Everyone in the room said the same thing, in their own way: I thought this would be easier.
That was the moment I knew we were doing something real.
I’ve been using systems thinking and facilitating systems mapping with nonprofit and human service leaders over the past few years as a consultant. Through Rootworks, Partners for Impact’s community of practice for systems change leaders, I’m working with incredible people to deepen their understanding and practice of systems thinking and mapping. And in every group, without fail, the same friction surfaces in the first few sessions. Not confusion about systems thinking as a theory. Friction with the actual practice of mapping. Sitting down, opening up a blank Kumu canvas, and trying to represent a messy reality as a set of interconnected circles and arrows is difficult.
That friction is not a bug. It’s the most important signal that something real is happening. But it’s worth naming the specific sticking points, because they tell us something important about what it actually takes to see a system, and to begin to change it.
Pain Point #1: Finding the elements is the easy part. Finding the loops is the hard part.
Most practitioners can quickly generate a list of elements in their system. Funding. Policy. Community trust. Leadership. Partner organizations. That part flows. What stops people cold is the next step: drawing the arrows. Specifically, drawing arrows that close into loops that show how elements circle back and influence each other, rather than flowing in one direction like a logic model or a flowchart.
One of our Rootworks participants, an experienced practitioner with years of systems mapping under her belt, put it plainly: It always amazes me how hard it is. It’s not hard to find the elements, but it is hard to figure out the loops; to make loops in them and make them not linear.
This is the cognitive shift at the heart of systems thinking. Our brains are trained to think in straight lines; cause leads to effect, input leads to output. A systems map demands that we think in circles. And that rewiring takes practice, real practice, not just exposure to the idea.
Pain Point #2: Words matter more than you think, and the right word is elusive.
Systems mapping forces a precision with language that most of us don’t exercise in our day-to-day work. You can’t just name a concept. You have to name it in a way that can move. Something that can increase or decrease, grow or shrink, strengthen or weaken. Abstract nouns like “capitalism” or “leadership” aren’t mappable until you’ve wrestled them into something specific enough to have direction.
This wordsmithing isn’t perfectionism. It’s the work of clarifying what you actually mean. One practitioner in our current cohort was grappling with how to represent capitalism in a systems map about healthy communities. She knew it belonged there. She just couldn’t find the movable thing inside it. Is it the influence of capitalism? The belief in capitalism? The power of capitalism? That question isn’t semantic hair-splitting. It’s the difference between an element you can do something about and one that just sits there as an immovable force.
When you find the right word, the arrows almost draw themselves.
Pain Point #3: Where you stand determines what you see, and what you map.
Several practitioners in our Rootworks cohort described the experience of zooming in and zooming out as they worked on their maps. One participant, drawing a map centered on a local housing department, kept switching between her lens as a housing professional, her lens as someone navigating internal city politics, and her lens as a community member watching trust erode. Each vantage point produced a different map.
This is not a problem to solve. It’s a feature to recognize. Systems are not objective structures waiting to be discovered. They are always seen from somewhere. The map you draw reflects the question you’re carrying and the role you occupy in relation to the system. A director of housing will map a housing system differently than a tenant organizer, and both maps are true.
The discipline is to name your vantage point, and to stay curious about what you can’t see from where you’re standing.
Pain Point #4: The boundary is genuinely hard to set.
Every mapping process eventually hits the question: Where does this system end? And the answer is always a judgment call. One participant described doing her map on childcare and feeling overwhelmed because the system kept expanding in every direction. Another mapped the voting system in North Carolina and didn’t know whether to start with a problem statement, an outcome, or just a pile of elements.
The boundary you draw determines what you hold in view and what you let fall outside the frame. Draw it too tight and you miss the structural forces driving the problem. Draw it too wide and you’re paralyzed by complexity. The practical answer we’ve found: start with your question. What do you actually want to understand or influence? Let that question set the working boundary, knowing it will shift as the map develops.
What These Pain Points Are Really Telling Us
None of these sticking points are signs that someone doesn’t understand systems thinking. They’re signs that someone is doing it. The discomfort of systems mapping, the difficulty of closing loops, finding the right word, choosing a boundary, locating yourself in the system — is what it feels like to move from event-level thinking to pattern-level and structural-level thinking. That shift is the whole point.
And here’s what I’ve seen, again and again: the maps that emerge from that struggle are far more useful than the maps that come easily. When you’ve wrestled with whether “unregulated capitalism” or “individualism” is the right element, you understand your system better than any diagram could convey on its own.
That’s why we built Rootworks the way we did, not as a course in systems theory, but as a community of practice where practitioners work on real systems, in real time, with real peers. The friction is part of the design. The learning happens in the struggle, not despite it.