AIS offers systems thinking workshops for multisectoral groups

The Climate and Disaster Resilience Program of the Ateneo Institute of Sustainability offered a systems thinking workshop from 11-12 April 2024. The two-day workshop, “Systems Thinking Workshop for Resilience Planning,” was offered to stakeholders from different sectors: local government units, civil society, and the academe, and was held at Heyden Hall in the Manila Observatory. Ms Jean Jardeleza-Mijares and Mr Daniel C Ratilla, Program Manager and Program Officer for Climate and Disaster Resilience, led the workshop and guided the participants through each of the activities.

This workshop was AIS’ first public offering of a systems thinking workshop. Prior to this, the CDR program had piloted these activities to smaller groups among students and staff of the university. It featured activities from the City Resilience Toolkit: A Compendium of Systems Thinking Activities for Resilience Planning, or CResT. Activities in the toolkit were designed using systems thinking frameworks or adapted and enhanced from existing activities to better suit the purpose of applying systems thinking in resilience planning over three phases: Problem Diagnosis, Stakeholder Engagement, and Action Planning. Systems thinking approaches are useful in enhancing resilience by uncovering feedback and hidden structures that might affect a resilience issue, fostering dialogue and helping to articulate coherent storylines to achieve intended futures.

For this initial workshop, AIS opened a total of 30 slots. Participants were able to explore systems thinking, and remarked that they were able to recognize familiar elements to systems thinking that they practice in daily life, and the workshop was able to provide the language to help identify these. Among the tools introduced, they were able to leverage causal loop diagrams to better articulate the connections between socio-cultural, environmental, and technical factors in resilience. Exploring system archetypes also allowed them to see why certain solutions do not always solve problems, due to a tendency to focus only on the symptomatic, or what is seen, rather than fundamental issues and root causes.

Overall, participants expressed how they will be able to use the activities for their own internal operations on understanding problems, assessing how to engage stakeholders, and making clear plans and avoiding unwanted consequences as much as possible in crafting their agenda and goals.

AIS, through the CDR program, will offer more workshops for the community in the coming months. To stay up to date on such offerings, kindly refer to AIS’ interest check on public trainings and workshops HERE.