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

# Introduction to Systems Thinking: Unit 2 Preview

## Details

**Authors** Pope, Harley

**Year** 2017

**Publisher** IFSTAL (Interdisciplinary Food Systems Teaching and Learning)

**Kind of work** course

**Discipline** Agriculture & Food

**Secondary disciplines** Education

**Kind of engagement** public

**Applied** false

[Read it](https://ifstal.ac.uk/?p=1233)

## In authors' words

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

To preview the second unit of IFSTAL's online introduction to systems thinking for postgraduate students, covering the properties of food systems challenges and the frameworks for thinking about them.

### Who or what was studied (sample)

Postgraduate students across the IFSTAL partner universities; the unit is set at roughly 60 to 90 minutes of study and is paired with Workshop 2, Analysing System Interventions, held at Warwick, Oxford, Reading and London.

### How they did it (methods)

A course page by IFSTAL's Education Coordinator at the University of Reading that recaps Unit 1, sets out Unit 2's content and learning outcomes, and points students to the portal and the accompanying workshop.

### What they found (results)

The unit distinguishes problems that are difficult or complicated from those classed as complex and wicked, argues that knowing these general qualities helps in designing interventions, and presents several frameworks for thinking about systems, among them DSRP. The page names DSRP as the Distinctions, Systems, Relationships and Perspectives framework, calls it "an excellent distillation of many systems concepts," and says it will help learners begin thinking about food system challenges. The stated learning outcomes are to distinguish the features of wicked and super-wicked problems from tame problems, to make a case for the role of a systems approach in responding to them, to define the key characteristics of a system and of a systems approach, and to apply the DSRP framework. The workshop adds a systems thinking tool for structuring thinking around a potential intervention and for identifying what might help or hinder an intervention strategy.

## Commentary

### In short

IFSTAL's postgraduate food systems teaching unit adopts DSRP as its systems thinking framework, calling it an excellent distillation of many systems concepts and listing applying it among the unit's four learning outcomes.

### Response

Making "apply the DSRP framework" a learning outcome in its own right, alongside defining a system and distinguishing wicked from tame problems, places the four patterns as a capability students are expected to leave with rather than as background reading. The endorsement is explicit and evaluative: a distillation of many systems concepts is a claim about what DSRP does relative to the rest of the field, not merely a description of it. The framework arrives here detached from its source — the page names neither Cabrera nor any citation for DSRP or for the systems concepts around it — so students in UK postgraduate food-systems teaching meet the four patterns without the account that grounds them, which is how a structural claim turns into a classroom tool whose warrant nobody in the room can check. The preview does not show how the unit teaches the patterns, so what students do with them cannot be read from this page.

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

**Added** 2026-11-02

**How to cite this** Pope, Harley (2017). Introduction to Systems Thinking: Unit 2 Preview. IFSTAL (Interdisciplinary Food Systems Teaching and Learning).