Systems Mapping: The Basics

Summary

Systems maps—especially maps built around stocks, flows, and stages of development—can help groups understand complex public-health and social problems, coordinate their efforts, and identify where interventions may have the greatest impact.

Georgia Children’s Behavioral-Health Case

The Georgia Interagency Directors Team (IDT), made up of government agencies, service providers, and stakeholder groups, had spent more than a year trying to improve coordination of children’s behavioral-health services without making the progress it wanted.

With support from the Centers of Excellence for Children’s Behavioral Health at the Georgia Health Policy Center, the team developed systems-thinking skills and created a shared picture of how the system worked.

The team’s initial map highlighted a provider- and service-centered system:

• Organizations provided specific services, while children moved among community settings, foster care, health institutions, and corrections institutions.
• Limited funding could encourage organizations to compete for resources and shift responsibility for children rather than coordinate care.
• Moving a child from one setting to another did not necessarily improve the child’s long-term development.

The team then reframed its goal around children’s development and well-being. It pictured a starting stock of adults living as independently and successfully as possible, and a pathway showing children growing into adulthood either “on track” or “off track.”

The map helped the team see that serious and costly outcomes—such as incarceration, homelessness, substance abuse, and crime—often appeared downstream, while the system provided relatively little incentive to invest upstream, when preventive support might help.

This shared view supported a more coordinated strategy focused on children’s needs at each developmental stage and on moving investments upstream. The team continued using the map to communicate, assess implementation, and guide its strategy.

Applying Systems Maps to Other Issues

The video describes adapting the approach to violence prevention. A map developed with the CDC, the National Network of Public Health Institutes, and the Georgia Health Policy Center showed children aging into youth and adulthood as risk and protective factors changed over time.

Risk factors discussed include substance abuse, mental-health challenges such as depression, family or social isolation, toxic stress, and community violence. Risk can contribute to cycles in which people exposed to violence may later perpetrate violence, creating reinforcing “vicious cycles.”

Protective factors, including education and employment, can help reduce the likelihood of victimization or perpetration.

These maps can help community, health, and social-service stakeholders discuss which risks are most prevalent, where protective factors can be strengthened, and how organizations can work together. The approach may also apply to issues such as obesity, chronic disease, education, and employment.

Mapping Approaches and Steps

1. State-to-State (or State-by-State) Map

This map tracks a population through different states or conditions, including as people age.

1. Choose a population-health measure, such as weight or obesity.
2. Select an age range and define the relevant stocks—for example, a healthy-weight stock and an unhealthy-weight or obesity stock.
3. Identify flows into and out of each stock. Consider how people enter or leave each condition.
4. Link age ranges to show how people move into the next age category while also changing states within an age range.
5. Choose a stock of particular importance and ask what is happening there: Is it growing or shrinking, and why?
6. Consider investments and interventions, especially whether action earlier in the pathway could prevent a worse outcome later.
7. Use the map to identify opportunities for collaboration and consider where resources should be directed.

2. Attribute-Chain Map

This map follows an attribute—such as a skill or a risk or protective factor—as it develops over a person’s life.

1. Choose the issue or attribute you want to understand.
2. Identify when it begins to accumulate or otherwise becomes relevant.
3. Trace how the attribute changes as people age: Does it build, persist, decline, or get lost?
4. Identify when intervention is intended to occur, then examine what affects the attribute at that stage.
5. Look upstream for earlier investments that could build or preserve an attribute needed later.
6. Use the map to discuss how different groups can coordinate resources and influence the attribute over time.

Main Lessons

• Mapping helps teams make their assumptions about a complex system visible and develop a shared understanding of how its parts interact.
• Reframing a problem from the activities of individual providers to the outcomes and development of a population can reveal gaps, incentives, and unintended consequences.
• The most visible or costly symptoms may occur downstream, while useful opportunities for prevention lie earlier in the pathway.
• A map is not just a one-time illustration: teams can use it to communicate, test strategies, identify leverage points, and adapt their work as they learn.
• Systems mapping can help groups move from fragmented effort toward collaboration and shared leadership.

Speakers and Sources Identified

• Unnamed narrator(s): Provide the case history and explain the mapping approaches.
• Unnamed IDT team leader: Describes the map as a foundation for the team’s strategy.
• Unnamed IDT participant: Explains how the map helps the team consider children’s needs at each developmental stage and coordinate resources.
• Interagency Directors Team (IDT), Georgia: The cross-agency team featured in the behavioral-health case.
• Centers of Excellence for Children’s Behavioral Health at the Georgia Health Policy Center: Supported the IDT’s systems-thinking work.
• CDC, the National Network of Public Health Institutes, and the Georgia Health Policy Center: Identified as collaborators on a violence-prevention map.