Systems Inquiry: Explore Resources and Tools

Systems Inquiry is an iterative process. You don’t need to know everything about a system before you begin—and you don’t need to use every tool on this page. Everyone starts by framing their inquiry. From there, choose tools and approaches based on what you need to understand, the issue you are exploring, the perspectives and information available to you, and your own capacity. As you learn, return to your original framing. What you discover may complicate your assumptions, reveal perspectives or connections you hadn’t considered, or change the questions you want to ask next.

How Systems Inquiry Works

Infographic illustrating an iterative Systems Inquiry process with four stages: Frame Your Inquiry, Explore, Reframe, and Explore Again as Needed. 1. Frame Your Inquiry — Identify the challenge. Define what you will explore. Start with the social, civic, or environmental challenge or outcome you want to understand. Then develop an initial frame that makes your inquiry focused enough to explore. Questions include: What am I trying to understand? What am I seeing or experiencing that leads me to identify this as a challenge? Who experiences the issue—and might people experience or understand it differently? Where does my inquiry take place? What time period matters? What parts of the issue will I explore—and what will I leave outside my inquiry for now? What do I already think I know? What am I assuming? Whose knowledge or perspective might help me understand the issue differently? What do I need to learn next? The section concludes: “Write down your initial frame. It isn’t a final definition of the issue. It’s a starting point that gives your inquiry enough focus to begin exploring.” 2. Explore — Choose tools based on what you need to understand. Six areas are shown. People & Perspectives: Think, Feel, Care; Journey Mapping; Lived Experience. Relationships, Assets & Power: Actor Mapping; Asset Mapping; Power Mapping; 5Rs. History & Change Over Time: Timeline Mapping; Trend Mapping; Colonial Influences. Patterns & Interconnections: Causes Diagram; Iceberg Model; Causal Loop Diagrams. What’s Already Happening: Impact Gaps; Gap Analysis; Actor Mapping; Asset Mapping. Where Might the System Be Influenced?: Levers Analysis; Causal Loops; 5Rs. 3. Reframe — Return to your initial frame. What has your inquiry changed? Questions include: What do I understand differently now? Which assumptions have changed or been challenged? Whose experiences or perspectives have complicated my understanding? Have I discovered important relationships, histories, structures, or conditions outside my original boundaries? Do I need to change the scope or boundaries of my inquiry? What am I still missing? What do I need to explore next? 4. Explore Again as Needed. Inquiry is iterative. Keep cycling through exploration and reframing to build a richer, more connected understanding of the system over time. A circular diagram reinforces the repeating sequence: Frame, Explore, Reframe.

The question should guide the tool—not the other way around. You might use one tool or several. You might also decide that reading, data analysis, observation, archival research, or conversations with people who know or experience the system will help you more. Choose approaches that fit both your inquiry and your capacity.

Systems Inquiry Resource Library

The resources below offer different ways to investigate a system. The numbered section labels and annotations can help you decide which tools might be useful for your inquiry. A note about language: Some external resources use terms such as problem and solution. In Systems Inquiry at Grinnell, we often use language such as challenges, conditions, and outcomes to remind ourselves that complex systems rarely have a single problem, cause, or solution.

Infographic titled “Systems Inquiry Resource Library” showing nine numbered resource-library sections arranged in a three-by-three grid. Each section includes an illustration representing the type of inquiry. 1. What Is a Systems Problem and Where to Start — Illustrated with a magnifying glass containing a question mark and a circular arrow. 2. Problem Framing Resources — Illustrated with a checklist and pencil. 3. People & Perspectives — Illustrated with three people and speech bubbles representing different perspectives. 4. Relationships, Assets & Power — Illustrated with interconnected nodes linking a hand, a group of people, and an institution. 5. History & Change Over Time — Illustrated with a calendar, clock, and arrow representing change over time. 6. Patterns & Interconnections — Illustrated with a magnifying glass containing a bar graph alongside interconnected nodes and wavy lines representing patterns. 7. What’s Already Being Done — Illustrated with a checklist, three people, a magnifying glass containing a bar graph, and a lightbulb, representing investigation of existing efforts, people, resources, and ideas. 8. Where Might the System Be Influenced? — Illustrated with a target and arrows pointing in multiple directions, representing potential places within a system where shifts might influence outcomes. 9. Visual Mapping & Communicating Your Understanding — Illustrated with a computer displaying an interconnected systems map and a speech bubble representing communication.

Provides a conceptual introduction to approaching complex challenges through systems inquiry and analysis.

