Making Sense of Complexity: Participatory Group Model Building in Action

30th September 2025

The SUPPORT Study

Over the past few months, Dartington has been working in partnership with the University of Bristol, the University of Exeter and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine to explore what helps or stops young people aged 14-16 years old getting support for their mental health in community settings within Bristol, Tiverton, and Ealing.

To ensure that young people and the systems around them shape the direction of this research, the teams have delivered a series of participatory ‘Group Model Building’ workshops. In each area, the research team has collaborated with young people, parents, practitioners and service-leaders to co-create system maps that illustrate the complexity and key drivers influencing access to support in each local context. These maps will guide the next phase of the study, which focusses on developing recommendations and co-designing solutions in each area.

What is participatory Group Model Building?

Participatory Group Model Building is a hands-on method rooted in Community Based System Dynamics (CBSD), which blends systems thinking with community-led approaches to address complex social challenges. CBSD brings everyone involved, especially people with lived experience, into the process to ensure that people most affected by the issue help shape the understanding and direction of change. In guided workshops, participants such as young people, families and practitioners come together to identify key factors, feedback loops and relationships within the system that influence their lives. The result is a shared system map, called a causal loop diagram, that captures the collective view of what drives and shapes the complex problem they are exploring - such as access to mental health support.

Below is an example of a causal loop diagram from our work on Kailo, an initiative committed to addressing the root causes of your people’s mental health in the places they live.

This approach is particularly valuable when tackling issues surrounding young people’s mental health, violence affecting young people, and access to opportunities. Rather than simplifying or avoiding complexity, participatory Group Model Building embraces it, and brings diverse perspectives together on making sense of how things connect. It begins with the voices of those most affected, grounding insights in lived experience. It helps uncover and shift the invisible assumptions people hold about problems, showing how factors such as funding, stress or access to services interact to affect wellbeing. By visualising recurring patterns and feedback loops, communities can identify leverage points for change. Through a collaborative process, participants build shared understanding, ownership and capacity to apply systems thinking to future challenges.

Why is it important?

Group Model Building is a tool that can support us to move beyond traditional silos and ways of thinking to better understand the whole system at play, rather than isolated symptoms. This allows us to design solutions that support lasting change. Group Model Building also invites young people into the exploration and co-design process, supporting them to shape the conversation around their own needs.

We have found that young people are often the most intuitive system modellers, as they tend to be less tied to linear ways of thinking – and often less afraid to get messy.

This opens up opportunities for conversations that are able to hold the complexity of their lives without reducing it to a core set of variables or fitting experiences into boxes. It also helps for us to visualise dynamics that may be overlooked or misunderstood (such as the connection between the perception of young people by adults and young people’s feeling of safety). This opens doors to new ways of approaching collective change to address social problems.

How can Dartington support?

Community Based System Dynamics and participatory Group Model Building requires people to break out of traditional ways of thinking. This can feel unfamiliar or overwhelming, especially when the boundaries of a social issue are wide-reaching or unclear. Without careful facilitation, the process and resulting system maps risk becoming overly detailed or losing shared meaning.

This is where we can support. Our team includes experienced facilitators and trainers who specialise in CBSD and in embedding these approaches within broader design and evaluation processes (see our Kailo Deeper Discovery for an example). We root our work in equity, anti-racism, and collective action, ensuring that the processes extend beyond the system maps to elevate voices, shift power and influence real-life policy and practice.

If you are interested in learning more about this approach, or to see how we can support you to implement it, please reach out. We offer tailored systems training and coaching and work collaboratively with teams to build capacity and provide technical expertise to support participatory group model building.