Systems thinking is the ability to describe and/ or visualize a part of a complex reality, express that part of reality as a model, understand the model as a system, use the model to explain the behaviour of the system, anticipate the behaviour of the system, and evaluate its impacts on sustainable development, identify potential points of, and types of interventions, generate options to act, assess their impacts in the frame of sustainable development, and decide whether further actions are necessary or not.
What is the aim?
To enable learners to:
- Reflect on unsustainable situations and decide on desired sustainable futures for jeans production,
- Apply their understanding of leverage points and different options of using such leverage in a system, to decide the nature of interventions to achieve desired future outcomes,
- Deal with potential dilemmas, and
- Prepare (and possibly carry out) a strategy to implement the intervention.
Activities, tasks, and suggested learning methods
In Step 8 learners understood that with the same leverage point, the Jeans system may be changed in different ways. In this Step, learners decide on an option for using the leverage they have identified to achieve a more sustainable cotton and jeans production system.
For this, ask the learners to:
- Form working groups of up to four members.
- Look at the list of unsustainable outputs and outcomes as identified in the analysis of the Jeans system they conducted in Step 6 (Worksheet ‘Sustainable or Unsustainable’).
- Imagine a sustainable future for cotton and jeans production through a Future Workshop
- Get back to their identification of leverage points (in Step 7) and the choices to use them (Step 8) to improve sustainability outcomes.
- Create and present a strategy to enable the change needed for an intended sustainable cotton system.
The tasks in this Step may be supported by learning methods such as:
Suggested Further Leading Questions
- Is the decided strategy really improving sustainability outcomes concerning cotton and jeans production?
- What is to be done if it the proposed strategy does not work to improve sustainability?