Dr. Katharine McGowan | Map the System Canada

Best for: Students who want additional background before choosing specific inquiry tools.

Watch What Is a Systems Problem and How to Start Your Analysis

Thumbnail labeled “2 Problem Framing Resources.” A teal-bordered card shows a clipboard with three green checkmarks and a pencil, surrounded by a dotted teal arc, representing tools for defining and framing an inquiry.

Learn how to refine the scope of your systems inquiry. Return here as your knowledge grows!

a. Map the System Problem Framing Activity

These activities can help you identify the challenge you want to investigate, establish initial parameters for your inquiry, surface assumptions, and consider how the way you frame an issue shapes what you investigate.

Best for: Everyone at the beginning of an inquiry—and again as your understanding evolves.

Individual Problem Framing Activity

Group Problem Framing Activity

b. Student Guide to Mapping a System

Anna Johnson, Daniela Papi-Thornton, and James Stauch | Map the System

A broad introduction to investigating and mapping complex social and environmental challenges.

Best for: Getting oriented to systems inquiry or beginning a larger investigation.

Student Guide to Mapping a System

c. Identifying a Systems Challenge

Dr. Katharine McGowan | Map the System Canada

Introduces ways of recognizing and beginning to investigate a challenge that involves a complex system.

Best for: Determining the scope and boundaries of your inquiry.

Watch Identifying a Systems Challenge

d. Framing Your Problem

Map the System Oxford

Explores how framing influences the questions you ask and what you investigate.

Best for: Developing or reconsidering an initial frame.

Watch Framing Your Problem

Thumbnail labeled “3 People & Perspectives.” A blue-bordered card shows three people in blue, teal, and purple beneath three different speech bubbles, representing different experiences, viewpoints, and ways of understanding a system.

No one sees an entire system. These resources can help you explore how people experience and understand a system differently—and recognize where your own understanding may be incomplete.

a. Think, Feel, Care

Project Zero | Harvard Graduate School of Education

A thinking routine for considering how people in different positions within a system might understand it, respond to it, and experience it.

Best for: Identifying perspectives you may not have considered and generating questions to investigate.

Explore Think, Feel, Care

This is a resource for all ages. Remember: Imagining another person’s perspective isn’t the same as knowing it. When possible and appropriate, learn from people themselves.

b. Journey Mapping

Traces how a person or group encounters a process, service, organization, institution, or system over time.

Best for: Investigating how people may experience the same system differently and identifying important points of interaction.

View a Journey Mapping Example

Explore the Journey Mapping Resource

c. Navigating Lived Experience in Your Systems Thinking Research

Maatomiikamootstakii/Latasha Calf Robe | Map the System Canada

Explores how lived experience can inform systems research, including how our own identities and experiences may influence framing, interpretation, and relationships.

Best for: Considering whose experience and knowledge are shaping your understanding—including your own.

Explore Navigating Lived Experience

d. Identifying Colonial Influences in Systems

Maatomiikamootstakii/Latasha Calf Robe | Map the System Canada

Supports investigation of how colonial histories and structures may continue to shape contemporary systems.

Best for: Exploring historical power, institutions, land, governance, identity, relationships, or access within a system.

Watch Identifying Colonial Influences in Systems

Thumbnail labeled “4 Relationships, Assets & Power.” A green-bordered card shows interconnected blue, teal, purple, and gold nodes above icons of an open hand, a group of people, and an institution, representing relationships among people and organizations as well as resources, assets, influence, and power within a system.

Knowing who is connected to a system is only part of the story. These tools can help you investigate relationships, existing capacities and resources, and differences in access, influence, and decision-making power.

a. Actor Mapping

Identifies people, communities, organizations, institutions, and other actors connected to an issue and explores relationships among them.

Best for: Understanding who is connected to an issue and how they are connected.

Explore the Actor Mapping Resource

b. Asset Mapping

Shifts attention from what a community or system appears to lack toward the knowledge, skills, relationships, networks, organizations, institutions, spaces, cultural resources, and other capacities that already exist.

Best for: Making sure your inquiry recognizes existing strengths and resources rather than viewing people or communities primarily through needs or deficits.

Consider: What knowledge already exists? What are people already doing? What relationships and resources are already present? What might I miss if I look only for needs?

Explore the Participatory Asset Mapping Toolkit

c. Power Mapping

Adds an important dimension to actor mapping by examining how people and organizations are positioned differently within a system.

Best for: Investigating how authority, influence, resources, access, and decision-making power are distributed.

