Do we need a theory of change for systems change?

"The Matrix is a system, Neo. The system is our enemy. But when you’re inside you look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still part of that system and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand that most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so injured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it.” ~ Morpheus, The Matrix

There is a lot of handwaving and protestation these days about how the world would be a better place if only people were more systemic thinkers. As someone who believes in the power of systems thinking, I’ve been guilty of participating in these activities, often in echo chambers of other converts. If only people could see the bigger picture, the conversation commonly goes, we’d be able to deal more effectively with the complex problems facing our societies.

But are we the ones that have lost sight of the bigger picture? If achieving a more systemic world was achieved by repeated protestation, wouldn’t we already be there? A significant chunk of our effort as a systems community is focused on getting people to the initial realisation systems thinking can be useful tool. Too much of a chunk, perhaps, if the result is that we’ve neglected to answer the question, “ok, well then what?”

The critical task is how we harness that realisation for deeper change in those individuals and the contexts in which they work.

I’ve grappled with this in my own work as a teacher. At UNSW Canberra I ran a 13-week Masters course on systems thinking and organisational change to a range of practitioners. Despite all having some kind of systems ‘aha!’ moment, my students struggled to make the systems thinking tools they acquired useful in their vocational lives.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise. The organisations in which they worked were largely not built to value and enable systemic ways of thinking. Attempting to change an organisational culture as an individual, or even to innovate around the edges, is always a Sisyphean task. The more you push, the more the system pushes back. People will fight to protect the linear, reductionist, siloed structures that they have come to know and rely upon. They are not ready to be unplugged.

Beyond ‘aha!’: a theory of change for systems change

The obvious question, then, is how do we create that readiness? How do we intervene to shift the drivers that produce linear and reductionist cultures and ways of thinking? I don’t have all the answers, by any means, but here are some fragments that I think we can build upon.

1. We need to turn our own tools back our ourselves

It’s one thing to say that organisational cultures are linear, reductionist and systemic, but that tells us nothing about why or how. What are the drivers that lead to the emergence and prominence of this way of thinking? We know that how organisations are structured, how initiatives are funded, and how people are incentivised all play a role, but how can we understand these drivers as a system? Lane, Munro and colleagues have done great work thinking about how compliance cultures emerge in the context of social care, using systems mapping to understand the different drivers, their connections and relationships. We need to do the same work here, focused on the emergence of cultures that push back against systemic ways of thinking.

2. We need to be supporting others to be systems influencers

‘Aha!’ moments are undoubtedly important, but our efforts should also be focused on giving people the skills to help others be more systemic, and to embed this thinking in their organisational cultures and systems. Just like we can’t train people to be more ethical when the structures they operate in don’t incentivise ethical behaviour, we can’t continue to expect that simply training individuals to be systems thinkers is the solution to the world’s complexity.

This doesn’t have to be rocket science. My colleague Sharon Zivkovic, for example, now discourages clients from solely running trainings for individuals, who – for all the reasons above – will struggle to get value from what they learn. The alternative: deliver training to entire teams, with a minimum of eight participants. This may sound like a really small shift, but it is transformative. Training teams results in an in-built critical mass, it gives team members have a place to turn when they hit a roadblock, and it signals to others that an organisation is serious about investing in a shift to more systemic ways of working.

We can also think strategically about which teams to target for training: those that hold the current system in place. If we know that, like in many organisations, it is the risk, assurance, and performance management frameworks promote and incentivise linear and reductive thinking, then those teams are a good place to start. Helping them see the value of systems approaches will, very likely, create the enabling and authorising environment for others.

3. We need a language to explain our theory of change

There is no doubt that systems thinking exists at the margins and has done for a long time. Bemoaning that will get us nowhere. We need to reimagine the margin as a site of possibility, and seek what Neil McLaughlin called ‘optimal marginality’. Optimal marginality attempts to ‘transfer ideas from the creative margins to the centre … creating pressure for innovations.’ It uses knowledge about the orthodoxy to simultaneously deconstruct and reassemble it from within. This is perhaps not dissimilar from what many systems change advocates consider they do already but giving it a language makes it explicit and forces us to actively consider the opportunities and limitations baked into particular change strategies. If we accept that we are at the margin, that forces us to think in specific ways about how we can most effectively achieve a more systemic world.

The alternative is that we continue to embrace change strategies that plainly aren’t working, at least not at the scale necessary for the urgency of the challenges we face. Without turning the tools of systems thinking back on ourselves, we risk that all we achieve is a strident systems in-crowd at the margin, rather than a transformed centre.

Again, there are fragments and there is a lot more work to do here. But the point is that our narrow focus on training people to be systems thinkers isn’t going to give us the world we want. We need to start by using our own tools to build a picture of the system we have and a strategy for transforming it.