Systemic Design Club Japan
Talk
Grateful to ACTANT and Ryuichi Nambu for inviting me to speak at the Systemic Design Club Japan. Was a pleasure to engage with such a diverse group of professionals from design, policy, and finance on the topic of portfolio approach.
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During my talk, we explored:
→ The importance of identifying the nature of the challenges we are addressing.
→ What a portfolio approach is and its usefulness in addressing complex systemic challenges.
→ Understanding the phenomena of a challenge, both pasts and presents, before designing futures.
→ Balancing work at both the conceptual and technical scales of the challenge.
→ Building new logics: not being bound by rigid structures of knowledge, but instead re-ordering information in ways that open up new ways of seeing and acting.
During my talk, we explored:
→ The importance of identifying the nature of the challenges we are addressing.
→ What a portfolio approach is and its usefulness in addressing complex systemic challenges.
→ Understanding the phenomena of a challenge, both pasts and presents, before designing futures.
→ Balancing work at both the conceptual and technical scales of the challenge.
→ Building new logics: not being bound by rigid structures of knowledge, but instead re-ordering information in ways that open up new ways of seeing and acting.
A few key takeaways:
The questions from the community were particularly revealing, highlighting the shared threads many of us are grappling with:
⦿ How do we resource and fund this way of coordinating?
⦿ How do we align on shared future directions? And what roles of orchestration are needed?
⦿ How are we designing time, navigating different time horizons, and orienting around them effectively?
⦿ What capacities are needed to enable systemic transformation?
It’s clear that moving toward a portfolio way of working requires rethinking roles, time, resources, and the ways we collectively make sense of complex challenges.
References
Index