Consider: Who has formal authority? Who has informal influence? Who controls or has access to resources? Whose knowledge carries weight? Who has access to decision-makers? Who experiences the consequences of decisions but has relatively little influence over them?

Explore the Power Mapping Tool

d. 5Rs Framework

USAID

Examines Resources, Roles, Relationships, Rules, and Results to develop a broader understanding of how actors interact within a system.

Best for: Investigating how relationships, formal and informal rules, resources, and different actors’ roles contribute to system outcomes.

Explore the 5Rs Framework

Additional 5Rs Resource

Thumbnail labeled “5 History & Change Over Time.” A gold-bordered card shows a calendar and clock connected by a dotted path ending in an arrow, representing the exploration of historical events, decisions, trends, and changes over time that help explain how a system came to work as it does today.

Systems develop over time. These tools can help you investigate how past events and decisions continue to shape present conditions and how important conditions have changed.

A useful distinction: A timeline asks What happened and when? A trend map asks What has been changing over time? Using both may reveal connections neither would show alone.

a. Timeline Mapping

FSG

Places important events, decisions, activities, policies, and other milestones in chronological order.

Best for: Understanding how the system came to work the way it does today.

FSG Guide to Timeline Mapping

CEI Timeline Mapping Resource

b. Trend Mapping

FSG

Tracks relevant trends influencing a system over time and can reveal longer-term changes that aren’t apparent when examining individual events.

Best for: Investigating what has been changing over time and how those changes may relate to the system you’re studying.

FSG Guide to Trend Mapping

Thumbnail labeled “6 Patterns & Interconnections.” A purple-bordered card shows a magnifying glass examining an ascending bar graph alongside a network of interconnected blue, teal, purple, and gold nodes and blue wavy lines. The image represents looking for recurring patterns, relationships, connections, and interactions among different parts of a complex system.

Complex systems aren’t simply collections of separate parts. These tools can help you investigate recurring patterns and the relationships among conditions that may contribute to the outcomes you see.

a. Causes Diagram: Breaking Down a Complex Issue

Nesta | DIY Toolkit

Identifies multiple conditions that may contribute to an outcome and begins exploring relationships among them.

Best for: Moving beyond a single-cause explanation and generating questions about interconnected conditions.

Explore the Causes Diagram

b. Iceberg Model

Compass Education

Encourages you to look beneath immediately visible events to investigate recurring patterns, structures, and underlying assumptions or ways of thinking.

Best for: Asking why similar outcomes keep occurring and what may be sustaining those patterns.

Watch an Introduction to the Iceberg Model

c. Causal Loop Diagrams

Map relationships among different factors and help reveal feedback loops through which changes in one part of a system can influence others.

Best for: Investigating interconnections, recurring patterns, and reinforcing or balancing feedback.

Learn to Read Causal Loop Diagrams

d. Stacey Matrix

Offers one way of thinking about situations with different degrees of certainty and agreement.

Best for: Distinguishing relatively bounded or complicated situations from complex situations that may require greater inquiry, learning, and adaptation.

Explore the Stacey Matrix

Thumbnail labeled “7 What’s Already Being Done.” A teal-bordered card shows a checklist, three people, a magnifying glass examining a bar graph, and a lightbulb, connected by a dotted path. The image represents investigating who is already engaged with an issue, what efforts and approaches already exist, and what can be learned from them before assuming something new is needed.

Systems Inquiry doesn’t begin by assuming something new needs to be created. Understanding what people and organizations are already doing—and what knowledge, relationships, and resources already exist—is part of understanding the system.

a. Impact Gaps Canvas

Daniela Papi-Thornton

Helps investigate both an issue and the landscape of existing responses before assuming something new needs to be created.

Best for: Understanding who is already engaged, what approaches exist, and where there may be gaps or opportunities for further learning.

Explore the Impact Gaps Canvas

Download the Impact Gaps Canvas

b. Gap Analysis

Investigates the space between what is currently happening and what may be needed or desired. In Systems Inquiry, identifying a gap is a beginning—not a conclusion.

Best for: Investigating where needs, experiences, resources, knowledge, or existing efforts don’t appear to align and asking what might explain those gaps.

Consider: What appears to be missing? For whom? Who identifies it as a gap? What already exists that I may not know about? What conditions contribute to the gap? Has someone tried to address it before? What happened?

Explore Gap Analysis through the Impact Gaps Canvas

c. Asset Mapping

Asset Mapping is particularly useful alongside Gap Analysis. Looking for gaps without looking for assets can create a distorted picture of a community or system.

