Challenge
The issue, the place, who is affected and the future you are working towards.
RFI Digital Commons
Systems Canvas
A free tool for mapping a challenge, the people and living systems involved, how they are connected, and where change might begin.
Test version 0.1Why it exists
Relational thinking, made practical.
Most challenges that matter—water, land, livelihoods, care, governance—are shaped by many actors and the relationships between them. Fixing one part in isolation often moves the problem somewhere else.
Systems Canvas makes this kind of thinking usable without specialist training. It walks you through a challenge one part at a time, explains each term in plain words, and produces a canvas you can print, discuss and come back to. It reflects the approach set out in RFI’s thinking: people, institutions and living systems understood together.
A canvas is a way of thinking a situation through with others. It does not replace listening to the people affected.
Who it is for
- Community groups and local organisations planning change
- Researchers, students and evaluators studying complex situations
- NGOs, programme teams and facilitators running workshops
- Local institutions and public servants working across sectors
- Anyone who wants to think a challenge through before acting on it
What it does
- A step-by-step canvas: the challenge, actors, relationships, resources, drivers and constraints, feedback, leverage points and intervention ideas
- Living systems such as rivers, forests and soils can be included as actors
- A simple relationship view showing who is connected to whom, and how
- Plain-language explanations of terms such as “feedback” and “leverage point”
- A printable canvas (print or save as PDF), plus spreadsheet (CSV) and JSON exports
- Backup files you can keep safe and restore on any device; works offline once opened or installed
The canvas
Eight parts, in any order.
Work through the parts at your own pace and come back as your understanding grows. A suggested next step points to a natural place to continue, but nothing is required.
Actors
People, groups, institutions, authorities, businesses and other-than-human actors such as rivers or forests.
Relationships
Collaboration, dependency, tension, authority, resource and knowledge flows, or a relationship in your own words.
Resources and assets
Knowledge, land and environment, finance, infrastructure, and social and cultural strengths.
Drivers and constraints
Policies, customs, incentives, history and environmental pressures that push or hold back change.
Feedback and consequences
Loops that keep a situation going or pull it back, described as short stories in plain language.
Leverage points
Places where a small, well-chosen change could make a bigger difference.
Intervention ideas
Possible actions, who would lead them, and their assumptions, risks and indicators.
Your data
Stays on your device. Here are the honest limits.
What you enter is saved only in your own browser on your own device. Systems Canvas never sends canvas content, names, places or titles to RFI, to analytics or to any third party, and it does not use your canvases for AI of any kind.
A canvas can name people and organisations and describe tensions between them. Use roles or pseudonyms where names are not needed, and check before sharing an export.
- If a phone or laptop is lost, stolen or broken, its canvases are gone unless a backup exists somewhere else.
- Clearing browser data for this website, some phone clean-up apps, or uninstalling the app can delete canvases.
- Private or incognito windows delete everything when they close.
- On a shared computer, anyone using the same browser can open the tool and see its canvases.
- The first version has no password and does not encrypt canvases or backup files.
- There is no syncing between devices, and no way for several people to edit one canvas at the same time. To move work, make a backup and restore it on the other device.
- The relationship view is a simple picture, not a diagram editor: actors are placed automatically and cannot be dragged.
At a glance
Free, and only from this website.
Open or install Systems Canvas from this page. There are no app-store versions and no copies hosted elsewhere.
- Version
- 0.1 (test version)
- Price
- Free
- Account
- None needed
- Works on
- Current versions of Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari, on computers, tablets and phones. A larger screen is easier for the relationship view
- Install
- From this website, using your browser’s own install option
- Exports
- Printable canvas (print or save as PDF), spreadsheet (CSV) and JSON