Reflections on Advent(ure) in System Seeing 2025 January 25, 2026

These are my reflections on the last Advent(ure) in System Seeing.

Advent(ure) in System Seeing is a series of daily challenges by Ruth Malan, focusing on understanding systems, and playing out from December 1st to December 24th. I enjoyed following along for the second year now and recommend it to anyone who is interested in trying their hand at system thinking.

I posted my results and reflections on Mastodon under #AdventOfSystemSeeing, but thought I'd collect them here for ease of reference – and because Ruth asked me to share a PDF of my zine that was the culmination of last year's effort. You can find it at the bottom of this post.

Thank you, Ruth, for your prompts and the effort you put into them!

Day 1 – Draw a bicycle (and sketch a key mechanism)

Day one was about drawing a bicycle from memory (find the full prompt here).

I did steps 2 (sketch), 3 (explore key capability), and 4 (reflect). Here are my pictures.

What I noticed:

• I paid more attention to how the parts were connected this time around.
• Drawing made me notice I don't know the exact angles between parts of the frame. My drawing looks slightly skewed.
• I see what I didn't draw.
• Just because you interact with a system often this doesn't mean you understand it.
• There's always another layer. I did note the necessity of friction, but I didn't describe how this comes about (gravity, usually).
• The system only works at all in connection with its environment. Without the ground, the bicycle doesn't move.

Day 2 – Zoom out to see the world around a bicycle

This was about exploring the context around bicycles (full prompt).

Didn't have much time today, but I managed to knock out a simple context diagram.

What I noticed:

• My map is not hierarchical. There are many connections across contexts.
• Some contexts have more depth than others, maybe because I have more experience riding a bike than building one.
• Some contexts are more … organized (at scale) than others, e.g., I imagine bike factories to be more strictly organized than how individuals use their bikes recreationally. I had no way to indicate this in the map. Maybe I could have color-coded it?
• I realize I forgot to include regulation and inspection (like traffic regulations and the TÜV).

Day 3 – Explore impact of change

Today's task was to draw a Futures Wheel to explore how one change in the context of cycling would ripple out into the environment (full prompt).

What I noticed:

• More than one first order effect may contribute to a second order effect.
• Different first order effects can lead to opposite second order effects.
• Second order effects are tricky.

Day 4 – Going behind the scenes

Drawing a rich picture of all that happens when you fill a pot with water (full prompt) was the exercise on day 4.

What I noticed:

• I know where the water in Munich comes from, but I don't know the exact mechanics.
• The plumber pays taxes in the city, which I didn't draw.
• Each of the elements in the picture is a complex system in its own right.
• I really don't like drawing that much.

Day 5 – Characterizing systems

This day's task was to design an introductory page of a zine on systems (full prompt). Here's what I came up with.

I spent waaaaay too much time on this one, but I am pleased with the result.

Deciding what to put on the sheet was the easy part. Coming up with a balanced arrangement was harder, and I didn't quite manage it. That this was supposed to be a zine cover made me want to achieve a much more polished design, which took a long time and a few false starts. I also wanted to tie the concepts together with a unifying theme, the airplane, which worked quite well, I think.

Day 6 – Causal loops with Meadows

This day was about watching part of a lecture by Donella Meadows and taking sketchnotes (full prompt).

This is a very interesting lecture. Here are my notes on minutes 18 to 36. I'll have to watch the whole thing when I have more time. The point that stuck with me the most is that when there are loops within loops, an interesting question is when which of them will dominate the system because this will influence the overall direction the system will take.

Day 7 – Give causal loop diagrams a spin

After watching Donella Meadows draw a few causal loops, this day was spent on drawing one myself (full prompt).

I chose to explore technical debt. This one is interesting because increasing technical debt initially increases development velocity (that's the whole point), but once a certain threshold is crossed, it begins to decrease it (red arrow). Perceived sucess tends to increase feature priority (over engineering priority), but so does a reduction in perceived success (red arrow). In both cases (initial low technical debt as well as later high technical debt) this can result in a self-reinforcing loop leading to the collapse of the system. Thus, the critical point of leverage seems to be how we approach feature vs. engineering priority in the face of some level of perceived success. At this point, we can break the self-reinforcing dynamic by exercising sound judgement.

Day 8 – Context changes everything

Drawing a second page for a zine on systems was the task of day 8 (full prompt).

I went with context as the topic and chose a more abstract visualization this time (mostly to keep to the time box).

Day 9 – Relationships and interactions

Today, there were two tasks: to watch a video about relationships and exchanges among trees and fungi in mycorrhizal networks, and to draft another zine page on relationships or interactions (full prompt).

