[DSRP Evidence](https://dsrpevidence.org/)

# DSRP

## Details

**Authors** Haapai Enterprises

**Year** 2025

**Publisher** Haapai Enterprises (haapai.nz)

**Kind of work** blog

**Discipline** Business & Management

**Secondary disciplines** Systems Science

**Kind of engagement** public

**Applied** false

[Read it](https://haapai.nz/index.php/2025/06/16/dsrp/)

## In authors' words

### What they set out to do (purpose)

To introduce DSRP to the consultancy's readers as the four fundamental patterns underlying cognition and systems thinking, and to set out the habits of mind the post calls the DSRP mindset.

### How they did it (methods)

A short explainer in four parts, each sentence carrying a numbered citation. "The Four Building Blocks of DSRP" defines each pattern with its element pair: distinctions as identity and other, systems as part and whole, relationships as action and reaction, perspectives as point and view. "Key Aspects of DSRP Theory" states that the patterns are universal to thinking and to the structuring of information and that they operate simultaneously and nonlinearly. "Application in Systems Thinking" gives one use per pattern — decomposing a problem, locating parts in larger wholes, tracing cause and effect, and holding multiple viewpoints — and connects the set to wicked problems. The longest section is a nine-item list of practices: attend to underlying structure rather than content, expect the patterns everywhere, treat knowledge as actively constructed, treat it as evolving, model concepts physically or graphically, iterate across elements until understanding satisfies, mix and match the patt

### What they found (results)

The post claims that the four patterns are universal to thinking, that making their use explicit improves thinking, and that DSRP gives practitioners a structured but flexible method for wicked problems. It closes by claiming that adopting the nine listed practices improves systematic thinking.

## Commentary

### In short

An explainer from a New Zealand consultancy that sets out the four patterns with their element pairs and then lists nine practices it calls the DSRP mindset. It is assembled from secondary sources — an encyclopedia entry, two blog posts, and Cabrera Research Lab's own blog — rather than from the primary literature.

### In more detail

The post's expository core is accurate as far as it goes. All four patterns are named with both of their elements, which is more than most short introductions manage, and the two structural claims it reports — that the patterns are universal to the structuring of information, and that they operate simultaneously and nonlinearly rather than as stages — are the theory's claims and not a procedural misreading of them. The nine-item mindset list is where the post does its own work, and it reaches past the usual summary in three places: it foregrounds structure over content as the object of attention, it names the constructivist and evolutionary-epistemology commitments that sit behind the theory, and it locates the analysis at the level of the elements rather than the four pattern names. The last of these is the distinction between knowing that there is a pattern called perspectives and being able to move a point onto a view. Against that, the post gives no example at all. There is no worked case, no scenario, and no demonstration of a pattern being applied to anything, so a reader finishes with the vocabulary and the element pairs but without having seen a move made. Its citation base is secondary throughout: a Wikipedia entry, an i2Insights post, and another practitioner's blog carry most of the sentences, with Cabrera Research Lab's own blog cited for the mindset items and the primary papers appearing only as an unused ResearchGate listing in the source list.

### Response

The post gets the element pairs right, and it gets simultaneity right — it says the patterns operate at once and nonlinearly, which is the claim that four-step readings of DSRP get wrong. Naming the constructivist and evolutionary-epistemology commitments is also correct and unusual in a short practitioner piece; those are in the theory and most summaries omit them. The error is one of attribution rather than of content. The post credits DSRP to Derek Cabrera alone, where the theory as it now stands is the joint work of Derek and Laura Cabrera, and its 2018 and later statements are co-authored. The post also claims that explicit use of the patterns improves thinking and sources that claim to a practitioner blog, when the claim is one the measurement literature addresses directly and could have been cited for. Nothing in the post misstates what the theory holds.

**Patterns it shows** D, S, R, P

**Added** 2026-10-28

**How to cite this** Haapai Enterprises (2025). DSRP. Haapai Enterprises (haapai.nz).