⟵ Room I · The First Drawing
Plate 01 · Systems Cartography
Plate01 / 01
SeriesSystems Cartography
ScaleConceptual · 1:1
Nicole Lockwood · Systems Transition
N 01  ·  E 02
Issue · MMXXVI
Drawing · Foundational
A Foundational Model

Me We

A framework for systems change. It starts with the individual and opens into the collective. Built from twenty years of work across government, industry, and living systems.

AXIS OF TRANSITION ↑ COHERENCE Pattern Recognition The Individual Clarity of Seeing Institutional Habit A · 01 A · 02 A · 03 A · 04 Me SYSTEM · AS IS Multi-Stakeholder Collective Emergence Side-by-Side Leadership Adaptive Systems B · 01 B · 02 B · 03 B · 04 We SYSTEM · POSSIBLE Sense READ Design CREATE Shift MOVE I II III State State State INDIVIDUAL TRANSITION COLLECTIVE “Systems change when people do.”
Drag the plate sideways to read the whole drawing
i.

Sense

Read: what is actually here

Before intervention, attention. How well you read the system sets the ceiling on everything that follows.

ii.

Design

Create: the conditions, not the outcome

Design for coherence: the table, the terms, the tempo. The system, not the solution, is the object of design.

iii.

Shift

Move: with the system, not against it

Movement is invited, not imposed. The shift has landed when the system keeps behaving differently without you.

Operating Principles
§ a to f
a.

Complexity over Control

The system is more intelligent than any single actor. Work with its nature, not against it.

b.

Truth over Performance

What’s actually happening, not what the institution would prefer to present.

c.

The Table Matters

Who is in the room shapes what’s possible before a single word is spoken.

d.

Outcomes through Learning

Not certainty. Not prescription. The system discovers its own way forward.

e.

Ecosystem Thinking

The goal is not to be the most important actor. It’s to strengthen the web that is already moving.

f.

Adaptive Capacity

The destination is a system that can continue changing after the work is done.

“Systems change when people do.”
THE INSCRIPTION ON THE PLATE
NL  ·  Studio of Systems Practice
Foundational Model · Me → We
Plate 01  ·  MMXXVI

This is the model before it was renamed. Everything here carries into The Threshold: the axis, the three states, the principles. Only the centre changed. It moved from the journey between two fields to the moment of readiness where the crossing actually happens.