I grew up in Mirik, and I have watched a certain kind of tool arrive more than once. It gets announced, people get trained, reports go upward. Within a year, everyone is back to the register and the phone call. The tool is rarely bad. It is usually built for somebody else.
The systemic design toolkits have a simple way to catch this early, and nobody has to admit anything for it to work.
Draw two experiences, not one journey
The tool is called Actants, from the Systemic Design Toolkit. Take two people in the same system. The toolkit uses a child and a teacher. For each, draw how their experience rises and falls over time, and mark the moments that matter.
Then put the two curves side by side and look at where they differ. That difference is the finding.
One journey map gives you a story everyone agrees with. Two maps give you the disagreement. In the rural tools I have seen fail, the officer’s curve rises: data arrives, reports compile, the dashboard stays green. The field worker’s curve falls, because every green square cost them a double entry, once in the app and once in the register they still trust.
Nobody is acting badly. The system simply produces two experiences, and only one of them is measured.
The trap with a name
System thinkers call one common trap <i>success to the successful</i>. If resources follow measured performance, they keep flowing to whoever measures well, and that is usually whoever started with the most. The village with reliable power and a trained operator posts good numbers, gets more support, and posts better numbers.
The dangerous part is that this looks like a system working. The metric rises. Only the second curve shows the gap widening underneath.
Three circles, not a launch date
The Roadmap for Transition asks you to plan in three widening circles instead of a straight line to a launch.
The first circle is the smallest real thing you can put in the system, with the people it needs. The second connects it to like-minded people and groups. The toolkit calls this a learning network, not a user base. The third circle is the one nobody plans: the tool becoming ordinary practice, no longer anybody’s project.
Rural technology tends to be planned as circle one and funded as circle three, with no circle two at all. The pilot works, because pilots are run by people who care. Then it scales, the caring does not scale with it, and nothing underneath holds it up.
What this gets you
None of this makes a tool succeed by itself. It tells you, early and cheaply, who the tool actually serves, while that is still a design question and not yet a post-mortem.
The two toolkits behind this post are the Systemic Design Toolkit by Namahn and shiftN, developed further with Peter Jones and Alex Ryan, and <i>Design Journeys through Complex Systems</i> by Peter Jones and Kristel Van Ael. Both are freely available, and both are more useful printed and drawn on than read and filed.