The Global Water Challenge
Collective intelligence applied to the world's most interconnected crisis.
water systems thinking co-creation transition design
A six-session co-creation series that brought 40+ participants from across the globe together to unravel the global water challenge through systems thinking, transition design, and collective sensemaking.
The global water crisis is not a single problem. It is a web of interconnected challenges spanning ecology, governance, economics, culture, and infrastructure. Most approaches address it in fragments: partial, linear, planned, and disconnected from one another. This series took a different approach. Over two months, participants from every continent collaborated on a shared Miro board to map the system, surface leverage points, and design pathways from insight to action.
Stage
Completed
Type
Campaign
Horizon
12 · Water Wisdom
Lab
Open Water Lab
Format
Co-Creation
Duration
August 29 to October 31, 2024
Participants
40-50 from across the globe
Partner
Si Network (Systems Innovation)
Primary Output
Co-created Miro board (5000+ objects)
Series Board on Miro Source Presentation
Overview
The global water crisis is systemic, interconnected, and resistant to fragmented solutions. The Global Water Challenge was designed to match that complexity: a structured co-creation process where diverse participants from across the world applied systems thinking methodologies to unravel the challenge together, moving from mapping the current system through to designing pathways for action.
Why it existed
Most approaches to the global water crisis are partial. They focus on one dimension (scarcity, or pollution, or governance) without seeing how all dimensions interact. They apply linear cause-and-effect thinking to a non-linear system. They plan within existing structures rather than questioning those structures. And they operate in disconnection from one another.
The series was created to model a different approach: systemic, multi-dimensional, and genuinely collaborative across geographies and disciplines.
How it worked
Six online sessions over two months, hosted on a shared Miro board. Each session built on the previous one, following a structured arc from unraveling the challenge through systems analysis to transition design and ecosystem building. Participants contributed in real time through timed interactive exercises, adding reflections, perspectives, and ideas that were then synthesized by the facilitation team between sessions.
The methodology drew from systems thinking, transition design, and collective sensemaking. The Miro board grew into a living artifact of shared intelligence: 5000+ objects co-created by the full group.
What it was
A completed six-session co-creation series and its primary artifact: a comprehensive Miro board mapping the global water challenge from multiple dimensions, identifying leverage points, and proposing pathways from insight to action.
Secondary outputs include a source presentation published on Miroverse (the research foundation for the series) and a synthesized body of collective intelligence spanning boundary questions, systems maps, challenge statements, and radical ideation.
Who wat it for
40-50 participants from across the globe: practitioners, researchers, systems thinkers, water professionals, community organizers, and curious individuals. Facilitated in partnership with Si Network (Systems Innovation), drawing from their global community of changemakers and systems practitioners.
The series was open to anyone willing to engage with complexity rather than simplify it away.
Challenge
The water crisis is not a water problem. It is a systems problem expressed through water.
Water scarcity, pollution, inequitable access, ecosystem degradation, and governance failure are not separate crises. They are symptoms of the same underlying system. But almost every attempt to address them treats them as independent problems, solvable in isolation with targeted interventions. This fragmentation is itself the crisis.
Key Barriers for Users
Partial approaches
Most interventions focus on improving parts. A sanitation project here. A desalination plant there. A conservation campaign somewhere else. Each may succeed on its own terms while the system as a whole continues to degrade.
The water challenge cannot be solved by improving parts. The parts are connected. A water infrastructure project that ignores governance will fail politically. A governance reform that ignores community will fail culturally. Treating any dimension in isolation guarantees that the others will undermine it.
Linear thinking
Cause-and-effect logic dominates how water challenges are framed. Pollution causes health problems. Scarcity causes conflict. Overuse causes depletion. Each framing is true and each is incomplete.
Water systems are non-linear. Effects loop back as causes. Interventions in one part of the system produce unexpected consequences elsewhere. Deforestation reduces rainfall which reduces agriculture which increases poverty which increases deforestation. Linear thinking cannot navigate these feedback loops. It can only chase symptoms.
Planned responses
Fixed planning and static organizational structures are the default mode of response. Five-year strategies. Rigid project scopes. Predetermined outcomes. These approaches assume the system will hold still while you implement your plan.
It will not. Water systems are dynamic, adaptive, and deeply sensitive to context. What works in one watershed may fail in the next. What works this decade may be irrelevant in the next. Effective responses must be adaptive, iterative, and comfortable with uncertainty.
