Designing an intervention in a complex system involves starting from what you can sense, trying things at a small scale, watching how the system responds, and adapting. No single intervention moves a system on its own. A new policy without shifts in money, relationships and the stories people tell changes little. Lasting change tends to come from a portfolio of interventions working on several levels, from mindsets and relationships to rules and resources, carried by many people at the same time. Each intervention also teaches you something about the system and where the next one should go. This page holds two tools for that work. The Route is the process for moving through the work, with a design canvas for each stage. The Orientations are the design principles that guide your choices.
The Route is our meta-process for intervening in complex systems: five phases (Probe, Sense, Design, Adapt, Integrate) that work as a navigation tool, not a checklist. Practitioners often move back and forth between them as the system responds and new insights reshape the problem. The Route also works at different scales of time. A team might move through all five phases in a six-month project, while a movement or institution may take five, ten or more years to do the same. Shorter cycles often sit inside longer ones. Across every scale, systems change tends to build slowly and then shift quickly, so it asks us to hold urgency and patience together, with deadlines elastic enough to absorb what we cannot predict. Tap a stage to open its design canvas, fill it in on screen and download your own copy, or download a blank canvas to print and work through by hand.
The Orientations are our design principles. They come from global social, cultural, and ecological movements, from people who taught us and communities we hold ourselves accountable to. Use them when you shape any intervention, whether a project, a programme, a partnership or a funding decision, to choose between options and to test what you have made.
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