Article 2: Systems Thinking and Paradigms

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Article 2: Systems Thinking and Paradigms: From Personal Shifts to Unleashing Systemic Shifts

This is the second article in an 8-week series exploring foundational systems thinking concepts that deepen your social system mapping practice. Originally written for the 2025 RE-AMP Systems Thinking Academy, these concepts help you understand and work more effectively with the living systems you’re mapping.

In the previous article, we explored the Cascade of Inference — the way individual minds rapidly and unconsciously convert experience into belief and action. But none of us does this alone.

We live and think within shared contexts — cultural narratives, institutional norms, inherited assumptions. These collective currents shape our individual cascades, influencing what we pay attention to, how we interpret events, and which actions feel possible or appropriate.

For sumApp users: When you’re mapping a system, you’re not just capturing individual relationships—you’re revealing the shared paradigms that shape how people think, connect, and act within that system. For example, if your map shows that funding relationships flow in only one direction, or that certain types of organizations are consistently central while others remain peripheral, or that collaboration happens only within sectors but rarely across them—these patterns reflect deeper beliefs about power, legitimacy, and “how things should work.” Understanding paradigms helps you ask better questions about these patterns, interpret what they reveal about underlying assumptions, and facilitate more meaningful conversations about what you’re discovering together.

This is the domain of paradigms — not just personal mindsets, but shared architectures of meaning that shape the behavior of whole systems. If cascades are the grooves worn in each of our minds, paradigms are the landscape that channels them.

Just as our individual cascade of inference creates our personal realities — often reinforcing the very patterns we long to shift — our shared paradigms shape the larger systems we live within. If we wonder why change feels so elusive, even when so much good will is present, the roots lie here.

Our collective mindsets determine the functioning, direction, and outcomes of our societal systems. Whether we are grappling with climate change, inequality, or institutional inertia, the most potent point of intervention is not simply action or policy, but the shared ways of seeing and meaning-making from which systems arise.

This insight comes to us powerfully from systems thinker Donella Meadows, who illuminated the leverage points within systems — the places where a small shift can create large change. At the very top of her list — the most powerful leverage point of all — is paradigm: the shared beliefs and assumptions from which systems arise. Shift a paradigm, and you shift what’s even thinkable within a system. (See appendix B below for more on Meadows and her theory of leverage points.)

In mapping practice: Your Social System Map likely reveals paradigm-level dynamics through the patterns that emerge. For example: if your map shows that all the “collaboration” relationships cluster around organizations with formal credentials, that reveals paradigms about legitimacy and expertise. If funding relationships mainly flow between similar-sized organizations, that suggests paradigms about “appropriate” partnerships. If influence relationships point only toward certain types of leaders (say, those with particular backgrounds or titles), that reflects paradigms about whose voices “count” in decision-making. These patterns in your relationship data aren’t just network structure—they’re windows into the deeper beliefs and assumptions that shape what’s possible in your system.

Paradigms — the deep architecture of assumptions, values, and norms — govern what we notice, what we ignore, what we believe is possible, and how we organize collective action. Shifting from a mechanistic worldview — where the world is seen as a machine to be optimized and controlled — to a living systems orientation — which honors emergence, interdependence, and evolutionary unfolding — is the paradigm shift systems thinking invites us into.

As we explored in our first article, our individual cascades of inference are shaped by the environments we inhabit. And modernity — especially Westernized, globalized modernity — has overwhelmingly habituated us toward mechanistic mindsets. Education (standardized testing), healthcare (treating symptoms instead of systems), business (profit maximization over stewardship) — each reinforces a logic of control, extraction, and separation.

These tendencies didn’t begin with modernity. The impulse to reduce, control, and constrain life — including people’s roles, identities, and worth — runs deep across many cultures and eras. Modernity did not invent these patterns, but it did amplify and systematize them in powerful, globalized ways. Noting this wider horizon helps us see that what we are unlearning is both recent and ancient — and requires attention at every scale.

Even if we carry personal beliefs aligned with living systems, we swim daily in the currents of a mechanistic worldview.

And crucially: mechanistic thinking doesn’t merely happen by accident. It is actively reinforced by structures of power that benefit from predictability, scalability, and externalization of harm. Those who “succeed” within current systems are often those most deeply conditioned into mechanistic habits. Thus, dismantling the dominant paradigm is not merely cognitive work — it is relational, structural, and systemic work.

