Let’s add a couple of descriptors to this to illustrate how complicating system factors can be — A costly medical device used for the prevention of injury is in a heavily scheduled operating room, in a surgical unit in a small hospital, in a city with a majority of citizens below the poverty line, in a country with a privatized healthcare system that has expensive universities that hire experienced professors to teach students who become doctors who have a lot of student loan debt, who work at understaffed hospitals that buy the medical device. Then, it is used on the patient, only succeeding in preventing injury 50% of the time, and the patient is billed.

Imagine you are designing an app that tracks the use and availability of the device at the hospital. Complexity grows exponentially when you consider the relationship between any one of these things and the medical device.

Understandably, the edges of systems can be difficult to define. They are usually drawn artificially to preserve the sanity of the person trying to understand a problem within them. The boundaries can be framed using the rules of a system — what is the system doing? Then, you can begin to make sense of the problem you’re solving by asking about the system’s goals— what would we rather it do instead? Understanding the behavior and relationships between the parts of a system gives you clues about where to make changes. While this works well for smaller systems, the complexity is often too much to handle when you want to solve problems within larger systems.

This is where the term “wicked problems” fits in nicely. Coined by design theorists Rittel and Webber in 1973, it describes problems with no solutions because each symptom of the problem is yet another wicked problem.

Poverty, war, famine, disease, housing shortages, addiction, etc, are all wicked problems that arise from and contribute to other wicked problems. They can’t be solved outright. I’m sure most designers find the view at this elevation, overlooking all of humanity’s critical issues, to be staggering, and it may lead to feeling quite hopeless.

However, this is where systems thinking can really shine.

Donella Meadows, the late environmental scientist and badass author on systems thinking, defines it as “an interconnected set of elements that is coherently organized in a way that achieves something.” She gained notoriety as a lead author of Limits to Growth (1972), a book that laid out how global resources are running out and brought to focus the ridiculousness of believing that growth can go on forever. More than 50 years later, most of us are still grinding away at growing companies while occasionally casting a glance toward sustainability.

Her book Thinking in Systems (2009) brilliantly explains how systems operate and, most importantly, how they can be influenced. She describes the “leverage points” that affect systems from least to most effective. The least effective leverage points aim to influence the numbers going in and out—more or less of something already being done, or, as Meadows says, “Diddling with the details, arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.”

Moderately effective leverage points include changing the rules and how information flows in systems, which is the range at which power dynamics become abundantly clear. Meadows writes, “If you want to understand the deepest malfunctions of systems, pay attention to the rules and to who has power over them.” She states, “Power over rules is real power.”

The ultimate leverage points have to do with paradigms. Meadows explains, “Paradigms are the sources of systems. From them, from shared social agreements about the nature of reality, come system goals and information flows, feedbacks, stocks, flows, and everything else about systems.” Paradigms are not just surface-level ways of thinking about the world — they’re deeply embedded in our minds, and challenging them threatens to shatter our beliefs about what we know to be good and true.

The term paradigm shift comes from the work of Thomas Kuhn, who describes them in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) as schools of thought breaking from previously understood scientific ideas based upon the finding of new information. The new information radically changes what scientists believe, dramatically raising doubt about or disproving previous ideas. The examples he uses are primarily framed within positivist scientific research, such as the discovery of oxygen or gravity. The term paradigm shift has been popularized to mean something more abstract in popular culture — changing a mindset or way of thinking about oneself and the world. To remove rose-colored glasses, perhaps.

Meadow’s use of the term seems to blend Kuhn’s original meaning without the rigid dualism of Western science. Paradigms are based on what we believe to be true and can be rooted in scientific data, yet they are influenced by culture, and so are the relationships between everything as part of a connected system. Paradigms are cultural and awkwardly human, not simply the breeding grounds for new scientific theory. Even without applying a sociological lens to it, Kuhn described paradigm shifts as extremely controversial, and the proponents of them were viewed as heretics — some, like Galileo, stood trial, and others were exiled from their professional communities until many years or decades later when their ideas finally took hold.

Professional communities, companies, and even more broadly, cultures resist this kind of change at all costs because it is disruptive and dangerous to the status quo. However, paradigm shifts are needed more than ever to shift us away from worsening the growing list of wicked problems we face. Meadows doesn’t describe it light-heartedly, saying paradigms are the hardest things to change about a system — “But there is nothing physical or expensive or even slow in the process of paradigm change. In a single individual it can happen in a millisecond. All it takes is a click in the mind, a falling of scales from the eyes, a new way of seeing.” For one person to shift is easy but it is a different story for the masses.

According to Meadows, the most effective leverage point is the ability to transcend paradigms. The power of this thought ultimately leads people looking for answers to go deeper into systems thinking — it doesn’t dogmatically prescribe processes, and there are no specific frameworks to follow. Yet, it gives us a platform for making sense of the problems we aim to solve that is far from being in the weeds and beyond seeing any forest for the trees — because maybe there are no forests here at all.

UX professionals can find liberation in Meadow’s advice to “keep oneself unattached from the arena of paradigms, to stay flexible, to realize that no paradigm is ‘true,’ that everyone, including the one that sweetly shapes your own worldview, is a tremendously limited understanding of an immense and amazing universe that is far beyond human comprehension.”

Are we, as companies and individuals, willing to acknowledge the paradigms from which we profit, understanding there may be conflict in knowing, and still return to work the next day? It can be argued that we need to find ways to approach the edges of our paradigms and shift our perspectives without losing sight of the importance of our daily lives and risk throwing it all to the wind. Or worse, we risk rejecting what we learn altogether, burying our heads in the sand, and continuing to diddle with details as we pursue the fallacy of endless growth. If what systems thinking teaches us is true, following through to the point of releasing our blindfolds should make us the kind of designers that our world desperately needs.

Is this what UX professionals sign up for when we call ourselves “Systems Designers” or what we offer by listing systems thinking as a skill on our LinkedIn profiles? Is it a buzzword or the sign of a profession on the edge of radically transcending paradigms? That’ll depend on how willing we are to get comfortable with the uncomfortable. UX should embrace the discomfort and not let the opportunity to harness the revolutionary and transcendent power of systems thinking pass us by.