See Story to Graph
**Situation:**
Social systems are the purpose and context for technological systems, thus the commonly used term "sociotechnical-systems 
".
Most of the focus in STEM is on the engineering of technological systems.
We have managed complexity in our technological systems far better than in our social systems.
By making explicit the relationships between complex social **systems and stories** of participants in the social systems we may make better worlds for ourselves and our progeny. Most people are better at storytelling than at system thinking.
Our team is interested in increasing neighborhood scale skills in solving inherently complex social problems at the neighborhood to watershed scales. In our scope we include relevant complex technological problems.
After a few promising experiments in moving from explicit stories to implicit "systems-in-stories" and back to the storytellers themselves, we have formulated a hypothesis.
**Hypothesis:**
**One.** People are good at telling stories and understanding stories.
**Two.** Many people are put off by well-meaning people advocating and teaching systems thinking.
**Three.** Stories can easily be represented in graphic form as causal loop diagrams.
**Four.** Reflection on the story-graph pairs leads to new insights. A happy side effect of using story-graph pairs is the realization that systems diagrams are useful and easy to create.
# Proposal
We are proposing a program of participatory action learning to discover attractive ways for neighborhood actors to acquire systems skills for practical and ongoing use in their neighborhoods.
**Demographics:** **One.** Youth: grade school, high school, and college **Two.** Elders **Three.** Youth and elders. **Etc.**
**Domains: ** Schools Neighborhood associations Clubs Etc.
**Principles: ** **One.** Everything can be performed and understood by non-specialists living in the participating neighborhoods. **Two.** No specialized language. **Three.** Written permission with right of review and refusal by primary storytellers.
**Focus** Potential for action/change/improvement at neighborhood level.
**Equipment: ** Audio/video recorders (smart phones) Descript Arrows tool FedWiki Projector Meeting spaces
**References:**
Kerry Turner
Marc Pierson Ward Cunningham Eric Dobbs
Paul Rodwell
Peter Dimitrios
Richard Schultz
Peter Tuddenham