What's in a System?
Short animations exploring what systems are, why they're hard to change, and what happens when they push back.
These videos use simple visual analogies to unpack concepts that anyone working in complex systems will recognise: the nested nature of systems, the effort required to create change, the quiet drag of resistance, and the sharp reversal of backlash.
Everything is a system
Systems aren't abstract concepts that only apply to organisations or policies. They're everywhere, at every scale. A cell is a system. So is an organ, a human body, a family, a neighbourhood, a city, a country, a planet. Each one is made up of parts that interact, and each one sits inside larger systems that shape what's possible.
These systems don't just stack neatly inside each other. They overlap, interact, and influence one another in ways that are often hard to see. A change in one system ripples into others. Understanding this interconnectedness is the starting point for systems thinking.
From cells to galaxies
This animation starts at the smallest scale, a single cell, and pulls back to reveal the nested and overlapping systems that surround it. Organs, bodies, communities, cities, countries, the planet, and beyond. Then it returns to where it started.
The point isn't just that systems exist at every level. It's that they're connected. The health of a community shapes the health of the people in it. The design of a city shapes the communities within it. Policy settings at a national level shape what cities can do. When we work on change in one system, we're always working within and across others.
This is why simple, linear approaches to complex problems often fall short. The system you're trying to change is nested inside other systems, and it contains systems of its own. Effective systems thinking starts with recognising where you sit in that picture.
The landscape of change
Imagine a ball sitting in a landscape of hills and valleys. The valleys are stable states, the places where a system naturally settles. The hills are the barriers between those states. To move a system from one stable state to another, you need enough force to push the ball up and over the hill.
This is a useful way to think about what happens when we try to shift complex systems. Whether you're working in public health, community development, education, or environmental management, the dynamics are remarkably similar. Change requires sustained effort. It meets friction. And sometimes, it gets actively pushed backwards.
The following three animations make those dynamics visible. Each one illustrates a different force at work.
The effort required for change
A finger flicks the ball, and it starts to move. It rolls through small hills and valleys, gaining and losing momentum. Then it reaches a much larger hill. The first attempt isn't enough. The ball rolls back down, losing the ground it gained. A second push gets it to the top.
This is how systems change often works in practice. Early wins can feel encouraging, but the deeper structural shifts require more sustained effort. Programs that show promising initial results can stall when they meet entrenched norms, institutional inertia, or funding cycles that don't match the timeline of real change.
The key insight here is that falling short on the first attempt doesn't mean the approach was wrong. It often means the system is working exactly as designed, and that the next push needs to be better supported, better timed, or better coordinated with other forces.
Resistance
The ball is moving again, but this time it reaches a body of water. It doesn't stop. It manages to jump onto the surface and keep going. But the pace slows right down. Progress continues, just much more slowly than expected.
This is what passive resistance looks like in systems change. Nobody is actively blocking the work. There's no outright opposition. But things take longer than they should. Approvals stall, meetings get rescheduled, data doesn't arrive, and partners are supportive in principle but slow in practice. The change effort isn't rejected. It's absorbed.
Resistance like this is easy to miss because it doesn't announce itself. It shows up as delays, as "alignment processes," as the gap between what people agree to in a workshop and what actually changes in their day-to-day work. Recognising it for what it is matters, because the response to passive resistance is very different from the response to a direct barrier.
Backlash
This time, the ball is moving forward and a finger appears from the opposite direction and flicks it back. Hard. The ball doesn't just slow down. It reverses course entirely.
Backlash is the most visible and disruptive force in systems change. It's what happens when the system actively fights back. This can look like policy reversals, defunding, organised opposition, or public campaigns against the change. Unlike resistance, backlash is deliberate. Someone or something is pushing in the other direction.
Backlash often emerges when a change effort starts to succeed. The closer the ball gets to the top of the hill, the more the existing system has to lose. This is why some of the strongest opposition arrives not at the start of a change process, but partway through, when the shift becomes real enough to threaten the status quo.
Why this matters for practice
These four animations cover two related ideas. The first is structural: systems are everywhere, they're nested, and they overlap. Any change effort sits within that reality. The other three are about dynamics: what it actually takes to shift a system, and the different forces that work against you when you try.
Those forces don't operate in isolation. In any real systems change effort, you're likely dealing with all of them at different times, and sometimes simultaneously. A program might need sustained effort to get moving, encounter passive resistance from the institutions it's trying to influence, and then face active backlash when it starts to gain traction.
Understanding which force you're dealing with changes what you do next. If the challenge is effort, the response is persistence and coordination. If it's resistance, the response is relationship building and finding where the friction is coming from. If it's backlash, the response might be coalition building, strategic communication, or simply being prepared for the pushback before it arrives.
We use these animations in our workshops and training to open up conversations about what participants are experiencing in their own systems. They're a simple starting point for much richer discussions about power, incentives, and the practical realities of trying to shift things that don't want to be shifted.
Related resources
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We run workshops and training that use these concepts as a starting point for deeper work on your specific systems challenges.
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