System mapping
From Faster Than 20
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Examples
- Young Global Leaders: Guide to Influencing Complex Systems. Produced by our friends at The Value Web through a process with the World Economic Forum Young Global Leaders.
- Food System Map. This example only shows reinforcing loops.
- #wethedata was an experiment by an ecologist. He came up with a huge list of nodes through a traditional interviewing process, then used an online tool to allow people to define the relationships. It's a very innovative tool with lots of interesting properties.
Tools
The most common tool for system mapping is Vensim, which is available for both Windows and Mac. There is a freely available evaluation version. It is oriented toward rigorous modeling, and so it's not very user-friendly for generating diagrams.
There's a web-based system mapping tool called Insight Maker.
Kumu can be used for system mapping.
