Systems, innovation, diversity and inclusion

The Systems Innovation conference that I attended earlier in September met my expectations. The thought-provoking, eye-opening and heart-warming presentations and discussions provided participants with the opportunity to connect with fellow explorers across the landscape of systems innovation to address complex social challenges.

Having loved the 2022 edition of the conference, I was glad to be back, with the opportunity to hear first hand from Karima Kadaoui and Louis Klein about the richly emergent and inspiring work of the Tamkeen Community Foundation for Human Development in Morocco a particular highlight for me (for a little more on Tamkeen, see here).

With the regular in-person gatherings an important part of the mix, the Systems Innovation network's team, led by Joss Colchester, has done a great job of nurturing a rich and increasingly well-connected community of folks doing interesting and inspiring things. (See here for takeaways from the conference from Joss, the primary organizer, and here for other participants’ perspectives).

I did however come away with a sense that on a future occasion a systems innovation conference could do more to facilitate richer collaborative learning in two ways: first, by intentionally unpacking the diversity of systems innovation perspectives; and second, by intentionally including more participants whose ways of thinking about relationships, learning and change are informed by traditions that go beyond the systems thinking traditions those that have emerged in western Europe and north America over relatively recent decades.

My reflections are offered constructively, with gratitude for the opportunity to participate in the conference, and appreciation for the organizers, presenters and fellow participants. Joss and I chatted about my feedback last week, discussing the inevitable trade-offs in organizing such an event, and trying to meet the needs of a wide variety of participants.

Unpacking the diversity of approaches - what and why

I appreciated the diversity of the presentations and workshops and the various systems innovation approaches that informed them. There was (some) space for ethnographic, empathetic and poetic approaches to understanding and engaging with systems, alongside systems dynamics and associated approaches with a greater emphasis on hypotheses, models and quantification.

However, for me at least, the diversity of approaches remained a bit of a soup. Specifically, I felt that there was sometimes insufficient clarity about: whether the approaches were informed by a particular worldview or ontology (including as regards whether systems are real, or useful mental constructs, or something in between); and, whether the approaches discussed were based on and aligned with a particular understanding of how change happens, and might therefore have a realistic chance of shifting the power and political economy dynamics that often hold systems in place. My sense was that by not unpacking the diversity of systems innovation approaches presented, fruitful opportunities for differentiation, connection, integration and collaborative learning - important elements for making a system, or a community, or a set of conversations, more than the sum of its parts - were missed.

Including a greater diversity of traditions - what and why

As regards the systems innovation traditions, I was struck and shocked by how white the conference was, how few participants there were from the global south, and how absent indigenous traditions of systems practice and innovation - including traditions that may not use the language of systems, complexity and innovation to talk about relationships, learning, and change - were. I understand how this came about; the participants were a self-selecting group of people who are interested in systems innovation and whose circumstances meant that they could come along to a two-day conference in London.

Nonetheless, I thought it was a missed opportunity as the systems innovation field - a field that remains dominated by people like me (white, male, middle class, and coming from a culture where reductionism and individualism have been hegemonic for centuries) - has a lot to learn from people from other cultures that have safeguarded and nurtured their own rich traditions of systems thinking and practice.

In addition to the value of inclusion for those who might be included, the conference would, I think, have been enriched by the intentional inclusion of more participants with a grounding in such traditions and cultures. I also think that greater diversity and inclusion in this regard might have helped to open up richer conversations about the diversity of approaches to systems innovation that were presented, by making clear that all approaches are based on particular worldviews, assumptions, priorities and values, even when that is not made explicit.

More unpacking and greater inclusion - some possible hows

Unpacking the diversity of approaches

To unpack the diversity of approaches, there are some simple things that could be considered, including: organizing the conference by themes or - better still - learning questions; ensuring that (almost) all sessions involve multiple people, organizations and perspectives; and prioritizing time for audience participation with constructive challenge and disagreement encouraged. Beyond that, presenters and discussants might be gently encouraged to be more explicit about their worldviews, to set out their thinking about how change happens, and to make clear how the approach they are taking is aligned with - and/or tests - their view of how change happens.

By way of example, partly informed by my experience at the Systems Innovation conference, the following week I used a simple prompt - what systems are you interested in and why? - at a Sussex Seaside Systems Social. This get together brought together ten people with various interests, motivations and experience in seeking to shift the dynamics of various social systems, in different ways, for different purposes. By providing some additional points of connection, the gentle prompt perhaps encouraged a little more clarity about those differences and provided additional points of connection, helping our conversation to flow, and supporting our collaborative sense-making.

Including a diversity of traditions

To include a greater diversity of systems practice traditions, for a future conference - and mindful of how white the Sussex Seaside Systems Socials currently are - I'd encourage a deliberate effort to ensure a higher proportion of speakers and participants with systems practice traditions that come from beyond the predominantly white and European backgrounds of this year's participants. This will require some creative thinking, but, with a very welcome increase in conversations about the value of lived experience and the importance of decolonizing development in recent years, there are clear ways forward.

The majority world is rich in traditions of systems practice that have emerged and evolved over hundreds and thousands of years. Inspiring examples that I've come across include: the very deliberate effort that was made by the School of System Change to include contributors from indigenous communities and the global south in their Stepping into Systems series, and the hugely rich associated dialogues; the inclusion of more southern presenters, participants and organizers, and attention to decolonization and a dual transition in the UNDP-hosted sandbox on complexity-aware monitoring, evaluation and learning; the rich and diverse work of the Collective Change Lab, strongly informed by Latin American and African perspectives, including on collective healing for systems change; the emerging work of the Centre for Public Impact's Collective, including as regards decolonizing the development sector; and a recent excellent piece by Arbie Baguios on resisting coloniality in systems thinking in which he argues that "systems thinking as it’s widely known and practiced by Westerners may tend to be colonial, but it doesn’t have to be."

I'm very much looking forward to future get togethers of the systems innovation community, perhaps with more intentional unpacking of the diversity of approaches, and more intentional inclusion of traditions that have emerged in different times, places and cultures. In the meantime, here in Rimini, Italy, for the European Evaluation Society conference this week, I'll be interested to see what progress has been made in ensuring that evaluation practices prioritize the diversity, equity and inclusion that is needed to support and inform efforts to address complex social challenges, in and across the various contexts and cultures in which they emerge.

NB: The image at the top of this post shows the symbols shared by Tyson Yunkaporta in his book Sand talk, which presents, in effect, an aboriginal take on systems practice, and which is also referenced in Arbie's resisting coloniality piece. My notes from Sand Talk can be found here.