This week will see the start of our learning series, a great opportunity for you to master the foundational ideas and methods of systems innovation. During the series of live sessions and self-paced learning guides, you will learn new ideas and methods each week and how they fit together into a coherent process for approaching systems innovation.

The guide we will be using for our learning session this week is designed to give readers a high-level overview of systems innovation. First, it provides a brief historical overview of the concept's rise before discussing the current economic and social context in which these ideas are gaining relevance. We discuss innovation and what characterises this approach to change, before finally giving some examples.

Coming up this week, the Si Governance Hub will host this event exploring methods for collective sense-making. In this session, Cynthia Kurtz will introduce Participative Narrative Inquiry (PNI), an approach that brings people together to share and work with real stories, helping groups notice patterns and make more thoughtful decisions.

Two great booklets at Si: the first will help you apply systems and complexity theory to unpack and rethink economics, exploring how we can understand the economy as a complex adaptive system. The second will then help you understand sustainability in a more systemic fashion from the perspective of living systems principles. Together, they present an alternative way of approaching our wicked environmental and economic challenges as an interconnected system.

The Si Design hub has been working to create an overview of systemic design, bringing together tools, references, and insights from across the field of people applying systems thinking to design. In this event, we wish to share this overview and gain your input as we move towards the publication of our first paper on this topic.

Graphic of the week: This one helps to illustrate a key insight on how systems change really happens through the emergence of new patterns of organisation. As Buckminster Fuller once said, "You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete". While - Fritjof Capra reminds us "The phenomenon of emergence takes place at critical points of instability that arise from fluctuations in the environment, amplified by feedback loops" 

With love from the whole happy team at info@systemsinnovation.network