Rosenverse

This video is only accessible to Gold members. Log in or register for a free Gold Trial Account to watch.

Log in Register

Most conference talks are accessible to Gold members, while community videos are generally available to all logged-in members.

Complex Problem? Add Clarity by Combining Research and Systems Thinking
Gold
Tuesday, March 31, 2020 • Advancing Research 2020
Share the love for this talk
Complex Problem? Add Clarity by Combining Research and Systems Thinking
Speakers: Sarah Flamion
Link:

Summary

Enterprises are increasingly complex. Workers are faced with more information, more tools, more demands, and research needs to keep up. The field of Systems Thinking can help researchers uncover the models behind this complexity. This talk covers practical techniques for illuminating how models are interconnected, where feedback loops exist, and how we might transform these complex systems to drive innovation. It highlights how we can understand these systems without losing sight of the workers themselves… their ideas, concerns, motivations, and needs. Marrying systems clarity with this human perspective is critical, and is something researchers are uniquely positioned to do.

Key Insights

  • Systems thinking offers a essential lens to research complex products by revealing whole systems and their subsystems simultaneously.

  • Effective research balances understanding detailed subsystems with maintaining a holistic system-level perspective to avoid 'blind men and the elephant' problem.

  • Feedback loops—reinforcing and balancing—help explain dynamic behaviors in product ecosystems and user interactions.

  • Bounded rationality causes users in different system roles to make reasonable decisions with limited visibility, often leading to systemic challenges.

  • In Customer 360 Audiences, data engineers lack visibility into marketers' downstream needs, causing inefficiencies and user frustration.

  • Intangible elements like emotions and user confidence significantly impact how users experience and perceive product subsystems.

  • Redrawing system boundaries based on research insights can lead to pivotal product strategy shifts, as Salesforce experienced prioritizing foundational features.

  • Mental models about data ownership and collaboration between roles shape communication and product adoption, requiring targeted enablement.

  • Keeping system diagrams and research at appropriate abstraction levels helps communicate complexity without overwhelming stakeholders.

  • Collaborative exploration of system boundaries with stakeholders ensures the research stays focused on core system elements and relevant opportunities.

Notable Quotes

"Systems Thinking can give us this new lens to think about research in the middle of complexity."

"If you dive too deep into the subsystems or the bits right away, then your understanding of the whole is going to be lacking."

"People make decisions with limited information, especially about more distant parts of the system."

"Marketers don’t try very interesting things when their confidence in data is low, which can create a downward spiraling reinforcing loop."

"Our big idea was big and they wanted it, but what they wanted way more was the foundational features."

"You drew the boundaries wrong, so we pivoted and re-drew the boundaries, and those foundational features became our marquee product launch."

"Data is like a black box. It’s owned by IT. I’m not allowed to know how it works, but I kind of resent that it introduces delays into my marketing processes."

"Drawing a boundary was the hardest part for me, like stopping drawing the systems."

"System diagrams are a nice level of abstraction over something that is really complicated underneath."

"If you can draw that picture and tell that story, it just makes it easier for everybody to talk about how it's really going to be used."

Ask the Rosenbot
Peter Van Dijck
Building impactful AI products for design and product leaders, Part 3: Understand AI architectures: RAG, Agents, Oh My!
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Michelle Bejian Lotia
Rolling Out a Repository: How Zapier Centralizes Insights from Across their Organization
2023 • Advancing Research 2023
Gold
Jonathan Fairman
Integrating generative AI into enterprise products: A case study from dscout
2024 • Designing with AI 2024
Gold
Sandra Camacho
Creating More Bias-Proof Designs
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Laura Gatewood
Beyond Buzzwords: Adding Heart to Effective Slack Communication
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2024
Gold
Steve Portigal
War Stories LIVE! Q&A-Discussion
2020 • Advancing Research 2020
Gold
Alana Washington
Theme 3 Intro
2021 • DesignOps Summit 2021
Gold
Jake Burghardt
Stop wasting research: Create new value with insight summaries
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Peter Van Dijck
Building impactful AI products for design and product leaders, Part 1: The new product journey
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Yunyan Li
UX Best Practices
2021 • Design at Scale 2021
Gold
Joerg Beringer
Scaling User Research with AI: Continuous Discovery of User Needs in Minutes
2025 • Designing with AI 2025
Gold
Kristin Skinner
8 Types of Measures in Design Operations
2020 • DesignOps Community
Uday Gajendar
Day 2 Welcome
2024 • Designing with AI 2024
Gold
Rachel Posman
"Ask Me Anything" with Rachel Posman and John Calhoun, Authors of the Upcoming Rosenfeld Book, The Design Conductors
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2024
Gold
Sam Proulx
Prototype Reviews, People With Disabilities, and You
2021 • DesignOps Summit 2021
Gold
Amy Jiménez Márquez
The Atypical UX Manager Path
2020 • Enterprise Community

More Videos

Scott Plewes

"The story of the Indian king and grains of rice perfectly illustrates exponential growth."

Scott Plewes

Why Isn't Your UX Approach Going Viral?: A Mathematical Model

March 28, 2023

Alison Rand

"We live in a biosphere that’s collapsing, so maybe we should try life-centered design rather than just human-centered design."

Alison Rand Sarah Brooks

Scaling Impact with Service Design

March 25, 2021

Rachael Dietkus, LCSW

"The pressure to produce insights quickly defines many organizations shaped by 'move fast and break things' culture."

Rachael Dietkus, LCSW

The power to heal and harm

March 13, 2025

Sheryl Cababa

"One of the challenges for designers is to orient around forces rather than only people."

Sheryl Cababa

Living in the Clouds: Adopting a Systems Thinking Mindset

June 6, 2023

Renee Bouwens

"The sum is greater than the parts—how qualitative and quantitative research play together."

Renee Bouwens

Landing Product Impact: Aligning Research as a Foundational Driver for Delivering the World’s Best Products

December 15, 2023

JP Allen

"Tools are getting much more complex and have more crossover, which made redesigning the map a challenge."

JP Allen Holly Holden

Navigating the UX Tools Landscape

October 1, 2021

Bria Alexander

"Because this is virtual, we have a digital swag bag with goodies you can access via QR code or URL."

Bria Alexander

Opening Remarks

November 18, 2022

Llewyn Paine

"Even if you’re not doing facial recognition, storing face and voice data is under growing legal scrutiny."

Llewyn Paine

[Demo] Deploying AI doppelgangers to de-identify user research recordings

June 5, 2024

Ricardo Martins

"Cluster analysis will definitely replace personas, the fictional personas of course."

Ricardo Martins

Unlocking the power of advanced quantitative methods

March 12, 2025