“I want to get the most out of this place” said the newcomer, towering over everyone else. “I’m different things to different people” said the church, moving between different people. “I don’t belong anywhere” said the care home, moving to the edges of the room.
This wasn’t an inner city version of the Lion, Witch and the Wardrobe, but if you had just walked up to the second floor of Impact Hub Brixton, you’d be forgiven for thinking this was a troupe practising interpretative dance.
It was a session that was part of the U Lab programme where people want to learn and tackle personal and local challenges. During this session, we practiced Social Presencing Theatre, a term invented by the MIT and which borrows from practices like “theatre of the oppressed” or “forum theatre”.
Being used by Impact Hubs across the world, as well as by the Scottish Government on how it works with communities, the U Lab focuses on getting people to be more aware of what’s around them to be able to sense and develop future solutions together.
From 2D to 4D mapping
The previous week, we had mapped our individual and collective needs — from security to love via…housing — the resources and actors around us — from the Council to the Soup Kitchen, and what future possibilities should emerge — from a local wellbeing service to experiential education.
If we can pretend to create social value that can have a systemic effect, then we need to move beyond just understanding the causes of an issue — whether it be homelessness, elderly care or loneliness — to be able to make sense of the system/s the issue is part of. To tackle the issues caused by the system requires us to move from social innovation to systemic innovation.
We had mapped this writing down our insights, visualising them to create a map and discussing each layer to develop the next stage of the mapping. It’s important to start with learning styles that people are comfortable with, in particular to create collaborative frameworks that groups can refer back to.
But what happens when you get people to use a style they haven’t used to learn since they were kids? When you use that style to make sense of how the different parts of a system interact? In front of each other?
How does 4D mapping work?
- Identify the different actors, places & resources in a system — from people like residents on estates or private landlords, institutions like the police, places like the GP surgery or parks or resources like air or love
- Select 8–10 of what you’ve mapped above — making sure there’s a balance of actors, places and resources, this not only makes it more fun, it makes you reflect on the relationship between unlikely connections
- Ask who’d like to volunteer to embody the roles in the system — with about half the people in room embodying the roles and the other half observing what happens
- Call out the first role — the role you think is most powerful in the system. Ask someone to volunteer this role and put a sticker with the name of the role on them.
- Ask the person to embody the role, letting their body direct the gesture & shape they should make and moving to the space the role is in the system. When they’re ready to stop, they say a sentence describing their part in the system, for example “I am in control” or “I am nowhere”
- Call out the second role, where the person repeats the same exercise as the first role, but also looks to the role already in the space as to where their role should be in relation to them.
- Repeat the exercise with the other roles until everyone has volunteered
- At the end, look around the room, to see if you need to readjust your shape, position or proximity to the space
- While people are embodying their roles, people observing pay attention to how people are moving, how they’re looking to each other
- Each role moves into how they’d like their role to act in the future in relation to the other roles, repeating the above exercise, moving into a shape and saying a sentence that embodies their new part in the system. As each role is moving, other roles are moving
- When everyone has stopped moving, you can get the people observing to feedback on what they thought about the movements, the shapes and the people playing the roles how they felt about moving the shapes
What I learnt from facilitating this, is how through:
- embodying the role of another part of the system, you get to really empathise with that role
- looking at the other roles to see how your role positions itself in relation to them, you get to understand how close or far roles are to others
- moving about to how you see your role working in the future, you get to see how roles could influence each other
A powerful example of this, was when the “private landlord” started embracing the “estate resident” in the future and when the “council” sat down and held his arms out to welcome the other actors.
I would love to know how you’ve helped people who are part of a system — be it health, housing, etc. — better understand how their roles influence each other?
What can we learn from this in how we support change?
The world is changing fast, and many of us are feeling the pressure to adapt. But the problems we are tackling aren’t simple. They are complex, messy, and deeply connected. Trying to solve them in the same old ways just isn’t working.
That’s why I’ve been reflecting on how we need to act differently. Instead of focusing on fixing individual issues, we need to change the whole system. This means looking at the bigger picture, spotting patterns, and working together to shift the conditions that create the problems in the first place.
What does this mean in practice?
Here are some steps I’ve been thinking about, based on what I’ve seen work in different places:
- Work across boundaries — Problems don’t sit neatly in one department or sector, so neither should our solutions. We need to bring together different teams, organisations, and communities to make meaningful change.
- Understand the system — Instead of rushing to action, we should take time to map out how things really work, who holds power, and what’s reinforcing the status quo. System mapping, user research, and lived experience insights can help here.
- Start small, learn fast — Trying to redesign a whole system at once is overwhelming. Prototyping and testing small changes helps us learn what works before scaling up.
- Shift power — Too often, decisions are made by those furthest from the people affected. Sharing power with communities and frontline workers leads to better, fairer outcomes.
- Make change stick — Real transformation isn’t about short-term projects; it’s about embedding new ways of working. This means focusing on culture, behaviours, and incentives, not just structures and processes.
Where is this happening already?
There are great examples of this approach happening across different sectors:
- Greater Cambridge Partnership is taking a long-term approach to urban development, planning sustainable neighbourhoods that will last for generations (The Times).
- New Local has been championing the ‘Community Paradigm’, showing how councils can shift power and resources to communities to create better public services (New Local).
- Janaagraha in India is transforming urban governance by involving residents in shaping city budgets and planning (Wikipedia).
A challenge for us all
We can’t solve today’s problems with yesterday’s thinking. Systems change takes time, effort, and courage, but it’s the only way to create real, lasting impact. What’s one small step we can take to shift from text and talk to touch and making to bring about change?
