The iceberg model

The iceberg model is a useful tool to reflect on the complex social or environmental challenges we care about and seek to address. As explained in the blogpost on systems change, changeworkers often inadvertently find themselves fighting the symptoms of the real issues. Our entire society is geared towards this. For those who want to go deeper, to understand how the challenges are maintained in place and what the power dynamics behind this are, the iceberg model is a good entry point.

How to use this tool

Above the water line

Start at the level of the symptoms. Above the water line, jot down everything that can readily be observed and naturally draws most of our attention: behaviours, decisions, results or outcomes. This most likely includes some metrics or facts that are related to why you care about this issue, meaning what is problematic about the current situation. You may write “X tons of Y land on a landwill every hour”, “X children suffer from Y”, “only Z% people in decision-making spaces”, or “in only X% of countries is it legal to Y (something desirable based on your values, e.g. marriage for all)”. It’s the ‘why you should care’ pitch you may have delivered to others before. You may also include more neutral facts or even things you personally consider to be positive. 

Just below the water line

Below the water line lie the structures, processes, rules and norms that produce these visible results. This will most likely require some more thinking for most people, unless you’ve done this investigation before. Can you identify laws that directly or indirectly cause the problem? Perhaps this was already established in your field. For instance, if single plastics are allowed, even in places without the infrastructure to ‘recycle’, and allowed to be exported to poorer countries under the guise of ‘recycling’, it’s quite logical that ocean plastic will remain a problem. Taking a more social problem, so long as only people gendered women are eligible for a maternity leave, it is quite obvious that there will be gender inequity in the workplace. Worse, if there is no maternal leave at all, then the consequences for the children’s health and development may also be considerable if the mother has to go back to work the day after giving birth, or for the mother’s chances in the workplace if she doesn’t. Remember that laws can also include subsidies, meaning a subsidy for an unsustainable or unethical product and the absence of subsidy for a better alternative could also be part of the problem (e.g. the way meat and other by-products are subsidised in most countries). Jot down any laws that you can think of that impact what you see above the waterline.

But it could be something less formal than a national law. It could be a rule in a given context, for instance a sexist dress code in an institution, or a rule in a local school district that everyone needs to bring their own food, which creates inequity in school participation for those children whose parents don’t have the means to feed them healthily. It could also be a process, like the way unemployment benefits are awarded (or not), the way applicants for a job opening are screened, and so on. It could also be the way certain roles are defined, for instance the amount of power a presidential democracy grants the elected president (compared to a more parliamentary or direct democracy), what a psychiatrist is allowed to do, or say, whether a teacher can hit children or not, and so on. You may also think of less explicit things, for instance what is considered “normal” or “best” practice in certain contexts. For instance, there is no law or rule that women have to be prescribed the pill as the main contraception method in many countries. But it’s a normal practice. It’s prescribed all over the place, often without information about the risks and side effects, much to the detriment of women. Giving out funds to charities without changing anything in the core business, also called greenwashing or pinkwashing, is also a standard practice in the business world. Lastly, you may consider value and money flows. How does money flow in this system? Could this contribute to the problem you identified? Write down everything that comes to your mind in this section.

One level deeper

Next, we move on to the people and power dimension. How is power distributed in this system? An easy way to identify some core elements is asking yourself who gets to decide any of the things you wrote down in the previous section. For example, if you identified problematic laws - who made them? Who is refusing to change them? This will typically point you towards the people - either very specific people which you can name, or more abstract categories such as ‘white’, ‘whealthy’, ‘cis-gender’, etc. - who hold the power and are behind the problematic things you identified previously. Sometimes it’s not as obvious. For instance, people voting against what we know to be in their interest - why? Who told them to do that? How were they manipulated into this and who did it? Or certain political decisions, when scrutinised, reveal themselves to be the result of private interest, rather than that of the elected people specifically. For instance, big industries lobbying for their interests - whether that’s the tobacco industry, meat, arms, oil… Do you know how many big oil lobbyists were at the last COP? Over 2000. So yes, sometimes the question of power needs a little bit more digging, but very often you can simply follow the money. If the money cannot be followed because the data is hidden, you can do so indirectly by asking yourself who benefits. Who benefits from this remaining as it is? Often this will point you to who is invested in defending the status quo. Lastly, when you think about money flows in general in this context, you may want to ask some more questions. Is there inequity in who holds the money? How is it (re)distributed? And so on. 

What lies beneath it all

Finally, we come to the last level, the deepest on the iceberg. It may get a little bit more abstract or philosophical in the opinions of some, but bear with me. The question we want to ask here is: what mindset, worldview or set of beliefs are all of the above stemming from, or rooted in? In other words, what do I have to believe about the world, about humans, and non-human animals, to come to the conclusion that the above is the way to go? This may be quite specific to your topic, but let’s give a few examples. Examples of beliefs that motivate many choices in the patriarchy are “women are inferior to men'', “women were created by God to serve men”, or some other, perhaps more subtle variation of this (including jokes about the “weaker sex”). When it comes to environmental challenges, you will often find beliefs dating back to previous centuries around “nature needs to be controlled”, “man is at the top of the food chain”, and things like “natural resources are there to be extracted”. In a society that values money, status and success above all else, a capitalist society, you will also often find beliefs like “anyone who works hard can become rich”, “poor people are lazy”, and so on. In racist societies, there are typically beliefs about people who look differently, which can revolve around the ‘supremacy’ or ‘superiority’ of lighter skinned people, something that bogus science has nurtured in previous centuries. 

In some cases, the beliefs and worldviews that the challenges you’re looking at stem from may be pretty obvious and known. They may even be things that are (still) considered ‘acceptable’ to believe in the society you find yourself in. In other cases, you may cringe and struggle to put words to it, because even though the beliefs are now considered with a more critical lens, or perhaps your society thinks of itself as ‘past’ that, they are actually still very much real. In those cases, shame and other tricky feelings may come up. Do what you need to acknowledge and move through those, without shying away from the truth you are uncovering here. Sitting with discomfort is an essential skill of any changeworker, and we will not look away. 

Now that you have written down a number of beliefs, mindsets and so on, you may be able to pin down the underlying paradigm that anchors all of them. This may be a slightly more abstract or generalised statement. To give you some examples, a linear and extractive economy is a paradigm (and a circular, regenerative economy a totally different one). White supremacy is also a paradigm. The patriarchy is a paradigm as well. And so on and so forth. Naming those will allow you to get really clear on what needs changing.

Resources & further reading

• Mair, J. and Seelos, C. (2021) ‘Organizations, Social Problems, and System Change: Invigorating the Third Mandate of Organizational Research’, Organization Theory, 2(4), p. 1–22.
• The Water of Systems Change, FSC
• Cambridge Judge Business School, www.appliedsystemsthinking.com
• Otto Scharmer on the three divides
• Nicholls, A. and Murdock, A. (2012) ‘The nature of social innovation’, in A. Nicholls and A. Murdock (eds) Social Innovation Blurring Boundaries to Reconfigure Markets. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 1–30.
• This blogpost was written by Nora Wilhelm and originally published on the blog of collaboratio helvetica

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