Disconnected actors
Organizations, projects, and communities working on water challenges largely operate in isolation. They see the world as individual initiatives and organize within those confines. Knowledge stays siloed. Efforts duplicate. Complementary work happens in parallel without awareness of each other.
The irony is precise: water connects everything in nature, yet the human response to water challenges is profoundly disconnected.
Systemic Nature
These four patterns are not independent failures. They reinforce each other.
Partial approaches encourage linear thinking because focusing on one dimension removes the need to understand how it connects to others. Linear thinking produces planned responses because cause-and-effect logic implies predictable outcomes. Planned responses breed disconnection because rigid project scopes leave no room for coordination with adjacent efforts. And disconnected actors default to partial approaches because no one has visibility of the whole.
The cycle sustains itself. Breaking it requires an intervention that is simultaneously systemic (not partial), non-linear (not cause-and-effect), adaptive (not planned), and connected (not siloed).
That is what the series was designed to be.
Intervention
Six sessions. One shared board. Forty minds from across the world working the same problem together.
The series was designed as the opposite of fragmented response: a structured, participatory process that moved a diverse group of people through a complete arc of systems inquiry. From unraveling the challenge through mapping its structure to designing transitions and building pathways for action. Each session built on the last. Every contribution became part of a shared, living artifact.
Core Strategic Intent
Model what a systemic, connected, adaptive response to the global water challenge could look like by actually doing it. Not a report about systems thinking. A lived experience of collective sensemaking applied to a real and urgent challenge.
Methodology
The series drew from three interconnected disciplines:
Systems Thinking
Understanding the water crisis as a web of interdependent variables, feedback loops, and emergent behaviors rather than a collection of isolated problems. The Iceberg Model was used to move from visible events through patterns and structures down to the mental models that sustain them.
Transitional Design
Designing for systemic change across multiple timescales and levels of organization. Moving from understanding the current system to envisioning what a fundamentally different relationship with water could look like, then working backward to identify pathways.
Collective Sensemaking
Harnessing the diverse perspectives, experiences, and knowledge of 40+ participants from different geographies, disciplines, and contexts. The premise: no single perspective can see the whole system. Bringing many perspectives together on a shared canvas creates a richer, more honest map than any expert analysis.
The Six Session
Session 1 · Unraveling August 29, 2024
Series introduction and orientation. Participants walked through the source research (published on Miroverse) establishing the shared knowledge base. Then the first collaborative exercise: unraveling the various dimensions and aspects of the global water challenge through timed sessions where participants added reflections, perspectives, and ideas directly to the board.
The facilitation team synthesized all contributions between sessions, distilling patterns and surfacing themes that would shape the next stage.
Session 2 · Boundary Questions September 12, 2024
Building on the synthesis from Session 1A, the group moved to generating boundary questions: the questions that define the edges of the system under investigation. What is inside the scope of inquiry? What is outside? Where are the boundaries porous? These questions shaped the frame through which the rest of the series would operate.
Session 3 · Systems Thinking September 19, 2024
The core analytical session. Using the Iceberg Model, participants mapped the global water challenge across four layers: visible events (what we see), patterns (what recurs), structures (what produces the patterns), and mental models (what beliefs and assumptions sustain the structures).
From this mapping, the group formulated a challenge statement: a precise articulation of the systemic challenge the series would address in its remaining sessions.
Session 4 · Systems Mapping October 3, 2024
Setting focus and goal variables for the series and constructing a systems map centered around the core challenge statement. This session made the interconnections visible: how variables influence each other, where feedback loops amplify or dampen change, and where the system's behavior emerges from structure rather than individual decisions.
Session 5 · Transition Design October 17, 2024
Revision of the challenge question based on what the systems map revealed. Synthesis of the map's insights into a series of "How Might We" statements that reframed systemic challenges as design opportunities. Then ideation: generating interventions that address leverage points rather than symptoms.
Session 6 · Ecosystem Building October 31, 2024
The final session. Radical ideation pushing beyond incremental solutions. Ecosystem design connecting ideas into reinforcing clusters of action. And the critical bridge: setting pathways from ideas to action, identifying what would need to happen for the most promising interventions to move from the board into the world.
Series wrap and reflection on what the collective process produced, what it revealed, and what it means for how we approach systemic challenges.
The board is not a report. It is a map made by forty people who looked at the same system from different places and built something none of them could have built alone.
