Some problems cannot be described adequately in words or numbers. The full situation includes people with conflicting interests, historical grievances, unstated assumptions, cultural norms, power relationships, and emotional investments that interact in ways no linear description can capture. For these kinds of problems — which Peter Checkland called messy or soft — a different kind of representation is needed.
Rich pictures are that representation. Developed as part of Checkland’s Soft Systems Methodology (SSM), rich pictures are informal, hand-drawn diagrams that capture the full complexity of a problem situation — not just the technical facts, but the human, social, cultural, and political dimensions that shape how the problem is experienced and why it is hard to resolve.
What is a Rich Picture?
A rich picture is a hand-drawn diagram — often messy, often unconventional — that uses images, symbols, stick figures, speech bubbles, caricatures, and any other visual means to represent all the elements of a complex problem situation that the analyst considers relevant. There is no standard notation. There are no rules about what can or cannot be included. The richness is precisely the point.
Rich pictures typically include:
- Actors: The people, groups, and organizations involved in or affected by the situation, usually represented as stick figures or simple icons.
- Relationships: Lines, arrows, and visual connections showing how actors relate to each other and to key elements of the situation.
- Concerns and perceptions: Speech bubbles, thought bubbles, or icons representing what different actors want, fear, believe, or value.
- Conflicts and tensions: Crossed swords, lightning bolts, or other visual symbols for areas of disagreement or conflict.
- Context: Background elements that shape the situation — organizational structures, external pressures, historical factors, cultural norms.
- Key processes and events: Activities, flows, and events that are central to how the situation unfolds.
Why Draw Rather Than Write?
The choice of a visual, hand-drawn format is not incidental. It reflects a specific epistemological stance about what is knowable and communicable about complex social situations.
Written descriptions and formal models select and organize information according to established categories and priorities. A management consultant’s report and a worker’s complaint letter about the same organizational problem will select very different elements as salient. A rich picture can include both perspectives simultaneously — and can represent the relationship between them visually — in a way that neither a written report nor a formal model can.
The informal, hand-drawn quality also matters. It signals that the picture is not a definitive, authoritative representation but a working tool for sense-making, open to revision and extension. This encourages people to contribute to and modify the picture rather than simply accepting it as given — which is essential in the kind of participatory problem-structuring that SSM is designed to support.
How Rich Pictures Fit into SSM
In Checkland’s Soft Systems Methodology, rich pictures are developed in Stage 1 (finding out about the problem situation) and serve as the foundation for everything that follows. They are typically created through interviews, observations, and group workshops in which stakeholders describe their experience of the situation.
The rich picture itself does not solve anything. It does not prescribe what should be done. What it does is make the full complexity of the situation visible — creating a shared reference point for all subsequent analysis and a basis for identifying the different perspectives (Weltanschauungen, or worldviews) that stakeholders bring to the situation.
Those worldviews then feed into the CATWOE analysis and root definition development in the later stages of SSM, ensuring that the conceptual models built in those stages are grounded in the real perspectives and concerns that the rich picture revealed.
Drawing a Rich Picture: A Practical Guide
Step 1: Gather perspectives
Before drawing, talk to people involved in or affected by the situation. Ask them to describe what is happening, what they want, what they worry about, and what they think is causing the problem. Pay attention to disagreements and to the things people do not say explicitly but seem to take for granted.
Step 2: Start drawing without a plan
Do not plan the picture before you draw it. Start by placing the central elements — usually the main actors and the core activity or problem — on the page, and then add elements as they seem relevant. The absence of a fixed plan encourages you to include things you did not initially think were important.
Step 3: Include everything that seems relevant
If you are unsure whether something belongs, include it. The picture can always be revised. Leaving something out because it seems too messy or too political or too hard to represent visually is usually a mistake — those are often precisely the things that matter most for understanding the situation.
Step 4: Use the picture as a discussion tool
Share the rich picture with stakeholders and use their reactions to refine it. People will often point out things you missed, disagree with how you’ve represented something, or suddenly see connections they hadn’t noticed before. This is the picture working as it should.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do rich pictures need to look professional?
No, and in fact overly polished rich pictures often lose their effectiveness. The informal, hand-drawn quality signals that the picture is an open, provisional representation, which encourages people to engage with it actively rather than simply accepting it.
What is the difference between a rich picture and a mind map?
A mind map organizes information in a hierarchical tree structure around a central concept. A rich picture is non-hierarchical and focuses on capturing the social, emotional, political, and relational dimensions of a specific real-world problem situation. Rich pictures explicitly include conflict, power, and human perception in ways that mind maps typically do not.
Conclusion
Rich pictures are a deceptively powerful tool. Their informality is their strength: by refusing the false clarity of formal notation, they make room for the genuine complexity of real problem situations. If you are working on a problem that involves multiple stakeholders with conflicting views, historical tensions, and cultural factors that defy easy categorization, drawing a rich picture is often the single most clarifying thing you can do — not because it will give you the answer, but because it will finally let you see the full shape of the question.