I didn't come up with a good focal point for the zine page within my timebox, so I just jotted down relationships and interactions between systems as they occurred to me. If I had more time, I would try to bring them in some kind of order, maybe by similarity or something. What I now notice I missed are indirect relationships, e.g., mediated by some other system.

Day 10 – Draw your org 3 ways

As the title says, this day was about drawing an organization I have been part of at least three different ways (full prompt).

I drew my work organization, anonymized so I can share it.

1. The (almost) classic org chart. As a consultant, I am part of 2 orgs, one of which is my employer (red), and the other one is the customer I am currently working for (blue).

2. The teams, working groups, and communities of practice in which my actual work happens. None of these appear in the official org chart because they are either too small (the Scrum team) or cross organizational borders (the communities).

3. A calendar view that roughly shows where my time is spent. Unlike the other charts, this one shows the relative importance of various activities. Because I work for a consulting firm, work for the customer dominates my calendar, although I am also engaged in various internal activities.

Day 11 – Describe your focal situation

On this day, we moved from generic systems exercises and ruminations about common systems to exploring a specific situation in our own lives (full prompt).

Reflecting on this, I find that deciding on my focal situation for the upcoming days was easy. I've been thinking intensely about the situation the team in my current customer project is facing anyway. On one hand, writing down all the things bouncing around in my head was slightly depressing because it showed how many unresolved issues – major issues – there are. On the other hand, I can see none of them are unsolvable, even if it will take a long time to address them.

Day 12 – Sketch the situation

Today, the task was to either draw a rich picture or an actor map of the focal situation chosen yesterday (full prompt). I chose the actor map.

What I noticed: Drawing the situation – the software system we are responsible for, a number of construction sites within the system, and the actors surrounding and complementing it – made me think a bit harder about where to place each actor in relation to the whole. I realized the motivation of some of the actors is not that clear (to me). Most of the contractors don't seem to have strong motivation apart from ensuring their contracts are extended. This is both a boon and a hindrance. A boon because they are unlikely to oppose potential improvements; a hindrance because they are equally unlikely to contribute much energy. This means what leverage I need I'll have to find in the others, and I “just” have to make the changes I want easy for the contractors to go along with. Well then, problem solved. 😉

Day 13 – What if you do nothing (different)?

The task was to reflect on the “characteristics of the current state of things” of my situation and to think about what was likely to happen if I didn't actively change anything (full prompt).

In my case, the most relevant factors influencing the default future situation likely are:

• reverting to the mean,
• institutional inertia,
• central policy forcing certain issues,
• cost of change for established communication patterns,
• distribution of experience in the team.

Day 14 – How we got here

Today was about exploring how the situation came to be, either in textual form, or in the form of a graphical history (full prompt).

I tried to assemble a graphical history. This was difficult because the history of the project I'm working on goes back more than 10 years and there have been many changes to the team. The documentation is … not great as far as significant decisions are concerned, so the historical information is disjoint at best, and in large parts unrecoverable. I myself joined 6 months ago and my efforts to uncover the rationale behind certain … interesting decisions were not very successful. This in itself is telling.

Day 15 – Mapping value flows

Today, we focused on value exchanges in the our focal situation, and visualized them in the form of a Value Network Map (full prompt).

Mapping the value flows for my current project was interesting because it is an internal service that provides basic data to many other services. Hence, on the surface, the primary value flows are very simple. But actually, the team providing this service is part of a rather large network of other teams and communities, some of which provide direct support to each other, some are formally responsible for certain aspects (e.g., a centralized architecture team), and some are more informal in nature. It is not always obvious (to me) what each party gets out of the interactions I have observed so far. Putting this on paper clarified some things. I'll have to dig deeper on the others.

Day 16 – Another distillation

Taking a break from our focal situation, this day was about designign another page for the systems zine (full prompt).

I followed the suggestion of illustrating constraints. I found this rather hard – constrained by my drawing skills, time, and mind space more than by the medium.

Day 17 – Systems and boundaries

Back to our focal situation, today's task was to “identify systems, list them, or draw (and name) tne systems, and their interrelationships” (full prompt).

The page I used to draw my diagram quickly got too small. In the end, I touched on everything from the technical components of my system of interest over the team composition, organisational structures of the German government, technical infrastructure down to the electrical grid, my own company, the labor market which enables me to work for it, the contracting system which allows me to work for this customer, the economy underpinning both, the food supply chain (gotta eat something!), the (US) companies providing the software I use to work on the system remotely, and world politics up to the solar system and astrophysics. After all, where would we be without the sun?

Oh, and, yes, we have users, too. 😉

I'm not sure if I should be glad or sad that, tomorrow, I'll probably be focusing on breaking the dependency between our unit tests and a centrally provided test database. 😵‍💫

Day 18 – Exploring capabilities and boundaries

This day's task was to draw the network of capabilities that enable the system identified yesterday “to be viable as a system with that purpose” (full prompt).

