Diagram relationships between primary interests and drivers of change that create challenges as well as opportunities.

Com­plex sys­tems can have many links and so we rec­om­mend that your team cap­ture these links visu­al­ly rather than in nar­ra­tive form alone. As you devel­op the sit­u­a­tion analy­sis dia­gram, keep in mind the following:

• The team should not make any deci­sions yet about which links are impor­tant or strong or can be altered, instead iden­ti­fy all links with­in a sys­tem that make it work the way it cur­rent­ly does. Do not con­sid­er any pos­si­ble strate­gies yet. This step cap­tures the world the way it is now, not how we’d like to change it.
• Be sure to include rel­e­vant emerg­ing fac­tors. Demo­graph­ic, eco­nom­ic, polit­i­cal, tech­no­log­i­cal and envi­ron­men­tal fac­tors all may affect the sit­u­a­tion analy­sis. Attempt to iden­ti­fy the emerg­ing fac­tors that could strong­ly influ­ence the sit­u­a­tion analy­sis, such as impacts from and respons­es to cli­mate change, new ener­gy and agri­cul­tur­al tech­nolo­gies that will affect land use, and pop­u­la­tion growth. Include these fac­tors in the sit­u­a­tion analy­sis diagram.
• Not all pri­ma­ry inter­ests will be con­nect­ed to each oth­er, and not all social or eco­nom­ic pri­ma­ry inter­ests will be con­nect­ed to con­ser­va­tion pri­ma­ry inter­ests. The point of the sit­u­a­tion analy­sis is to iden­ti­fy strong dri­vers of pri­ma­ry inter­ests, and strong con­nec­tions between social, eco­nom­ic and con­ser­va­tion pri­ma­ry interests.

A sit­u­a­tion analy­sis dia­gram visu­al­ly cap­tures the rela­tion­ships between pri­ma­ry inter­ests and their pri­ma­ry dri­vers of change.