Our research
We apply the framework in the open, on two tracks: enriching the field of strategic foresight & systems design, and applying the method to live problems and historical cases across business, policy and society.
The framework in action
REALITY PAPERS, NO. 1
The Human Family & Everything Else
The climate crisis is always framed as a threat to human rights. We show that by drawing the moral boundaries as it did, the arrow of causation goes the other way too. The UDHR created the systems that led to the climate crisis, and why we need to align on a coherent new reality to make our climate activism and change efforts stick.
FORESIGHT & SYSTEMS DESIGN
Scenarios versus alternative realities
Traditional scenario work helps to show directions for the future or work through what our preferred future could be. It does not show whether the future you’ve imagined is coherent. We show how our framework strengthens the field by structurally driving coherence into the alternative realities we design.
POLICY, GOVERNANCE AND PUBLIC SYSTEMS
Europe doesn’t have a growth problem, it has an identity problem.
Europe is not suffering from a growth crisis but rather an identity crisis, prioritizing stability and high quality of life over the volatile, high-growth American model. No reality is perfect, free from all trade-offs. American inequality and crumbling social systems are proof of that. Europe needs to name it’s ‘beacon’ a simple concept from our framework, which helps guide decision makers on the choices to make and the trade-offs to choose for building their reality.
POLICY, GOVERNANCE AND PUBLIC SYSTEMS
Mark Rutte can save NATO or keep it alive. Not both.
Mark Rutte is spending his political capital convincing Europeans to buy more American weapons, meet spending targets, demonstrate loyalty, keep Trump engaged. We analyse both the 'zoomed in' detailed NATO reality and the 'zoomed out' context within which it exists: Surprise, surprise... It's fundamentally different to 1949 when NATO was created. And the instinct to preserve NATO as is, is the most dangerous option. The correct move is to change more, not less.
Unfortunately that's not in the NATO Secretary General's job description.
FORESIGHT & SYSTEMS DESIGN
Putting paradigms on the systems map
Fixing complex systems at the wrong level causes invisible damage. Traditional causal loop diagrams or other flat mapping techniques treat deep system goals or paradigms just like the other simpler variables, hiding the true structural costs of your choices. Using Donella Meadows’s spruce budworm example, we show how the Reality Canvas, a hierarchical tool designed to reveal the hidden architecture and nestedness of a system, can help identify the paradigm of a system and the cost of changing it, before you ever intervene.
Commission a reality paper
Every field has a system that everyone treats as settled: a market structure, a piece of policy, an institution, a definition that has hardened into a fact.
A Reality Paper takes that system, shows it was always a set of choices, and designs at least one coherent alternative to it.
What you get
A published Reality Paper you can put in front of funders, members, policymakers or your own board.
A diagnosis of your system as a set of choices rather than a fixed fact.
One or more fully worked, coherent alternatives, with their trade-offs named up front instead of discovered later.
A reframing of your issue that gives people something concrete to argue with, build on, or move toward.
If there is a system in your field that everyone treats as permanent, that is exactly the kind of thing worth reading as a configuration.
The Third View podcast
The Third View is a podcast about change at the system level: what is actually happening when an industry inverts, a political order collapses, or a business model becomes obsolete overnight. Not what we should feel about it. What the structure of it is, and what it makes possible.
Every two weeks, Erik de Ruijter, Janne Brok and Manasi Kumbhat apply their framework of radical systems level change to one complex system: politics, business, or society.
If you think in systems, this is your show.
