Summary
The Iceberg Model is a systems-thinking tool for looking beneath visible problems to the deeper forces that produce them. It has four levels: events (what just happened); patterns (what keeps happening); the structures that hold those patterns in place, such as policies, rules, incentives and resource flows; and, deepest, mental models – the shared beliefs and assumptions those structures grow from.
Its origin is unclear. The charity consultancy NPC traces the image to the anthropologist Edward Hall’s 1976 iceberg of culture, later adapted by systems and management theorists. NPC is frank about its limits: “too simplistic to provide a thorough analysis”. Jill Andres and Carole Muriithi have redrawn it as a living tree, since an iceberg is “static and disconnected from its environment”.
Rationale
Its bottom layer is roughly where we’re looking, and Part 1 agrees that what’s invisible is often most influential. But its arrows point one way; we see structures and assumptions continually remaking each other.
Source: mutomorro.com