Resumen de Fostering systems thinking within engineers without borders student teams using group model building

Jeffrey P. Walters, Benjamin Greiner, Emily Omorrow, Bernard Amadei

• Engineers Without Borders-USA (EWB-USA) developed the Planning, Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (PMEL)framework to confront the complex challenges inherent in internationalcommunity development projects. The first criticalstep of the PMEL framework requires thoughtful exploration of ‘‘pathways’’ to community change: a series of proposedactions that lead to a set of positive outcomes within the community. In this study, we investigate the benefit of using GroupModel Building (GMB) as a way to improve the outcome of brainstorming sessions, a key aspect of team decision makingwithin this first step of the PMEL framework. Here we posit an important mechanism for an improved outcome inbrainstorming sessions would be a shift in student mental models towards system thinking. In order to assess the valueproposition of GMB in project decision making, a two-session GMB workshop was held with a EWB-USA student teamworking on a rural water project in Peru. A mixed-methods approach was used to extract and analyze participant mentalmodels before and after the workshop to measure growth in systems thinking. The results of the study indicate compellingshifts in participants’ mental models towards those of systems thinkers, including an understanding of important factorsand how they influence as a system to impact project sustainability. Marked changes in project planning action items werealso observed along with an alignment of their proposed change pathways. Overall, the project team gained a morecomplete understanding and appreciation of project complexity and of the factors that contribute to project success. Thus,GMB provides a usefultechniqueto teach engineeringstudentssystems thinking, whilepossibly improving the quality, andthus sustainability, of EWB community development projects.