Topic 1 Creative Thinking

• Creative thinking gets together key attributes for addressing complex sustainability challenges and driving meaningful transitions.
• While combining the following approaches, it enables solutions that are creative, systemic, and resilient:
  1. Systems thinking – allows systemic insight into feedback loops and system resilience 
  2. Design thinking – towards empathy-driven, context-sensitive solutions
  3. Futures literacy – enhances forward-looking and adaptable mindsets.

These approaches – Design thinking, Systems thinking and Futures literacy – can lead the way to sustainability transitions.

• Creative thinking gets together key attributes for addressing complex sustainability challenges and driving meaningful transitions.
• While combining the following approaches, it enables solutions that are creative, systemic, and resilient:
  1. Systems thinking – allows systemic insight into feedback loops and system resilience 
  2. Design thinking – towards empathy-driven, context-sensitive solutions
  3. Futures literacy – enhances forward-looking and adaptable mindsets.

These approaches – Design thinking, Systems thinking and Futures literacy – can lead the way to sustainability transitions.

---

Systems thinking

• Systems are interconnected elements, linked in ways that affect each other. 

Systems are all around us – examples:

• Our bodies
• Our global trade and transportation systems

Because the elements in a system are connected, action in one area affects others.

• Systems thinking recognises the existence of systems and considers them in decision making:
  • seeing the bigger picture and focusing on the power of these connections
  • helps to understand the world’s true complexity and make better decisions.

The View inside a Dark Room: Go Slow When You Can’t See What’s in Front

• Peter Senge used the analogy of a dark room to illustrate how one moves through a turbulent world where the future is so uncertain

“…when you enter a dark room, you walk slowly, feeling around in the dark to ensure you don’t fall or break something”

At the heart of Senge’s idea is Systems thinking

Systems Thinking can better navigate Risks, Barriers, and Opportunities 

• Traditional, linear business thinking won’t solve social and environmental issues. 
• Executives need systems thinking.

---

Core principles:

• Holistic perspective: Focus on systems as interrelated wholes rather than isolated parts 
• Feedback loops & interdependence: Recognises causal chains and dynamic relationships that shape system behaviour 
• Identification of leverage points: Pinpoints where small interventions generate significant change, crucial for systemic transformation.

Application to sustainability:

• Systems-based models (e.g., SDG Interlinkages frameworks) help assess complex SDG trade-offs
• New AI-enhanced platforms, like SYMBIOSIS, use systems thinking to support societal challenges and the SDGs by mapping causal structures and enhancing stakeholder understanding

Teaching and Learning Activity

Design thinking

• A mindset and approach to problem-solving and innovation anchored around human-centered design

“Design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success.”

—Tim Brown, Executive Chair of IDEO

• Design thinking is different from other innovation and ideation processes in that it’s solution-based and user-centric rather than problem-based

== It focuses on the solution to a problem instead of the problem itself ==

FOCUS ON SOLUTION

Core principles:

• Iterative & non-linear processes involving empathising, framing, ideating, prototyping, and testing 
• Solving wicked problems through creative, abductive reasoning and visual modelling such as sketches and prototypes

Application to sustainability:

• Research shows integrating design and sustainability science leads to more effective and inclusive solutions aligned with SDGs by fostering cross-disciplinary collaboration and creative coordination in complex contexts
• “Systemic design”—which merges design thinking with systems thinking—is increasingly used to develop interventions that are environmentally sound and socially equitable

Futures literacy

• Futures Literacy helps people understand why and how we use the future to prepare, plan, and interact with the complexity and novelty of our societies. 
• Through structured on-the-ground learning-by-doing activities known as Futures Literacy Laboratories (FLLs), communities and individuals can learn about how the origins of what they imagine and can empower them to diversify their actions.

Core principles:

• Capability to “use the future” purposefully, not just predict it. Futures Literacy involves anticipating multiple scenarios and reflecting on how expectations shape decisions 
• Scenario-building and reflexivity: Encourages experimentation and rethinking mental models via participatory approaches.

Application to sustainability:

• UNESCO’s global “Futures Literacy Laboratories” empower communities to reimagine sustainable futures through diverse stakeholder engagement
• Educational programs combining futures thinking and climate science have demonstrated measurable gains in sustainability agency and positive emotions among students 
• Futures-literacy modules are being increasingly integrated into sustainability education (e.g., at Centre for Alternative Technology), emphasizing uncertainty, systemic connections, and transformative change

Futures literacy is the capacity to know how to imagine the future, and why it is necessary.