About: Josephine Sassen-van Meer is currently the Scientific Lead for the System Innovation program at TNO in the Netherlands. With a background in Cognitive Psychology, and expertise in mental resilience, she has devoted her scientific career to systems thinking and transdisciplinary collaboration. Specifically, she aims her efforts at building bridges between the theory and practice of systemic approaches to our grand societal challenges. Together with her team, she is developing a methodology ‘Unlock System Transitions’; a clever mix of systemic approaches to unlock deep understanding of complex matters, while at the same time developing the competencies for transdisciplinary collaboration. Currently, the Unlock methodology is being used by ministries, municipalities, knowledge institutes, and universities while her team is still developing it further.

Josephine’s motivation in her work is to contribute to transitions that lead to an increasingly healthy, fair and more compassionate society. Her contribution lies in the domain of optimizing our collective human thinking capacity, as a precondition for making transitions possible.

Speaker Series Session: Unlocking System Transitions: A systemic approach to actioning complex challenges

Systemic approaches are heralded as the new way forward. Nevertheless, in practice the process of addressing complex problems through a systemic approach is often considered arduous and not seldom unsuccessful. In our drive to solve big problems and relieve the agony as swiftly as possible, there can be a tendency to oversimplify the complexity. If the complexity is taken seriously however, there is a realistic danger of becoming overwhelmed by the manyfold of valid but contradictory perspectives.

This is why the Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research (TNO) has developed the UNLOCK methodology, a transformation program that supports in effectively addressing complex and cross-domain societal issues. In the UNLOCK methodology, participants continuously improve and sharpen their own and collective transdisciplinary skills while they work on the content. This results in actionable ideas for effective interventions with ownership and support from all the stakeholders in the ecosystem.

Watch the recording of the session here.