Reflecting on this task, I realize that most of the capabilities required for the system to fulfil its purpose are external to the system – or at least out of scope of the team nominally responsible for the system. This has already made some things more difficult than they should be.

Day 19 – Exploring constraints and forces

The focus for today was on action – to identify an area where we wanted to do something (the problem), and to explore relevant constraints, forces, assumptions, and approaches (full prompt).

Reflecting on this task, I can say mind mapping on paper does not work for me. I always end up needing more space in places where I did not plan for it, resulting either in very crammed corners or spaghetti connections. So I made a table instead, with columns for constraints, forces, assumptions, and approaches. I linked constraints with the forces they generate and assumptions I made about them. I marked each force assisting my endeavor with a green plus sign and each resisting force with a red minus sign. I also linked forces and assumptions with possible approaches that build upon them or try to counter them, and I included my assessment of the efficacy of each approach. I did this iteratively, adding entries to all columns as they occurred to me.

This is what it looked like:

Initially, I came up with a lot of resisting forces, until I realized that I myself and my current role in the team could count as forces, too. Now it's even, which matches my gut feeling. It could go either way.

Filling the first three columns enabled me to think about possible approaches in a more structured way. Not all approaches are mutually exclusive, and they address different subsets of the forces. Most importantly, I noticed an important gap: some of the positive forces hadn't been properly utilized yet. Thinking about this enabled me to come up with a new approach that might have the best chance of success.

This may well have been the most immediately helpful exercise up to now.

Day 20 – Reflection

The task was to go back over the work of the past 19 days and extract concepts related to systems; to identify the lenses we've used in system seeing; to come up with questions and a next step; and to think about what topic we would like to add (full prompt).

I drew a concept map.

Two things I added to my map that weren't explicitly in focus on days 1 through 19 is seeing what's there and seeing what's missing. Seeing what's there means not being content with the first impression and jumping to conclusions but looking closer for what's really there, e.g., do we really have cause and effect here or is it just correlation? Seeing what's missing means noticing gaps in our understanding or in arguments, and working to fill them.

Day 21 – System concepts, take n+1

Today was about designing another page or two for the systems zine (full prompt).

At this point, I was getting a bit fed up with all the drawing, but in for a penny, in for a pound, right?

Day 22 – Shifting outcomes

The task was to draw an Impact Map for a challenge in our focal situation (full prompt).

This exercise felt very similar to “Exploring Constraints and Forces” on day 19. When I squint a bit, the goal here looks like the problem there, the actors here form a subset of the constraints there, the impacts here are roughly equivalent to the forces there, and the responses here look like the approaches there. Assumptions are not explicitly called out here, although some of the impacts I listed are indeed assumptions rather than proven facts.

In order to not just copy everything over, I chose a different goal to explore today.

What's new here is the last paragraph where we ask about side-effects and explore further beyond the right side of the diagram. We could do that with the other one, too, however.

Day 23 – Notice what we add

Focusing on a recent conversation, the task was to write down what was actually said in one column and what I heard/thought in a second column, and to reflect on this (full prompt).

There were definitely “differences between [my] external dialogue and internal thoughts and feelings.” I think this is necessary to a certain degree. In general, you don't want to bleat out the first thing that comes to mind in a professional setting. In the situation I had in mind, I had certain suspicions about the motives of the other party, but this was not the moment to address them. There will be a meeting at the beginning of the new year where the cards will be put on the table. We will prepare for this and hopefully have a fruitful discussion then.

Day 24 — Adventure zine

The final exercise was to turn the zine pages designed over the past days into a physical zine (full prompt).

Doing this on Christmas Eve with 2 kids? No chance! On the 25th, they are busy with their presents, and I have some free time. I admit, I groaned every time I encountered a “make a zine page” exercise because drawing does not come naturally to me, but now I already had 5 pages I wanted to finish it. So I added a title page and created two additional pages to illustrate all the tools we used during the course of our Advent(ure). I am quite pleased with the result. I intend to keep it on my desk as a tangible reminder to practice system seeing more often, and as a quick reference.

Advent(ure) in System Seeing zine

If you want to print my zine, here is a PDF file with all pages in the correct order: Adventure_in_System_Seeing_2025_Zine.pdf.

Because my printer can only handle A4 pages, the PDF file contains 2 pages. I printed them on A4 paper, cut off the margins, and taped the pages together with transparent tape. The right border of the first page (with the title and constraints pages) must be attached to the left border of the second page (with the context and system pages). The resulting large page can be folded into an 8 page zine by following the instructions from Ruth's prompt.

Have fun with it, and let me know what you think!