Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2025

DOI

10.1007/s11528-025-01057-1

Publication Title

TechTrends

Volume

Article in Press

Pages

15 pp.

Abstract

A design-based research study on the development of one-page tools to support systemic thinking in public managers is presented. Study participants included public managers of social and human service agencies within government or nonprofit organizations, as learners for whom the tools were designed; and instructional design professionals, offering expert opinions regarding the design of tools for adult learners. The design process consisted of generating ideas, visualizing ideas and developing prototypes of the tools. Formative assessments of tool prototypes were conducted in several small online focus groups, sharing specific tools to be used within the context of specific management practices, such as collaboration, culture development or evaluation of the organization as a system. In this article, we discuss the context surrounding our designs, the process used to design systemic thinking tools, experiences of a one-page tool design using design stories and lessons learned from design failures encountered during formative assessment. This study contributes to the body of educational design research by emphasizing the large learning gains achieved through the design of simple one-page tools.

Rights

© 2025 The Authors.

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original authors and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

ORCID

0000-0003-4370-7893 (Regenold), 0000-0002-9323-5217 (Reed)

Original Publication Citation

Regenold, T. A., Murphy, S. E., & Reed, P. A. (2025). Developing systemic thinking skills: Design-based research of one-page tools for public managers. TechTrends. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11528-025-01057-1

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