Poor diet and obesity are some of the biggest contributors to chronic health disease but with the popularity of fast foods and processed foods – how do we overcome it?

At IISRI, we have applied systems thinking to health promotion to develop a new technology that assists with chronic disease prevention by better understanding complex drivers of unhealthy diets and when to intervene.

Systems Thinking in Community Knowledge Exchange (STICKE) is an application developed in collaboration with the GLOBE – a World Health Organization Collaborating Centre for Obesity Prevention, with the support of a grant awarded by VicHealth.

This new tool revolutionises the way insights surrounding complex issues can be obtained, shared, analysed and tracked through the power of systems thinking. STICKE has the potential to speed up the development, and ultimately the roll-out, of new health programs or policies – meaning health programs developed using real-world data can reach the community quicker and more effectively.

By adopting a group model building approach and transferring the process to a virtual platform, STICKE users can engage with a stakeholder community to speed up the consultation process, more easily communicate and achieve consensus on problems, agree policy and program initiatives – while engaging across broader stakeholder pools.

STICKE generates causal loop diagrams showing a stakeholder community’s understanding of the complex problem in entirety, contributing factors, relationships and influences all in one platform.

Facilitators can use STICKE in workshops, one-on-one, and distribute survey modes to capture information and construct in-depth connection circles that directly focus on cause and effects more efficiently with less cost, time and resources.

Stakeholders granted access to STICKE have the ability to view and contribute to the development of projects in their own time.

STICKE is not standing still – IISRI is building additional functionality that will further advance the solution’s capabilities to cultivate and consolidate increasing amounts of data from both historical and current sources.