Whether running a city, an organisation, or a social campaign, the greatest challenges standing in your way are always complex. Involving numerous players and constrained by multiple interdependent forces, they form systemic patterns that are seemingly impossible to break. Tackling them requires creative new approaches that not only address their complex nature, but are uniquely designed to take advantage of it.

Towards this end, Complexity Science has come a long way in helping us understand the inner dynamics shaping systemic patterns. Yet such insights have proven hard to translate into effective forms of action. Hence the question repeatedly asked by change makers – how can we bridge the gap between complexity thinking and complexity doing?

Social Acupuncture is a personal research project aimed to help bridge this gap by suggesting new rationales for designing counter-pattern strategies. In a nutshell, it explores how analysing the deeper interactions sustaining patterns can be used to identify leverage points; and how small accumulative interventions across such points can be used to disrupt and transform them.

If you’re interested to learn more, some of the key ideas and underlying assumptions for this experimental approach can be found under ‘Building Blocks’. As this research project is still in progress they do not present a fully formed narrative as a future book on the subject would demonstrate, but rather map out its leading rationales. Hope you enjoy:-)