The Artifact
The primary output is the co-created Miro board: 5000+ objects spanning the full arc of the series. Sticky notes, systems maps, synthesis diagrams, challenge statements, ideation clusters, and ecosystem designs. All contributed by participants across the six sessions. All visible, explorable, and open.
The board is not a finished document. It is a snapshot of collective intelligence at a specific moment. Its value is not in providing answers but in making the system visible in a way that no single perspective could achieve.
→ Explore the series board on Miro → View the source presentation on Miroverse
Evolution
Eight months from first research to final session. A project that moved fast because the challenge demanded it.
March 2024 · Research Begins
The project started as independent research into the global water challenge. Synthesizing data across scarcity, pollution, governance, access, and ecosystem health. Mapping how current approaches fragment a challenge that is fundamentally interconnected. The output: a comprehensive visual presentation that would become the shared foundation for everything that followed.
June 2024 · Partnership with Si Network
Sara Featherston and Kim Sellberg began designing the series structure in partnership with Si Network (Systems Innovation Network). The methodology was shaped: systems thinking, transition design, and collective sensemaking as the three disciplines. Six sessions over two months as the arc. Miro as the shared canvas.
August - October 2024 · The Series
Six sessions with 40-50 participants from across the globe. From unraveling the challenge through systems analysis, iceberg mapping, and challenge framing to transition design, radical ideation, and ecosystem building. The full arc is documented in the Intervention section above.
The Miro board grew to 5000+ objects co-created by all participants across the sessions.
Current · Completed
The series fulfilled its intended scope. The Miro board and Miroverse presentation remain open and accessible as lasting artifacts. The methodology, insights, and collective intelligence produced across the series inform ongoing work within Open Water Lab and the broader Lumeon Labs ecosystem.
Forty people from across the world spent two months thinking together about water. The board they built is still there, still open, still waiting to be explored.
Resources
The Global Water Challenge drew from a body of research that became an open resource in its own right. The source presentation on Miroverse is the primary reference, freely accessible for anyone to explore or build upon.
Methodologies used in the series
Iceberg Model
A systems thinking tool for moving beneath surface-level events to identify underlying patterns, structures, and mental models. Used in Session 2 to map the global water challenge across four layers of depth.
Systems Mapping
Visual mapping of interdependent variables, feedback loops, and causal relationships within a complex system. Used in Session 3 to construct a map centered around the core challenge statement.
Transition Design
A design-led approach to systemic change across multiple timescales and levels of organization. Used in Session 4 to generate "How Might We" statements and intervention concepts targeting leverage points.
Boundary Questions
A facilitation technique for defining the scope and edges of a systemic inquiry. Used in Session 1B to establish what is inside, outside, and at the margins of the investigation.
Further reading
Thinking in Systems: A Primer
Donella Meadows The foundational introduction to systems thinking. Essential context for understanding the methodology behind the series.
Transition Design Seminar
Carnegie Mellon School of Design The academic framework from which transition design methodology draws. Context for Session 4's approach to systemic intervention.
Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System
Donella Meadows The classic paper on identifying where small shifts produce large systemic changes. Directly relevant to the series' focus on leverage points over symptoms.
Team & Partners
A co-creation series developed and facilitated in partnership with Si Network, drawing participants from their global community of systems practitioners and changemakers.
Team
Researcher, Co-Facilitator & Series Designer
Responsible for the initial research, source presentation, series architecture, and Miro board design.
Co-Facilitator & Series Designer
Systems innovation facilitator. Led the participatory sessions and guided the group through systems thinking and transition design methodologies.
Partners
Co-Creation Partner
Global network for systems innovation. Provided the community infrastructure and participant network that made genuine global participation possible.
Project Incubator & Funder
Polymathic innovation studio based in Norway.
Research Lab
Water stewardship research and development lab.
Engage
The Global Water Challenge series is completed. The artifacts remain open. The methodology is available for others to adapt.
Explore the Board
The co-created Miro board is open and explorable. 5000+ objects spanning systems mapping, iceberg analysis, transition design, and ecosystem building. Navigate it at your own pace.
Use the Source Research
The Global Water Challenge presentation on Miroverse is freely available to download, remix, and build upon. Use it as a foundation for your own workshops, courses, or community sessions.
Run Your Own
The methodology is replicable. If you want to run a similar co-creation series on water challenges or on any systemic challenge, reach out. We can share facilitation insights, session structures, and lessons learned.
Connect
If you participated in the series and want to stay connected, or if you work on systemic water challenges and see potential for collaboration with Open Water Lab, the door is open.