Broadening Perspectives

About leveraging aspects of yourself to facilitate trust building and inclusivity.

The future of our work as designers and researchers will continue to evolve due to ongoing digitalization and advancements in AI. To remain resilient, both we as knowledge workers and our organizations need to embrace continuous learning. In the age of AI, this means creating new knowledge because nobody knows how AI will change our work yet. We must design the future of our work through experimentation. This will get us beyond ‘Babel’, which simply means confusion.

In June 2025, seven studios from the Reach Network contributed stories and reflections on the engagements they have had with system transformations. Our journey into system transformation revealed a fundamental truth: it’s about looking beyond isolated problems to understand interconnected challenges. For those designing solutions, this means shifting from fixing individual parts to engage with the system as a whole. For everyone, it’s about asking: What are the hidden connections, and how do changes ripple through the whole? Working systemically demands a particular way of thinking. It's about embracing curiosity, humility, and a willingness to collaborate across diverse perspectives. We observed the value of going broad in our understanding before diving deeper into specific areas. One helpful analogy that emerged was that of a gardener, nurturing growth and working with natural systems rather than simply trying to fix broken elements.