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Reading the System
A Two-Day Curriculum in Systems Literacy
for Leaders and Their Teams
A Two-Day Curriculum in Systems Literacy
for Leaders and Their Teams
Most leaders working with systems thinking are the only person in their organisation using the framing. They see parts and functions where their team sees personalities. They see relationships and interdependence where their team sees problems. The translation is constant, and the practice rarely lands beyond the leader's own work.
Reading the System is the curriculum that distributes the lens. It is not training, in the conventional sense — it produces no certification, confers no credential, and teaches no facilitation methods. It builds capacity to read.
The curriculum runs across two consecutive days, in person, for the leader and the team or department they are responsible for. The leader is present throughout. Their presence is part of the curriculum.
The curriculum is grounded in three published works:
Three values from the Primer are elevated across the two days: alignment over transactions; relationships and interdependence over individual positions; whole system over individual parts.
By the end of the two days, participants will be able to:
The curriculum does not aim to make participants practitioners. It builds the lens; what the leader and team do with it belongs to them.
Each session follows a three-beat rhythm:
Encounter. Participants meet the principle through experience before language. An exercise, an activity, an embodied practice. They bump into the principle in their own behaviour or perception, before it is named.
Read. The room reads what just happened. This is the discipline the curriculum is teaching. The facilitator holds the room without interpreting for it. Divergence between participants is treated as data, not as a problem to resolve.
Apply. The principle is named through a brief lecturette (five to seven minutes), then participants apply it to their own system — collectively in the single-system format.
The curriculum unfolds across four sessions, each three hours, with a sixty-minute lunch between morning and afternoon. Total contact time: twelve hours.
The opening session establishes the shift from anthropocentric framing to systems framing. Participants encounter the experience of changing perspective without changing the system itself, and begin naming the parts and functions in their own context — distinct from the people who occupy them.
Circles in the Air — a brief embodied exercise in which the same circular motion appears clockwise from one vantage point and counter-clockwise from another, without changing direction. The principle: perspective shapes what we see; the system itself has not changed.
Rich Pictures — drawn from Peter Checkland's Soft Systems Methodology. Each participant draws a single picture of their system as they see it: parts, functions, relationships, tensions, energies. The pictures are then compared. Each one shows the same system; no two are alike. Divergence between the pictures is read as the most valuable signal in the room — not a problem to resolve, but the data the curriculum is built around.
Lecturette: The Primer's definition of a system. Parts and functions, not people. The two-step process under stress — naming why we default to attributing outcomes to individuals.
Participants name the parts and functions in their own system — not by job title, but by what each does that affects others.
The afternoon session introduces the central principle of POSIWID — the purpose of a system is what it does. Participants experience the gap between intended outputs and actual outputs in real time, then turn the same lens on their own organisation through the Iceberg Model.
Warped Juggle — a structured group exercise in which the team discovers that the constraints holding back their performance are largely self-imposed. The exercise embodies POSIWID.
The room reads the gap between what the group intended to produce and what it actually produced. The facilitator introduces POSIWID and lets it sit.
Lecturette: POSIWID, briefly. Stafford Beer. Then the Iceberg Model — events at the surface, patterns of behaviour underneath, structures below that, mental models at the base. This becomes the working diagnostic tool of the curriculum.
Iceberg work on participants' own system. One event the team or leader has been frustrated by, traced down to patterns, structures, and mental models. The full diagnostic done collectively.
The second day opens with the distinction the Primer treats as central: alignment is shared direction toward a common aim, not agreement on process. Most organisations confuse the two and chase agreement when alignment is what they need. Participants experience the difference in their bodies before working with it conceptually.
Thumb Wrestling — a brief paired exercise in which most participants default to competition, while pairs that score highest have realised they can collaborate by alternating who wins. The exercise exposes a deeply held mental model about competition and shared aim in two minutes.
The room reads what just happened. Why did most pairs default to competition? What rule was no one given that everyone assumed? The conversation moves to alignment versus agreement.
Lecturette: Alignment versus agreement (Primer, Chapter 1). Then the four domains from Chapter 3 — focus, common ground, hierarchy, resilience — introduced as a diagnostic frame, not a model to apply.
Participants locate their own system across the four domains. The team examines itself together, and the divergence between team members on where strain sits is read as the most valuable signal in the room.
The closing session turns toward what the lens is for. The Primer's principle that systems emerge through observation over time — not through advance envisioning — becomes the working discipline of the afternoon. The session ends with a practice participants will take home.
What Happens If? — a collective mapping exercise in which the room traces the consequences of an action common to the system, forward through time, until a feedback loop closes back on the original action. The exercise produces a living causal map on the wall and embodies how systems reveal themselves over time.
The room reads the map. Where are the surprises? Where are the loops the team did not anticipate? What does the map say about why previous interventions did not produce what was expected?
Lecturette: Systems emerge through observation over time. The Wald aircraft story (Primer, Chapter 1). The discipline of standing there.
Each participant identifies one situation in their system where they would normally intervene quickly. They commit to a period of non-intervention — a week, two weeks, four weeks — and to observation in its place. The session closes with a simple weekly practice: read the system, do not yet act, return next week and read again.
The curriculum runs on attention rather than artefacts. No slides in the conventional sense — visuals are drawn on the wall in the moment, with the room.
The leader is a participant, not a co-facilitator. They sit in the room as part of their team, doing the work alongside their people. Their occasional silences in moments where they would normally intervene are part of the curriculum — the team sees the leader practising what is being taught.
The leader's presence signals what no document can: that this is the lens they themselves are using, and that the team is being given access to it.
Two consecutive days, in person, at the client's office or a venue arranged by the client. The curriculum is not adapted for online delivery — the leader's physical presence in the room with their team is part of how the program works. Embodied exercises lose much of their power when mediated through a screen.
A follow-up check-in is included: sixty minutes, online, four to six weeks after the program closes. The check-in is held with the leader and the team together. It reads what has changed in how the team reads itself since the program ended.
Held by Victor Nuñez or by a senior practitioner from the platform. The curriculum is delivered, not licensed; the program depends on how it is held, not just what it covers.
The curriculum is most useful when one of two conditions holds:
Run earlier than the first condition allows, and the leader cannot yet hold the lens for the team when situations arise. Run later, and the leader risks isolating themselves further from the system they lead.
The curriculum builds the lens. What the leader and team do with it belongs to them.
Reading the System is commissioned by the leader for the team or department they are responsible for, by arrangement. Pricing is per engagement, not per seat, and is shaped by team size and travel.
To enquire, visit emergententerprise.partners/literacy.html or contact Victor directly through the platform.
© Victor Nuñez. The contents of this curriculum draw from Emergent Systems Thinking and Authentic Practice with Right Attention (2024) and the broader body of cited work it stands on.
Registered IP. Not for reproduction or distribution.