Sheryl Cababa: Closing the Loop – Systems Thinking for Designers – Episode 141

Content Strategy Insights

Sheryl Cababa Sheryl Cababa wants to help designers of all kinds cultivate a systems-thinking mindset. Her new book - Closing the Loop: Systems Thinking for Designers - shows designers how they can expand their impact by adding a systems-thinking lens to their view of their work. Rather than setting out specific methods or practices, Sheryl focuses on how to leverage systems concepts like interconnectedness, causality, and wholeness to help you design better experiences. We talked about: her work as Chief Strategy Officer at Substantial, a design and software development consultancy in Seattle the scope her new book, "Closing the Loop: Systems Thinking for Designers" and its intent to help designers develop a systems-thinking mindset the three key concepts in her approach to systems thinking: interconnectedness, causality, and wholeness how systems thinking and design thinking can interact and intertwine in a designer's practice how systems thinking can help you expand the purview and scope of your design work how her background as a design researcher helped her develop her approach to this work how cultivating a systems-thinking mindset has expanded the impact of her design work how involving academic researchers in your projects can reveal systemic insights that you wouldn't have discovered otherwise how to involve multidisciplinary stakeholders in exercises like scenario planning, war games, and similar non-linear exercises to discover even more insights the importance of using techniques like causal loop diagramming judiciously Sheryl's bio Sheryl drives a human-centered design practice that is focused on systems thinking and evidence-based design, working on everything from robotic surgery experience design to reimagining K-12 education through service design. In her work with consultancies such as Substantial, frog, and Adaptive Path, she has worked with a diverse base of clients including the Gates Foundation, Microsoft, IHME, and IKEA. She holds a B.A. in journalism and political science from Syracuse University. Sheryl is an international speaker and workshop facilitator. When she’s not in the office, she can be found at the University of Washington helping educate the next generation of Human-Centered Design and Engineering students. You might also find her biking around Seattle, or talking about her most recent complicated baking project. Connect with Sheryl online LinkedIn Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://youtu.be/8a1WYw4R8uk Podcast intro transcript This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 141. When you first imagine systems thinking, you might picture Donella Meadows' stocks-and-flows diagrams or technical practices like causal loop diagramming. Sheryl Cababa thinks designers benefit from a different look at systems thinking - an approach that cultivates a holistic mindset, rather than any specific methods or practices. Sheryl wrote her new book - Closing the Loop - specifically to help designers benefit from this powerful kind of thinking. Interview transcript Larry: Hey, everyone. Welcome to episode number 141 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I am really excited today to welcome to the show Sheryl Cababa. Sheryl is the Chief Strategy Officer at Substantial, really a prominent agency in Seattle. Welcome to the show, Sheryl. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you're doing these days at Substantial. Sheryl: Yeah, for sure. We are a basically design and software development consultancy, and we do research and strategy as well as software design and build, so end-to-end services. And a lot of our work is focused in education, so that's where I spend a lot of my time and energy and attention, is working with edtech organizations as well as philanthropic organizations who fund edtech and other educational products and services. It's really nice,