The Practice
Systems thinking + systems design + systems engineering
= systems change.
Before there's a platform there's a room full of people with divergent opinions. Getting to agreement is the harder part of this work, and it's the part we have been doing for thirty years. The practice is where the design happens. The Exchange is where it lands.
Seventeen engagements with fourteen organisations, 2015 – 2024.
01 · Why now
Systemic interventions have finally
gone mainstream.
Over the last decade there’s been a surge in awareness of the relationship between systems change and systems thinking, design and engineering. That’s largely because the current approaches to planetary challenges are rationally and mathematically indefensible — and enough people now say so out loud. Community-driven design has emerged as the necessary response to global-north agenda-setting, and data mobility, sovereignty and agency have become unavoidable considerations for anyone working on social, ecological and economic challenges.
02 · Three motions
One practice, three motions.
They're not interchangeable.
Organisations that arrive asking for engineering usually need design, and organisations that arrive asking for design usually need a fortnight of thinking first. We will tell you which one you are in before we quote.
Motion one
Understanding what the system actually is before proposing to change it. Who holds what, which flows are real and which are asserted, and where the coordination is failing rather than where it appears to fail.
Motion two
Getting a room of organisations that do not yet agree to agree — on a shared schema, a shared taxonomy, and a shared definition of the problem. Participatory, facilitated, and slower than anyone wants it to be.
Motion three
Building the thing the design implies, and maintaining it. This is where most consultancies hand you a report instead. We have somewhere to put the answer, which is why the design is testable.
Worth knowing
The three motions are sequential and the first two cannot be skipped. Every engagement is scoped against the motion you are actually in, not the one you asked for.
03 · Evidence · 2015 – 2024
Seventeen engagements.
Fourteen organisations.
One decade.
Every engagement below is named, with the organisation and the motion it belonged to. The record is publishable and independently verifiable.
04 · The record
Who we've done it with, and what the work was.
Source · Armillaria project record, 2015 – 2024.
Swiss Agency for Development & Cooperation
Systems design
Systems design consulting, and Project 1800
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
Systems design
Systems design consulting with the WASH group
GAVI
Systems design
Innovation ecosystem design consulting
World Intellectual Property Organization
Systems design
Systems design consulting with WIPO Green
SuSanA · Sustainable Sanitation Alliance
Systems design
Systems design consulting
Bertelsmann-Stiftung
Systems design
Impact finance ecosystems — design consulting and publication
Zebras Unite
Systems + infrastructure
Systems design consulting, then infrastructure design consulting
Inclusive Capital Collective
Ecosystem + infrastructure
Ecosystem design consulting, then infrastructure design consulting
COBI
Ecosystem design
Ecosystem design consulting, then partnership — marine conservation, Mexico
Port of Portland
Ecosystem design
Ecosystem design consulting
Puerto Rico Impact Investing Group
Ecosystem design
Ecosystem design partnership
Islamic Finance Collective
Ecosystem design
Ecosystem design partnership
Interchain Foundation
Ecosystem design
Ecosystem design consulting
Innovación Azul
Ecosystem design
Ecosystem design partnership
05 · What an engagement is
Four things, in whatever combination you need.
None of these is a product and none is sold on its own. Which ones you need depends on which motion you are in, and that is a conversation, not a form.
Designing how capital moves between the organisations that hold it and the ones that need it — including who decides.
Getting the people who have to agree into one room, repeatedly, until they do. Multi-stakeholder, facilitated, minuted.
The design is made by the people who will live with it. We hold the process, not the pen.
Per engagement
How it is quoted
Worth knowing
Consulting is priced by discussion, unlike the platform, which is priced on its own page. If you need a number before you will take a call: the band above is the band, and where you land inside it depends on how many organisations have to agree.
06 · Who does the work
people. No account managers.
The person facilitating your roundtable is the person who wrote the schema and will be in the room at handover. There is no bench, no pyramid, and nobody you have not met.
Start here
Most engagements start with a conversation about what is actually failing.
Not a proposal, not a rate card, and not a demo. Tell us who has to agree and what they disagree about, and we will tell you which of the three motions you are in.