🌍 Mapping the Patterns: Four Practices Powering Systems (Re)Design
Four field-tested practices for building lasting systems change
Systems Design Lab helps social sector organizations use systems thinking and human-centered design to collaborate, innovate, and amplify their community impact. We work with technical tools, but we focus most on people. We are really good at bringing together diverse perspectives to make radical changes that lead to radical social change.
TL;DR // Systems change starts with people changing how they work together. At SDL, we’ve identified four key practices that support lasting transformation: building trust, bridging silos, integrating diverse tools and perspectives, and designing for sustainability. These aren’t one-size-fits-all solutions; they’re adaptable patterns drawn from real-world work in places like Vallejo Unified and Jackson County. When teams adopt them, they don’t just fix problems…they build the capacity to evolve.
Systems don’t change until people change how they work together. This is a fundamental principle that guides everything we do at SDL. After working alongside organizations in education, public health, and beyond, we’ve started to see something bigger than any single project. When we zoom out across sectors and geographies, patterns begin to emerge. From those patterns, we’ve distilled four core practices that define how we approach systems design for meaningful, sustainable change:
Attend to the human side of change by cultivating collaboration and trust
Build alliances and shared understandings across silos
Interweave tools and bodies of knowledge to strengthen practice
Set up enduring practices for continuous innovation
These aren’t formulas; they’re field-tested ways of helping teams move from fragmentation to flow. Today, we’re pausing to map the pattern and bringing in recent case stories from Jackson County Public Health and Vallejo City Unified School District to layer in some examples. This post is for practitioners, partners, and leaders who are trying to lead collective change without losing their people in the process.
Attend to the Human Side of Change by Cultivating Collaboration and Trust
Pattern: The most enduring change happens when people feel connected, respected, and ready to do the hard work together.
Every time we ask leaders what mattered most from the time we worked together to organize collective action, they say some version of this: “We were able to trust each other again.” That’s not accidental; it’s actually something we design for. We call it “moving at the speed of trust” because no strategy sticks without it.
In our work in Vallejo Unified, we slowed to make implicit assumptions and dynamics explicit. On the walls of the district's central office, a timeline spanning two decades told a shared story, not one of failure, but of endurance and hope. From there, honest conversations flourished because we took the time to build relationships before digging into data and designing ways to improve. Eventually, once-fragmented departments began to function like a pit crew: interdependent, attuned, and unified in their focus on student outcomes.
In Jackson County, support from our team enabled internal leaders to step back from logistics and facilitation, allowing them to engage more closely with the community to make sense of the data together by sitting in small groups and asking genuine questions. The shift wasn’t just strategic; it was personal. One member shared:
Having you all leading activities and discussion at Summit was incredible; we were able to do so much more in terms of relationship building and navigating conflict in the moment than we would've been able to if we were worried about the agenda.
Both initiatives prioritized reflection cycles, community agreements, and “moving at the speed of trust.” It’s easy to skip these pieces, but in our experience, they’re often the difference between short-lived strategy and sustained transformation.
Build Alliances and Shared Understandings Across Silos
Pattern: Collective action begins when people perceive themselves as part of a shared system, and when structures encourage them to act accordingly.
A common challenge in many complex systems is siloed efforts and fragmented communication. As we all know, these conditions can lead to duplicated efforts, misalignment, and resource waste — not to mention frustration! We find that the antidote is creating opportunities for people to see, feel, and understand their interdependencies.
In Vallejo Unified, alignment didn’t begin with a plan. It began with people — from the district, county, and state — sitting down together to build a shared timeline of their system’s history. They mapped turning points, identified tensions, and surfaced long-held assumptions. That act of storytelling allowed them to see how their work is necessarily intertwined, and it became the foundation for working across boundaries.
A similar shift unfolded in Jackson County. Instead of top-down implementation, Jackson County Public Health chose to become a convener bringing together stakeholders from housing, early education, mental health, and more. They held a fundamental belief that they could achieve more together than each of them could alone. Their Innovators Network didn’t just advise; it helped co-lead the work, surfacing priorities that reflected the community’s lived experience.