Michael Quinn Patton, a pioneer in developmental evaluation, offers a powerful related insight: most programs that achieve “success” do so by creating temporary “pockets of excellence” — islands buffered against the prevailing dysfunction of the larger system. Without such buffering, these regenerative efforts are often overwhelmed and absorbed back into the dominant paradigm.

Patton argues that durable transformation requires efforts that span multiple sectors, weaving relational fabrics capable of shifting the broader field, not just isolated parts. Networks, and particularly impact networks, become essential: they hold the potential to cultivate new paradigms through living relational practices — not simply for stronger human connections, but that guide deeper understanding honoring the relational fabric of all beings, and the web of cause and effect that binds us together.

The Paradigm of Wise Change Agents

Becoming wise stewards of system change means undergoing a paradigm shift within ourselves — from “gear logic” (predict and control) to “pattern logic” (sense and adapt) — and learning to apply that shift in how we engage with systems.

Rather than rigidly pursuing predefined outcomes, we learn to dance with emergence — to notice patterns, to respond fluidly, to seed conditions for life to flourish in unexpected ways.

For mappers: This shift from gear logic to pattern logic is essential in your mapping work. Instead of trying to control what your map reveals or force predetermined outcomes, you learn to sense what wants to emerge from the data, respond fluidly to unexpected discoveries, and create conditions for new insights and connections to flourish naturally.

Why this matters for your mapping practice

Recognizing the relational force of shared paradigms invites us into deep co-responsibility for how systems evolve. It empowers us, as network weavers, stewards, and participants, to engage the most fundamental levers for change.

It reminds us:

The paradigm is the generative soil from which all patterns grow. Tend the soil, and everything changes.
Our collective beliefs form the invisible architecture of what is possible.
Shifting these beliefs opens new pathways for creativity, resilience, and justice.
The first act of systemic transformation is internal — cultivating living-systems ways of seeing.
Transformation at scale requires collective practice: spaces where relational, emergent paradigms can be experienced and strengthened together.

Applied to sumApp projects:

Look for paradigm-level patterns in your mapping data
Ask questions that reveal underlying assumptions and worldviews
Help stakeholders see how their shared beliefs shape what’s possible
Use your mapping process to surface and examine dominant paradigms
Create space for new paradigms to emerge through dialogue about your findings

Shifting paradigms is not an upgrade or a fix. It is a composting — a patient, relational practice of unlearning, releasing old patterns, and welcoming new patterns, conditions and possibilities. As we move forward, we will explore how living systems behave, and how understanding their dynamics can guide our work more deeply.

🔍 Appendix B: Donella Meadows and the Power of Paradigm Change

Donella Meadows (1941-2001) was an environmental scientist, educator, and pioneer in the field of systems thinking. Her work emphasized that the leverage points for influencing complex systems vary — and the most powerful are often the least visible.

She outlined 12 Leverage Points to intervene in a system, ranked from least to most transformative:

Constants, parameters, numbers (e.g., subsidies, taxes)
Sizes of buffers and stocks relative to flows
Structures of material stocks and flows
Lengths of delays relative to system change
Strength of negative feedback loops
Gain around positive feedback loops
Structure of information flows
Rules of the system
Power to evolve system structures
Goals of the system
Mindset or paradigm out of which the system arises
Power to transcend paradigms

Paradigms, Meadows taught, influence what problems we perceive, what solutions we imagine, and how we structure our relationships. Addressing them offers the deepest possibility for transformation.

“The shared idea in the minds of society, the great big unstated assumptions, constitute that society’s deepest set of beliefs about how the world works.” — Donella Meadows

Challenging these deep assumptions — and learning to live from different ones — is the heart of regenerative systems change.

Continue the series: Follow the complete 8-week series to deepen your understanding of the systems thinking that makes social system mapping truly transformational.

Next: Article 3 explores how human systems behave as Complex Adaptive Systems — and what this means for how we approach change.

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Article 2: Systems Thinking and Paradigms

Article 2: Systems Thinking and Paradigms: From Personal Shifts to Unleashing Systemic Shifts

The Paradigm of Wise Change Agents

Why this matters for your mapping practice

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Article 2: Systems Thinking and Paradigms

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