Insights: Wicked Problems

Why don’t you all just talk to each other?!
2020 Virtual Summit on Ending Homelessness

October 28, 2020

The Michigan Campaign to End Homelessness offers a Summit on Ending Homelessness in the Fall of each year. For 80+ participants, we laid out the process we applied to better connect providers in physical/behavioral health, homelessness prevention and our neighbors at risk.

Along with our project partners from the, the Northwest Michigan Coalition to End Homelessness, we presented the origin, process and findings of two overlapping initiatives in the intersection of Healthcare and Homelessness. The first is detailed on our site, the second focuses especially on youth in the Child Welfare, Behavioral Health and Juvenile Justice systems.

Running Into Change
An Ethical Business Webinar

July 8, 2020

Our friend and colleague Nick Beadleston of Good Impacts had put together a webinar series on ethical business practice and asked Connect_CX Partner Mark VanderKlipp to share some thoughts on his transition from a larger graphic design firm working solely in the world of wayfinding to a sole proprietorship that’s focused on visualizing and accessing complex social systems from the standpoint of both provider and customer experience. The Webinar is 30 minutes long.


The Michigan Resilience Initiative: A Grassroots Child Sexual Abuse Primary Prevention Campaign
CS Mott Children’s Hospital Child Abuse and Neglect 37th Annual Conference

October 23 2018, Plymouth MI

Presented with Reggie Noto, MA, MSW, Michigan State University Office of the Provost, and Ginger Kadlec, Board Member, Traverse Bay Children’s Advocacy Center (TBCAC). Mark VanderKlipp, in his role as a Systems Practice practitioner, is working toward a research-based Public Will campaign as a contractor to the TBCAC. This was part presentation, part workshop where we facilitated a Q&A session for the 50+ participants of this breakout session. Their input was the basis for the beginnings of a systems practice process phase.


Better Stories by Design: Crafting Narratives that Stick
20+ facilitated workshops from 2017-2020

Responding to needs communicated by nonprofit community leaders, Rotary Charities of Traverse City asked us to design and deliver a workshop about storytelling process for their professional development series, the Leadership Learning Lab. This was our opportunity to not only research and facilitate, but also learn from others as they developed creative approaches to story design.

Since that time, Mark VanderKlipp has delivered the tailored workshop to leaders across the country and across market verticals. Each of these were searching for a process to tell Better Stories by Design; each of them left the session with a draft narrative they could continue to refine and deliver to their constituents.


Acumen Academy Systems Practice “Sherpa”

2020: MiSTEM Network

2019: Norte Safe Routes to School

2018: Advocates for Healthy Communities, Waste Stream Awareness

2017: Homeless Youth Initiative, Great Lakes Ecosystem Health

Certified six times as a Systems Practice practitioner, Mark VanderKlipp uses design thinking to help visualize "Wicked Problems" as he leads groups through a 12-week Systems Practice curriculum, then presents Systems Thinking concepts to groups of community and nonprofit leaders from across Northern Michigan at the end of each learning cohort.


Caregiver Unaware
Pulse: Voices from the Heart of Medicine

April 1, 2019

Pulse is dedicated to telling the personal story of health care … by and for everyone — patients, health professionals and students of narrative medicine. Our story was accepted for publication, under the heading “Not Knowing.” We believe that harm can be informational as well as physical, and our story details one six-minute interaction proving our point.


Signs of Green
College Planning & Management

In a wide-ranging article on sustainable solutions for wayfinding, author Karen Spring interviewed a number of experts on sustainability. Mark makes a case for sustainable information as well as sustainable signage. Simplified content is king, especially when giving directions.