Exploring living systems, design and wellbeing: Part 1 of 2
We don't yet know how to act or think about this new interconnected world of systems we've created. Those of us educated in Western culture learned to think and manage a world that was anything but systemic or interconnected. It was a world of separations and clear boundaries: boxes described jobs, lines charted relationships and accountabilities, roles and policies described the limits of what each individual did and who we wanted them to be.
Western culture became very skilled at describing the world with these strange, unnatural separations.
The September Mental Health Awareness Week theme: Explore Your Way to Wellbeing, collides with the 20 year anniversary of an article by Margaret Wheatley, who explores what living systems can teach us about organisational change - and ultimately thriving. Reflecting on her piece I realised how strikingly relevant her observations are 20 years later - in the context of moving us and our organisations (individually and collectively) towards inclusion, diversity and wellbeing.
In this two part series, #1 sets the scene for keeping interconnection in mind when designing better ways of working together, and #2 brings things to life with recent practices that build on Margaret's work. I grapple with putting these reflections in essay format; realising LinkedIn’s platform predominantly facilitates quick "How-to’s", frameworks and practical tools to turn insight into action for the time-poor reader. But I also feel it’s important to practice “exploring” as absorbing insights; giving myself permission to mull things over, writing without perpetuating the (and my own) status quo of shorter and shorter attention spans. Although as a learning designer trained to cull and clarify, there’s still an awkward tension :) anyhoo...read on if you have 10 or so minutes and you like learning about wellbeing and systems too.
Image courtesy of Margaret Wheatley's personal website
In her article, Wheatley speaks to the dangers of knee-jerk reactions, doing things in silos; making changes that tick neat boxes to satisfy hierarchy, but fail to consider the messy interconnections and any unintended consequences of our plans and programmes. And, setting up systems and processes for how we humans should behave, rather than how we actually do, leading to suffering “...from the unending fads that, like great tidal waves, crash down ...creating more destruction than growth. As the most recent wave recedes, we look over our organizations and see debris scattered everywhere - relationships torn apart, survivors struggling to come up for air, ideas and plans tossed askew.”
At first glance this may sound dramatic, but evidence tells us that approximately two-thirds of organisational transformation efforts fail. We might say the wreckage in Aotearoa today in the form of mental distress, bullying, and levels of inequality - and the growing awareness of the way power and status inequalities break down cooperation and trust - has led us to question our ways of working. A quick search on Google for “Diversity and Inclusion” today turned up 304 million results, “Wellbeing” reaching 371 million. It’s a time we’re scrambling to make sense of, and implement initiatives to improve psychological safety, workplace wellbeing, diversity, inclusivity, belonging and more respectful ways of relating to each other.
Image courtesy of heartofwellbeing.org
Yet Margeret’s observations remind us of the importance of keeping interconnection in mind as we carry out this important work, integrating wellbeing across all levels of the organisation (appreciating here we require leadership both endorsing and walking the talk to do so). To date, research identifies programmes are largely targeting individual level learning and initiatives (me), less at team level (we), for example job crafting, and organisational level (us), for example wellbeing policy and Appreciative Inquiry sessions.
The same paper speaks to workplace wellbeing interventions being “a patchwork of uncoordinated programmes, often delivered by multiple vendors, with limited consistency or integration”, in turn making measurement of wellbeing using validated scales even more challenging.
It is crucial to remember that, in organizations, we are working with webs of relations, not with machines. Once we recognize organizations as webs, there is a lot to be learned about organizational change from contemplating spider webs. Most of us have had the experience of touching a spider web, feeling its resiliency, noticing how slight pressure in one area jiggles the entire web. If a web breaks and needs repair, the spider doesn't cut out a piece, terminate it, or tear the entire web apart and reorganize it. She reweaves it, using the silken relationships that are already there, creating stronger connections across the weakened spaces.
Wellbeing doesn’t stand alone. It’s connected with how it feels like to work at the organisation - being valued, belonging, included. With so many wonderful multi-level tools to work together at our best, we need the leadership commitment for space and time to explore and experiment with them, make them our own and weave them into our practices.
This web also as a metaphor for widening our circle of compassion for what it means to be human, including the things that influence our decision-making resulting from how our brains evolved. For example, anticipating that present bias will focus our attention on reacting to what’s thrown at us - and intentionally build this time. Recognising our bias for the status quo can blind us to ways of working that don’t serve our wellbeing aims - and use well established design processes to question deeply embedded assumptions.
Otherwise we risk a checkbox approach that complies with recent Health, Safety and Wellbeing legislation, but in the language of complexity, treats the symptoms rather than the root cause. As Frank Golom point out in his fascinating article "Alternate Conversations for Creating Whole System Change around Diversity and Inclusion":
As leaders, our task is to step back from the events-based and reactive approaches that often dominate diversity and inclusion work to recognize how contexts, levels, and systems influence behavior in both visible and not-so-easily-seen ways, and to aim our interventions strategically, dynamically, and accordingly at multiple leverage points in the system
Basic principles of design and systems to sharpen our lens, as we foray further into living systems
Image courtesy of Allen & Kilvington (2018) An introduction to systems thinking and tools for systems thinking
Design is ultimately about making sense of things, to make sets of decisions and bring form to an idea. Scientist Will Allen says that systems thinking encourages us to explore inter-relationships (context and connections), perspectives (each actor has their own unique perception of the situation) and boundaries (agreeing on scope, scale and what might constitute an improvement) to make better decisions. Note: you can read more about basics in systems thinking here and here as it’s outside the scope of this particular foray.
The basic principles for how life self-organises and changes:
- A living system forms itself as it recognizes shared interests
- For change to occur, there must be a change in meaning
- Every living system is free to choose whether it will change or not
- To create a healthier system, connect it to more of itself
So what?
What do you do with a bunch of concepts on wellbeing, systems and design?
Part two in this series pulls things together, and weaves Wheatley’s wisdom with the recent practices of several designers and scientists I’m drawn to, whose work brings these living system principles to life. These insights and questions to ponder could be useful to identify:
- A wider range of possible wellbeing and inclusion pathways to test and adapt
- Embedded assumptions and bias on what prevents and promotes helpful behaviours within cultures and subcultures
- Any unintended consequences of our well intentioned programmes and initiatives
- A decision-making context that allows people to follow through on their wellbeing intentions
- How to take action together
- Where the best points of leverage are and aligning the moving parts
- How we might become better learning organisations.
Thank you for reading! Part 2 to come Friday.