If you are having a conversation with an Improvement Science aficionado, it won’t be long before the conversation shifts to a discussion of specific practices and tools that are closely associated with helping organizations or individuals improve.  The common mantra is that Improvement Science helps us “get better at getting better,” and the mechanism for continuous improvement can be found in the application of a set of tools and practices Improvement Scientists have identified and tested.  Empathy interviews.  Journey Maps.  Systems Mapping.  PDSA cycles.  Fishbone diagrams.  There are actually quite a few of these tools, and each one is designed to illuminate a different aspect of the improvement journey.

My personal favorite is system mapping.  Perhaps it’s because I’m a visual learner.  Systems mapping is an attempt to create a visual overview of a process, outlining explicitly the relationships and sequences that we assume are the part of any given system.  In essence, we are lifting the hood to take a look at how things work together (or as is sometimes the case, are not working together) and then represent those relationships in a visual map.  A systems map takes a flow chart one step further as it seeks to identify the weak points in the system that are leading to underperformance.  The map then serves as a launching point for determining potential interventions that we want to test to improve the system.

I find systems mapping to be incredibly illustrative.  It can become apparent very quickly that a room full of organizational leaders who thought they had a common understanding about how something gets done actually possess very nuanced and incomplete views of what happens in practice.  It’s like putting together a puzzle where everyone has a different piece to contribute.

At work, for example, I’ve recently been using systems mapping to help improve our process for approving substitute teachers for professional development.  You might think the process would be fairly straight-forward.  You need subs.  You ask for permission to get subs.  Permission is either granted or denied.

You would be very wrong.

For starters, we are in the midst of a serious, if not severe, substitute shortage.  There simply are not enough quality substitute teachers to fill our vacant positions on a daily basis.  Despite efforts to continuously recruit and hire good people, attrition is high and the best substitutes get snatched up – as they should be – for long term gigs or as full-time classroom teachers.  That puts a daily cap on how many subs we have available.  To add to the challenge, we have a lot of competing interests for professional development.  Of course that is a good problem since we want our classroom teachers to have opportunities for quality professional learning.

That all adds up to a simple equation of supply and demand, which means there are ALWAYS more requests for subs than we have the capacity to meet.  That drives a scarcity mindset, and when people start hearing “no” with regularity, it puts increasing pressure on a system that only worked moderately well even in the best of times.  Admittedly, my leadership responsibilities have little to do with substitute requests, but when everyone I am working with and trying to support is constantly referencing a system that is causing distraction and even spreading mistrust, it’s hard for me not to get involved.

Where do you start when you are trying to improve a system that you don’t know a tremendous amount about?  You start asking a lot of questions of the people who are closest to the work – and you begin to develop a map of the system.  So that’s what I did.  I started by putting my initial assumptions on paper, and then learning more by investigating the details of the system.  Committing those details to a visual map allows us to make our assumptions explicit, and develop shared meaning and understanding about the system.

Fast forward several weeks to today, and we’re still very much in the process of working through our new system.  One of my tasks today is to update our system map to reflect where things stand as of today.  The intention is to not only use the map to help us continuously improve the system, but to make that system transparent to its users.