EMBRACING COMPLEXITY IN SUSTAINABILITY
-Systems Thinking-
What is Systems Thinking?
PRE-WORK
-preparing for our session
Presentation of the competence model
Systems Thinking
The competence area Embracing complexity in sustainability focuses on empowering learners with systemic and critical thinking. It encourages them to better assess information, challenge unsustainable practices, and scan systems by identifying interconnections and feedback loops. Framing challenges as sustainability problems helps learners understand the scale of issues and identify everyone involved. Technological change, digitalisation, and globalisation have increased our society’s complexity and accelerated socioecological problems such as climate change and loss of biodiversity. Thinking in systems enables learners to identify feedback mechanisms, intervention points and interactive trajectories. Systems thinking can be understood as a tool for evaluating options, decision-making and taking action.
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Workshop Components
Duration: 120 min
Digital tools suggested:
Mentimeter: For interactive polls and icebreakers
Padlet: For collaborative brainstorming and scenario building. Also useful for ice breakers or energizers
Canva: For creating visual representations
Loopy: For creating simple cause-and-effect models
Competencies exercised:
Systems thinking, Critical thinking, Futures literacy, Individual initiative
Workshop Overview
Annotation:
An indoor/outdoor or classroom-integrated activity to promote systems thinking in sustainability through observation, discussion, reflection, and digital storytelling.
Objectives:
To understand systems thinking and its relevance to sustainability
To identify and analyze environmental challenges using digital tools
To understand how everything in nature is connected
To learn how small changes can make a big impact