rest of Terradigm can help you move from seeing the system to designing within it. The Offerings page lays out the range, from guided practitioner tools to a facilitated design sprint using the Terradigm Blueprint.
