This is my own light toolkit for taking a first pass at a system. I put it together for the work I do with practitioners and students, as a way in, not as the whole discipline. It draws on the systems thinking and system dynamics tradition; the work of Donella Meadows, Peter Senge, Jay Forrester, and John Sterman; Elinor Ostrom on shared resources; Michel Godet on scenarios; and the strategic-clarity work of James Ritchie-Dunham, among others. I have simplified all of it on purpose.

The kit follows a simplified path, with a short guide and a printable worksheet for each step: a read-through of the whole, a read-through of each actor's world, a read-through of how they connect, a read-through of the story told as one, and a look at the underlying agreements. The sheets do not claim to be complete. They hand on a frame and a set of moves, not the judgment, which is learned by doing and by going back to the sources.

I am sharing these as they are, because they may be useful to review and use. I cannot promise they will fit any particular situation, and I cannot take responsibility for how they work in yours. Treat them as a starting point, and go to the source work when you want the full depth.

I have recently been working on coding the book into an interactive toolbook that runs on your desktop. See an early version here. It is not yet complete, still has annoying bugs, but it is good enough to serve its purpose.

Open access, released under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.