Best for: Asking not only What’s missing? but also What’s already here?

Explore the Participatory Asset Mapping Toolkit

d. Actor Mapping

Actor Mapping can help identify who is already engaged, what roles different actors play, and how existing efforts relate to one another.

Best for: Understanding the existing landscape of people, organizations, institutions, and relationships.

Explore the Actor Mapping Resource

Thumbnail labeled “8 Where Might the System Be Influenced?” A blue-bordered card shows a bullseye with an arrow hitting its center and multiple arrows radiating outward in different directions. The image represents investigating potential leverage points within a system and considering how a shift in one place might influence other parts of the system or contribute to different outcomes.

Understanding a system can also involve investigating where changes in one area might affect other parts of the system. At this stage, the goal is still understanding, not deciding that you must intervene.

a. Levers Analysis

Donella Meadows | Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System

Meadows’ framework explores different places within a system where shifts may influence how the system behaves—from parameters and information flows to rules, goals, power, and underlying paradigms.

Best for: Investigating where different kinds of shifts might influence how a system behaves and the outcomes it produces.

Consider: What appears to reinforce the outcomes I see? Where might a shift affect other parts of the system? Who has influence over a potential leverage point? What might make change difficult? What else could be affected? What unintended consequences might result?

Explore Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System

Identifying a potential leverage point doesn’t mean you need to act on it. Levers Analysis can deepen your understanding of how a system functions. Whether and how you might contribute is a separate question.

Thumbnail labeled “9 Visual Mapping & Communicating Your Understanding.” A green-bordered card shows a laptop displaying a systems map of interconnected nodes alongside a speech bubble. The image represents visually mapping relationships and connections within a system and communicating what you have learned so others can understand the system and its complexity.

Sometimes making relationships visible can help you understand them. Systems maps might represent people and organizations, experiences, histories, relationships, policies, resources, patterns, power, feedback, or other connections.

There is no single kind of systems map—and a map is never the system itself. It represents what you understand at a particular point in your inquiry.

a. Systems Mapping Examples

A collection of examples showing different ways systems can be represented visually.

Best for: Seeing possibilities before deciding how to represent your own understanding.

View Mapping Resources & Examples

b. Kumu

A digital platform for creating relationship and systems maps.

Best for: Maps involving many actors, relationships, factors, or feedback loops.

Explore Kumu

See Vicki Nolton for access.

c. Canva

A general visual-design platform that can be useful for communicating systems research and creating accessible visual representations.

Best for: Presenting systems learning clearly when sophisticated relational mapping isn’t necessary.

Explore Canva

See Vicki Nolton for access.

d. Crafting Compelling Systems Stories

Dr. Katharine McGowan | Map the System Canada

Focuses on communicating systems research in ways that help others understand complexity without losing the larger story.

Best for: Presentations and other public-facing communication.

Explore Crafting Compelling Systems Stories and other Map the System Canada resources

AI in Systems Thinking: Ethical Considerations and Tools for Students and Educators

Mark McNees | Map the System Canada

Explores uses and ethical considerations associated with AI in systems-thinking research.

Best for: Thinking critically about whether and how AI might support research, synthesis, or visualization.

Watch AI in Systems Thinking

Keep Reframing

Using a tool isn’t the goal. Learning is.

After using a tool, talking with someone, examining data, reading, observing, or otherwise learning more, return to your initial framing and ask:

  • What do I understand differently now?
  • What assumptions have changed or been challenged?
  • Whose knowledge or perspective is still missing?
  • What new relationships, patterns, assets, histories, or power dynamics am I noticing?
  • Does my original framing still make sense?
  • Do I need to change the scope or boundaries of my inquiry?
  • What remains uncertain?
  • What do I need to investigate next?
  • What can I reasonably explore given my time, access, relationships, and capacity?

Then revise your framing and decide what—if anything—you need to explore next.

Your next step might be another tool. Or it might be reading, analyzing data, examining historical records, talking with someone, spending time in a place, taking a course, or sitting with a question longer.

Using one tool thoughtfully may teach you more than using six superficially.

The goal isn’t to complete a set of tools or create the perfect systems map. The goal is to develop a richer, more connected understanding of the system while remaining open to what you haven’t yet learned.

What Comes Next?

What you learn through Systems Inquiry may deepen your understanding on its own. It may also help you consider whether and how you want to use what you’ve learned.

Explore Ways to Apply Your Learning (Hyperlink)