Why I Started Thinking in Systems

I used to think complicated problems had clear starting points.

If something was wrong, I assumed there was one main reason behind it. One decision. One rule. One person or group that caused it. That way of thinking felt easier because it made problems feel understandable. If you could name the cause, maybe you could fix the issue.

But the more I learned about the problems that show up in people's everyday lives, the more I realized that most of them do not work that way.

Healthcare costs are not only about doctors or insurance companies. Food insecurity is not only about whether enough food exists. Social media pressure is not only about individual choices or screen time. Even belonging is not only about whether people are kind to each other. All of these are shaped by systems.

That word can sound abstract, but I think of a system as the set of forces, decisions, incentives, rules, habits, and relationships that work together to create an outcome. Sometimes the outcome is intended. Sometimes it is not. But either way, the result is rarely random.

I started thinking this way because I kept noticing how often people talk about problems only after they become visible. A student feels excluded. A family struggles to afford food. A teenager feels overwhelmed online. By the time we are talking about the issue, we are usually already looking at the final result. We are seeing the headline, the argument, or the symptom. Systems thinking asks us to slow down and look underneath: What made this happen? Who is affected most? What choices were available, and what choices were not? Who had power in the situation, and who had to adapt?

Those questions changed how I understood civic issues. But they also changed how I understood people.

Growing up as the child of a Kurdish refugee, I learned early that belonging is not always simple. Kurdistan stretches across several countries but does not have a recognized state of its own. I grew up around stories of people building identity and community even when the systems around them did not fully recognize them. I learned that home is not only a place on a map. Sometimes it is something people have to create for each other.

That shaped how I think about inclusion. It is easy to say people should feel like they belong. It is harder to ask what makes belonging possible in the first place. What traditions, policies, conversations, and histories decide who feels seen and who feels like they have to explain themselves?

The same idea applies to issues young people talk about all the time, even when we do not use the word "systems." Take social media. The conversation often becomes about whether teenagers should have more self-control. But that misses a lot. Social media is not just an app someone chooses to open. It is an attention system, designed around algorithms, advertising, comparison, and constant feedback. A teenager may be making individual choices, but those choices happen inside a structure built to keep people engaged. That does not mean young people have no responsibility. It means responsibility is not the whole story.

That is why I started Hang Haven. I wanted a space where young people could talk about big issues without pretending they are simple, and where those conversations felt accessible instead of intimidating. A lot of civic topics are introduced in ways that make students feel like they need to already know everything before they can participate. I don’t think that is true. I think students need better questions, clear examples, and room to think out loud.

The idea took a more concrete shape after I attended the NAIS Student Civic Leadership Summit. I spent a lot of time there thinking about what civic leadership actually means. I don’t think it always has to start with a huge public action or a perfect solution. Sometimes it starts with helping people understand a problem differently, and creating the kind of conversation where people feel safe enough to say what they really think.

So I brought the idea back to Potomac and built a student-led discussion pilot for middle and intermediate school students. The school supported the idea and I was thrilled to run a pilot of 3 sessions with 20 students each. And the students were incredibly engaged and interacted throughout the session. I realized I was on to something.

The goal was not to lecture younger students about what to believe. It was to help them see how issues connect. And what struck me was how much they already understood. When we talked about social media, they did not only talk about phones or trends. They talked about pressure, comparison, group chats, and the feeling that everyone else is always seeing something before you are. They understood the system because they were living inside it.

That experience made me believe even more strongly that young people should be included in civic conversations earlier. Not because we have all the answers, but because we are often closest to the impact.

Systems thinking also helps us move away from blame. Blame can make a problem feel emotionally satisfying for a moment, but it does not make the problem clearer. When my pilot group talked about school lunch, it became evident as the session progressed that they started thinking differently. They had assumptions when we started and they were very different when we ended. Blaming one person rarely explains the budget, supply chains, nutrition rules, stigma, and family income that all shape the outcome. Systems thinking does not excuse harm. It just helps us understand it more honestly.

That matters because how we define a problem shapes the solution we imagine. If we define social media as only a self-control problem, the solution becomes telling teens to put their phones away. If we define it as a design, policy, and culture problem, the solutions get bigger: platform responsibility, school norms, digital literacy, and how young people build healthier expectations with each other. The point is not to make every issue feel impossibly complicated. It is the opposite. When we can see the pieces of a system, we can see where action is possible.

A student may not be able to solve food insecurity alone. But they can understand it more clearly. They can ask better questions. They can support organizations already doing the work. They can notice patterns instead of only reacting to problems after they happen. I think that is one of the most important things civic education can do. It can teach us that the world is not just a collection of separate problems. It is a set of connected systems that people built, inherited, challenged, and changed. And because people shaped those systems, people can reshape them.

That does not mean change is easy. It usually is not. But it does mean young people should not be taught to see civic life as something distant from them. The systems are already part of our lives. They are in our schools, our phones, our lunchrooms, our neighborhoods, and our identities.

Hang Haven started because I wanted to understand those systems better, and because I wanted other students to feel like they could understand them too. Not perfectly. Not all at once. Just enough to ask the next better question.