In this video, Dr Rachel Lilley is interviewing Professor Jonathan Romm and Executive Masters Chair Andreas Wettre. They are talking about the experiences of practising Systems Oriented Design in Teaching and education. The conversation is from November 2024. (Video by Rachel Lilley)
Rachel provided some context for the interview:
All of our students at the Birmingham Leadership Institute work and study part-time; most are in middle to senior management positions (aged 30 to 50), and many are working in the public sector, particularly health, policy and strategy.
My students find systems thinking methodologies both useful and also quite limited/limiting. Mostly because of their applicability in their work environments, largely we believe because they were developed years ago and have not been updated, they can be unwieldy and time consuming in the current working environment.
The perception work that I discussed at the RSD13 keynote has (surprising even to me) offered one way through this. If you like, it has given them a new design principle around perception in the context of systems interventions. This has impacted how they understand themselves in practice and how they work with others and develop their approach. We have also taught systems methodologies critically (to help overcome the issue with applicability and traction). This has also worked well with the students and allowed them to develop their own methodologies and ways of working.
Systems-oriented design also attempts to deal with some of the limitations of systems thinking, offering alternative approaches (drawing on design) and more embodied approaches to practice, considering elements of human perception/psychology. This interview was an excellent opportunity to use it as an example of an alternative approach to systems thinking and design.
The feedback so far is that the students really enjoyed it, so it seems to have worked!
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DR. Rachel Lilley PhD, MPhil, PGCE, is a Senior Fellow with the Birmingham Leadership Institute. She is a close collaborator with Gerald Midgley
Jonathan Romm PhD is a professor and chair of the SOD group at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design
Andreas Wettre is a University Lecturer and Chair of the Executive Master’s Program in Systems Oriented Design at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design.