Interweave Tools and Bodies of Knowledge to Strengthen Practice
Pattern: Meaningful systems change requires not just integration across organizational boundaries but also across approaches to change management. This integration builds a stronger foundation for sustained improvement.
Lately, we’ve been thinking about how we’ve never met a tool that could transform a system on its own. But we’ve also never seen transformation happen without tools. Yet, so much capacity-building work relies on teaching discrete tools or relying on outside “experts” to introduce new assessments, protocols, or exercises.
We have come to find that one of our team’s greatest assets is our interdisciplinary training. While we have overlapping training in continuous improvement, we have different specialties that complement one another (Ke in legal advocacy and organizing, Cami in applied anthropology, and Emma in project management and organization development). We rarely rely on a single approach or lead with a single discipline; we’re an eclectic bunch! This allows us to really push each other on why a particular approach is the right fit for the moment. For example, when I (Emma) may want to bring in a project management tool, Cami often reminds me that it may be perceived as oppressive and go against my goal of co-designing. Or, if Ke wants to come in with a strong advocacy stance, sometimes I can help paint a longer-term, more scaffolded approach.
Let’s look at an example. In Vallejo, we moved between timeline mapping, artifact analysis and synthesis, and reflection-based retreats. In Jackson County, systems thinking blended with human-centered design and facilitation practices to emphasize inquiry, iteration, and power-sharing. In both cases, design choices weren’t just about deliverables; we thought critically about how to leverage the best of each of our bodies of knowledge to reshape how teams use tools to learn, sense-make, and move forward together.
Set Up Enduring Practices for Continuous Innovation
Pattern: Systemic change isn’t about quick fixes; it’s about creating conditions that enable organizations to continually evolve and improve.
The work doesn’t end when the retreat is over or the plan is drafted. We focus heavily on designing internal systems, structures, and routines that can be sustained even after we are no longer involved. It’s one thing to create a burst of change; it’s another to make it last — especially in resource-constrained systems.
Across both stories, we noticed a key difference: instead of adding new roles to manage complexity, teams changed the roles they already played. In Vallejo, leadership itself became the lever for coherence. In Jackson County, existing staff stepped into facilitative roles, with clear structures and evolving responsibilities.
Compare that with what we’re seeing in many systems right now: a tendency to add roles such as navigators, coaches, or liaisons in response to coordination problems. These roles help, but they’re often difficult to sustain because they’re resource-intensive and straddle boundaries without clear ownership.
Sometimes, the boldest move is not to add more — but to remove friction. To simplify. To design for coherence from the start. We worked hard to seed new habits and ways of working that could outlast any single consultant or funding stream.
💡 Designing for Sustainability
These practices didn’t come from theory. They came from watching real people try to do real work, in messy, high-stakes systems. They emerged from story, struggle, and iteration, and they point to a deeper truth: Systems don’t change until people do. And people don’t change until they have space — structurally and relationally — to show up differently.
If we want to build systems that serve people better, we must support the people inside them to fundamentally shift how they engage with complexity, uncertainty, and one another. That includes facing what’s hard, not bypassing it. When organizations adopt these core practices, they don’t just solve immediate problems; they build the capacity to innovate and adapt over time.
Our hope is that by naming these patterns, others can adapt them in their own contexts. Whether you’re building a new initiative or rethinking a decades-old structure, we hope this provides you with the language (and a little courage!) to begin.
Why This Matters
Across every system, we hear the same hunger: to do work that’s more adaptive, more relational, and more real. These four practices don’t promise quick fixes, but they do offer a way forward, especially for those navigating complexity, siloed systems, or big-picture change.
If you see yourself in these stories—or if you’re mapping patterns in your own work—we’d love to hear from you. What practices have helped your team move from ideas to impact? What have you learned about designing for systems change?
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Love this quote from you…”Systems don’t change until people do. And people don’t change until they have space — structurally and relationally — to show up differently.”