StairsWe practice Community Based System Dynamics, and use Sense-making methods in artful ways that produce remarkable results. We elicit deeply held knowledge, biases, and worldviews in respectful ways, while helping organizations and communities design their own representations of this precious individual and social intellectual capital so they might use it to build collaborations and create the means to solve problems and accomplish desired change. This leads to a number of helpful outcomes.

Related to community research and deep listening, Sagis’ Sensemaking Discovery is both a research approach and a communicating strategy for proceeding both humbly and with discipline in dialogue about people’s experiences. Remarkable insights are surfaced and articulated with this approach, which lead to effective collaborations and the potential to effect important social change.

When surfaced, well-articulated knowledge and mental models allow people from different sectors to collaborate more efficiently and effectively, leading to high quality community collaborations, organization and board strategic planning, and any initiative where getting a group of people working together effectively and consciously is essential.

Related to leadership transitions, it allows this knowledge to be represented and transferred, both to the new leader as well as within the organization. These “deep smarts”, accumulated over years of work and typically embedded in the subconscious, are often the most valuable business knowledge and of tremendous competitive advantage.

Here is a model of suburban child hunger and how families make the decision to seek food resources. This was co-created by a group of community stakeholders to help understand system relations that might be used to create ways to improve child well being. We have created models for affordable housing, homelessness, addiction, education, and the like.