In Too Deep: Recent Episodes
Kumu Inc.
What if the real problem isn’t what we think it is? When simple solutions don’t actually move the needle, it’s often a sign we’re treating symptoms, not systems. In this episode, Jeff Mohr talks with Matt Healey, founder of First Person Consulting, about how systems thinking and evaluation can help us move beyond surface-level problems.
They explore:
- The difference between program evaluation and systems evaluation
- Moving from problems to possibilities
- Monitoring system health and finding leverage points
- How to apply the System Effects approach in projects
- Bridging the gap between insights and meaningful action
Whether you’re designing programs, mapping systems, evaluating impact, or trying to create lasting change, this conversation is packed with insights you can use!
Subscribe to the In Too Deep Podcast or read the full transcript on the In Too Deep blog.
Mentioned in this episode:
- First Person Consulting
- Problems to Possibilities Canvas
- System Effects
- Resources on Lawyer Wellbeing: System Effects Report, Journal Paper & Theory of Change Model
What patterns are shaping how we learn, lead, and live, and how might we begin to shift them? In this week’s episode, we’re joined by Jessica Kiessel from (Re)Patterning Lab. Jessica stewards spaces and builds infrastructure to support the learning, creativity, and shapeshifting needed to live into the patterns we hope to see in the world, both for individuals as well as inside organizations.
Tune in to explore more around:
- Seeing and making patterns
- Building containers for learning
- Poking at our perspectives
- Creating conditions for curiosity
If you're curious about reimagining leadership, learning environments, and the patterns that shape our lives, this episode is for you! Subscribe to the In Too Deep Podcast or read the full transcript on the In Too Deep blog.
Want to go deeper?
To explore art and writing from a growing community of contributors exploring pattern making in their every day lives, visit www.patternmaking.org. To learn more about Jessica's organizational patterning work, visit www.repatterninglabs.org . In particular, we recommend you explore the beta version of common organizational patterns, an entry point for folks working in dominant culture organizations to work with patterns. If you are interested in collaborating or engaging with Jessica, reach out through either site or contact her on LinkedIn.
In this episode we’re joined by Santiago Bunce, founder of Via Bosque, a company that helps clients achieve transformative change by integrating leadership tools with nature-inspired principles. Santiago shares his unique perspective on building ecosystems and how it can be applied across different contexts to create positive, lasting change.
Tune in for a deep dive into:
- Designing ecosystems through a nature-inspired lens
- Approaching systems thinking in different cultural contexts
- Evolving from "good vs bad" to a mindset of "good, better, best"
If you're passionate about sustainability, innovation, and the interconnectedness of our world, this episode is for you. Subscribe to the In Too Deep Podcast to stay updated on future episodes of meaningful conversations about tackling tough problems.
After a long hiatus, we're excited to return and bring you the voices of those tackling tough problems! In this episode, Kumu Founder and CEO Jeff Mohr sits down with Cassandra Gould van Praag, Senior Community Manager at The Alan Turing Institute. Cassandra plays a key role in fostering and growing a dynamic community of researchers, practitioners, and enthusiasts. She recently launched a captivating Kumu project that visualizes her community and is now sharing with us what she learned from the process. Let's dive in!
Read the full transcript on the In Too Deep blog
Opinions expressed by Ms. Gould van Praag are solely her own and do not express the views or opinions of The Alan Turing Institute. For more information, please visit The Alan Turing Institute website for updates on their organization.
This week we’re joined by Chris Block, who is currently the Chronic Homelessness Initiative Director at Tipping Point Foundation. Previously he was the CEO of American Leadership Forum, Silicon Valley, as well as a number of other roles all really in the thick of it, as a systems leader working on systems change. I think you’ll find he has a fascinating background, with lots of insights to share, so let’s dive in.
Read the full transcript on the In Too Deep blog.
This week we are joined by Gene Bellinger. Gene is one of the most prolific systems thinkers, an early founder of Systems Thinking World, and one of the earliest and most influential evangelists of Kumu (there are a number of features that you should be thanking Gene for). In this episode we explore Gene's path to systems thinking, what it takes to do it well, and why he so rarely uses that term anymore.
Head over to the In Too Deep blog for the full transcript.
This week we’re joined with Odin Mühlenbein who is a partner at Ashoka Germany and also a lead of the systems unit at Ashoka Globalizer. He’s also the co-author of a recent report, From Small to Systemic which looks at the multi-billion euro potential in social innovation.
Head over to the In Too Deep blog for the full transcript.
This week we're joined by June Holley, who is a longtime network weaver and author of The Network Weaving Handbook. She's spent much of her career working with communities, often times low-income communities, on complex issues, taking both a systems and a network lens informed by complexity principles.
In this conversation we touch on lots of different topics from the basics of how do you collect really good, compelling information about the people in your network and see how that network changes over time, to the importance of experimentation and aligning funding to support that experimentation, and also to thinking about the really important role of things like diversity in a network, and how much that can be an unlock and truly an early leverage point for so much of the change that we're trying to create in the world.
Head over to the In Too Deep blog for the full transcript.
This week we have longtime community member Aldo de Moor joining us. Some of you may remember him from one of our original podcasts. Since we last spoke with Aldo, he's been busy refining his CommunitySensor participatory methodology with communities across the globe.
In this episode we catch up with Aldo to learn about how his approach has evolved, what he's learning about how to engage communities in shared sensemaking, what it takes to make maps that are meaningful to communities, and how processes like his are essential to increasing collective impact.
Head to the In Too Deep blog for the full transcript.
Luke Craven is a research fellow at the University of New South Wales and the developer of the System Effects methodology. Today we'll explore a number of different topics: why Luke decided to create this approach, what some of the challenges were with traditional systems mapping approaches, and find out about some of the secrets that Luke has come across for how to bring the user understanding of complex systems and recenter that lived experience in social science and policy making practice.
Head to the In Too Deep blog for the full transcription.
We’re joined today by Sam Rye. Sam is a self-described unapologetic generalist who has left his mark on a number of different organizations. Enspiral, Social Labs, Lifehack to name a few. In today’s conversation we’ll touch on a variety of topics. Anything from the role of nature in encouraging greater presence and leading to strategic insight. How to have a more experimental focus and combine systems analysis, strategy, and prototyping. And the need to focus way more than we do on relationships. Let’s dive in.
Head to the In Too Deep blog for the full transcript.
Karen is founder of Engaging Inquiry, a consulting practice whose mission is to bring light to complexity. Engaging Inquiry works with teams around the world to reshape the way they think about designing, executing and adapting strategy over time to have impact in the world.
Jolyon Swinburn is a Policy Analyst at the Ministry of Environment in New Zealand. In this role, he brings a multi-domain approach that recognizes how interconnected our various natural assets are and how we can use that mindset to create more effective policies.
Jenna Nicholas is the CEO of Impact Experience, an organization that helps build deep relationships between impact investors, foundations, entrepreneurs, artists and local leaders to co-create solutions with marginalized communities. Listen to learn about her work ensuring insights and leadership are coming from communities themselves, and how they use a curriculum that builds a foundation of trust and understanding to unlock greater forms of capital and partnerships.
Josh Goldstein is a Director of the Bridge Collaborative at The Nature Conservancy, where he works to bring about fundamental changes about how we think, plan and fund work across the environment, health and development communities. Josh's work pushes against the dominant paradigm that we can either support economic development OR protect the environment, and instead looks at how The Nature Conservancy's work can benefit both nature and people.