Seeing the whole

Abstract

• When the Global Finance Initiative (GFI) wanted to understand how to define the “global finance system” and identify its stakeholders to develop a strategy to integrate social and environmental concerns into the system, it began with issue crawls.

• When the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) considered its strategy for developing a South African network to advance GRI’s triple-bottom-line accountability agenda, social network analysis (SNA) was used.

• When the European Commission wanted to understand how to enhance the process of innovation, it used an approach called value network analysis (VNA).

• When Youth Enterprise and Sustainability (YES) in Latin America wanted to develop its network strategy it turned to an approach called managing for Clarity (MfC).

• When wanting to understand the role of GANs (Global Action Networks) in responding to the Tragedy of the Commons, systems archetypes are useful.

• When the Mass Atrocities Project wanted to understand use of specific words, it undertook web scrapes to produce semantic clouds.

• When the Global Public Policy Research Group wanted to understand the relationships between various organizations in the climate change domain, it developed a concept map.

All these organizations turned to tools that can be broadly called visual diagnostics mapping. They are tremendously useful when complexity is a big issue, when formal structures are obscuring what is actually happening, and when different ways of thinking about the world are creating conflict.