Sometimes the problem isn’t the campaign, the customer, or the communication. Sometimes the problem is the system surrounding them.

What is systems thinking?

Systems thinking helps organisations step back and understand how behaviours are shaped by people, processes, environments, incentives and structures working together. For marketers, CX teams and behaviour change practitioners, it offers a way to move beyond surface-level fixes and identify where change can actually have the greatest impact.

Systems thinking can take you into deep territory: stocks and flows, reinforcement loops, causal modelling and system dynamics. These are powerful tools, and all valuable further along the learning journey. But for most organisations, the best place to start is much simpler: mapping the system around the behaviour.

A beehive looks like thousands of individual bees doing individual jobs. But if you want to change how the hive behaves, you don’t focus on one bee. You look at the hive.

The same is true for marketing and behaviour change. You can optimise your campaign, journey, message, or prompt and still not move the needle. You can spend more, say more, test more, and still find that behaviour does not shift in the way you need it to.

Not because those interventions don’t matter, but because the real barrier may sit somewhere else in the system.

Systems thinking helps us zoom out before we zoom in. It helps us understand how outcomes are shaped by the interactions between people, processes and environments, rather than looking at each part in isolation. Most importantly, it helps us work out where to focus our energy for the greatest impact.

Behavioural insight is increasingly moving in this direction too. Early behavioural science gave us powerful tools: nudges, defaults, friction reduction, and timely prompts. These remain useful, but the field is evolving.  

We’re seeing a shift from nudges that influence individual choices to evidence-based approaches that build people’s capability and improve the environments they make decisions within.

This doesn’t mean we stop using nudges, campaigns, or journey optimisation. It means we use them in the right place. Sometimes the answer is a sharper message. Sometimes it is a better process, a different messenger, a reframed problem, or a shift in the conditions shaping behaviour.

For beginners, the starting point is simple: zoom out, map the system, dig deeper into what’s shaping behaviour, and identify where intervention is likely to create the most meaningful change.

Three practical ways to start mapping systems

Systems thinking can feel overwhelming at first. But in practice, there are several simple ways organisations can begin exploring the systems shaping behaviour.

1. Power mapping: identifying who influences behaviour

Power mapping helps identify the people and organisations influencing the outcome.

A useful starting point is placing the end user at the centre of the power or systems map. The goal is to map their key influences, noting that the person you are targeting is not always the person with the most influence over the behaviour.

Ask:

• Who is at the centre of the behaviour?
• Who influences their decisions?
• Who controls access, information, or options?
• Who benefits if things stay the same?

Who is working for or against the change?

For example, when looking at increasing the use of low-carbon building materials for residential construction, the initial thought was: “How do we get the market to demand these materials?”  

But mapping the system helped identify where influence actually sat – and where effort was likely to have the greatest impact. In this case, supply chain and recycled concrete constraints meant low-carbon materials were difficult to source, making it hard for homeowners to request them in the first place.

Power mapping shifts the question from “Who do we want to communicate to?” to “Who actually shapes what happens?”

2. Process mapping: understanding the customer journey and system friction

Process mapping looks at the journey people experience and the operational system sitting behind it.

For marketers and CX practitioners, this is particularly useful because customer journeys often look simple from the outside but become much more complex once backend systems, approvals, handoffs, and timing are mapped.

Ask:

• What steps does the person need to take?
• What happens before, during, and after the behaviour?
• Which teams, systems or policies are involved?
• Where does friction build?
• Where does uncertainty appear?

For example, mapping the retirement journey for a superannuation provider revealed that what initially appeared to be a communication issue was actually shaped by multiple decision points and backend processes that were at odds with the desired customer experience. Optimising the customer communication alone would not have solved the wider system friction.

Process mapping helps identify where the system is making the desired behaviour harder than it needs to be.

3. Problem mapping: identifying root causes beneath surface behaviours

Problem mapping helps you understand whether you are looking at a surface symptom or a deeper systemic issue.  

The iceberg model is a useful starting point. Above the surface are the visible behaviours: low uptake, confusion, resistance or drop-off. But beneath the surface are the patterns, structures and assumptions producing those behaviours.

Ask:

• What are we seeing on the surface?
• What keeps happening over time?
• What processes, rules or incentives are reinforcing it?
• What are the underlying beliefs, mindsets and assumptions that underpin the behaviours?

For example, The Research Agency (TRA) worked with a large organisation experiencing internal collaboration challenges. On the surface, teams appeared disconnected. But deeper mapping revealed compliance processes, structures and assumptions shaping how teams worked together. Teams lacked a shared sense of purpose and held competing assumptions about each other’s roles and priorities. The issue was not simply communication between teams; it was the system surrounding them.

Problem mapping helps organisations avoid solving shallow symptoms with shallow solutions.

Why systems thinking improves organisational alignment

One of the biggest “aha” moments in systems thinking often comes from mapping together.

Different teams, departments, partners and suppliers often see different versions of the same system. Marketing sees the audience and message. CX sees the journey. Operations sees the process. Policy sees the rules. Partners may see entirely different barriers and incentives again.

The value comes from surfacing those different perspectives and identifying blind spots.

For organisations starting out, the most useful questions are simply:

Do we actually see the system in the same way?

Do we agree on the barriers and the leverage points?

Are we focusing effort in the same place?

As a starting point, consider mapping the system for the problem you’re working on, then sharing it with a colleague and asking whether they see the system in the same way. You may be surprised.  

Systems mapping is not about mapping everything. It is about knowing where to focus.

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