SPx Lab is CSP’s capacity-building platform for systems practice: creating immersive, field-based learning spaces where practitioners can strengthen their ability to navigate complexity, build convergence, and drive systemic change.
What sets the Lab apart is that learning happens alongside real-world action. Fellowships, workshops, immersions, and design clinics are embedded within live contexts, working closely with practitioners, institutions, and communities addressing complex challenges on the ground. Systems practice is not taught as theory alone, but built through application, reflection, collaboration, and continuous adaptation.
The Lab currently anchors the Systems Practice Fellowship, with workshops, immersions, and collaborative design spaces evolving alongside it.
SPx Lab - Capacity Building
FELLOWSHIP
Systems practice, in the field.
A year-long embedded journey for experienced practitioners working on complex, systemic problems in their communities. It doesn’t take them out of the field. It deepens what they do there.
12 Fellows, 12 Problems.
1 System.
Meet the Fellowship Cohort 2026-27’
Select a fellow to know more about them
Shaivya Sahare
Bharti Thakur
Lochana Adivarekar
Suraj Singh
Onam Tamut
Sanjay Kamble
Firdoushi Al Islam
Manoj Madane
Badavath Venkanna
Nitya Sriram Srinivasan
OBJECTIVE & FORMAT
An embedded fellowship for changemakers.
The Fellowship creates a structured space for practitioners to approach problem solving in complex systems. Fellows continue to remain embedded within the communities and ecosystems they already engage with, while building the ability to better understand interconnected realities, navigate complexity, and enable systemic change.
The Fellowship does not approach systems practice as a fixed methodology, but as a way of seeing, learning, and acting. Through reflection, peer learning, mentorship, and real-world application, fellows strengthen their ability to identify leverage points, build convergence across stakeholders, and respond adaptively to evolving contexts and emerging challenges.
Fellows work on real, ongoing problems. Not on case studies, but with their own communities.
The
Fellowship Journey
Q1 · Mar–May
System Mapping
Map your system. Causal mapping, Iceberg Model, Actors & Power analysis, Leverage Ideation. Residency in Bengaluru.
Q2 · Jun–Aug
Immersion & Validation
Field immersions | Participatory mapping, Theory of Change, Design Thinking, Entrepreneurship frameworks. Build your pilot.
Q3 · Sep–Nov
Pilot Execution
Run your pilot | MEL frameworks, SWOT analysis, Ecosystem planning, Exponential Change lens.
Q4 · Dec–Mar
Demo & Showcase
Document and disseminate | Case studies, Causal Layered Analysis, possible conference. The field announces itself. Find investors for your pilot.
Programme Support
The Fellowship is designed to support practitioners through a combination of structured learning, peer exchange, mentorship, and field-based application:
Workshops, facilitated sessions, and practical tools that help fellows strengthen systems thinking, adaptive strategy, and problem-framing approaches throughout the year.
How do we get out of analysis paralysis? By recognising that people
in the system have the agency.