The purpose of developing systemic health measures is partly to replace 'scale' with more meaningful and earlier information about changes in system dynamics.
The combination of six tools attempt to track:
- Churn through commercial relationships
- The uses of financial flows by agents
- Delays in financial flows
- Information flows between agents
- Stresses and concerns felt by agents
- Rates of innovation in business models
These are intended to give a picture of the 'health' of the system, or at least to provide information about how a system may be changing over time.
All of the tools serve two uses:
- as 'sentinel indicators' that are triggered when critical aspects of system dynamics change, indicating that a follow-up investigation is warranted
- they show a snapshot of critical systemic features that may be useful for implementers seeking to understand, for example, the level of risk tolerance exhibited by agents in a market system a programme may intend to target, or the existing level of innovation in the system - which in turn would help provide insight into the likelihood of significant change resulting at least partly from the efforts of a market system programme.