Systems change hype in mission-driven organizations

Part 1: How do we think about systems change? Are you a systems thinker?

If you have worked in mission driven organizations, you know what the buzz word is - it is all about systems change. This post is my attempt to unpack what it means to work on systems change in education and skills. Obviously, these thoughts and ideas will shift as I gain more experience in influencing systems change in education, skills, and lifelong learning.

If anything, 2020 has given us complex and adaptive challenges to work on. Thinking in systems is an approach to solve these hard problems in work and life. While, I wrote this issue based on my experiences, conversations, and research in education, but the concepts and ideas can be more broadly applied in other domains as well.

From one to many: teaching to policy

In my first issue, I briefly touched on my life as an educator. After the first year of teaching, I was engaged in wider school and community improvement projects. One of the projects I worked on was conducting training for education professionals to implement the statewide Education Management Information System reform. The intended outcome of the policy was to bring all student-level data onto a unified, state-wide portal.

Our school was involved early on in this policy project as we were amongst the few government schools in the region with a functional computer lab and a stable internet connection. At that point, I didn't see much value in engaging with the project, rather saw it as a distraction, because it meant compromising on the time devoted to classroom teaching. In hindsight, it turned out quite well and marked my first foray into a system-wide project.

Since then I have worked on several small and large scale evaluations, policies, programs, and products that have been about systems change across three continents. These projects have been related to education across K-12, post-secondary, higher education, vocational education, and workforce training.

My take on systems change in education

There is no one best way of defining or influencing systems change

Systems change is a broad and abstract concept with varying definitions. The closest I have come to articulating systems change is that everyone shares the responsibility to fix the problems generated by a system.

In education, it doesn’t mean that everyone involved can exert equal leverage in bringing systemic change, but it recognizes that people who traditionally may have been ignored or treated in isolation including parents, associations, teachers, educators, local businesses and industry, and community members – have a collective stake in each other’s future and the future of the community.

Systems change is generally associated with the volume of impact for the beneficiaries, it is easy to assume that the department of education or government or governments are the best place to influence change in systems. However, systems change is a responsibility of organizations and institutions at all three levels: micro, meso, and macro.

This diagram is one example from my work on how systems change can be illustrated. You can read the full analysis in my monograph on Leading through crisis: resilience, recovery, & renewal.

Governments can’t influence any change, without implementing bodies (at meso and micro level) buying into government policies, similarly, meso and macro-level have the power to influence policy directions, provided they understand how to leverage interrelationships.

Addressing messy education challenges involves acknowledging the dynamism of the relationships and interactions in the education system. The leverage lies not in linear control-based relationships (top to bottom or bottom-up or inside out), rather in non-linear interactions and activities among diverse organizations involved in education delivery.

It is the combined effect of increased activity, interactions, and relationships between micro-meso-macro-level institutions that paves the way for systems change in education. It also requires us to move towards ‘feedback loops’ to measure the exponential impact, rather than traditional, linear methodologies. I will discuss these concepts in detail below.

Systems change involves systems thinking

The world of technical problem solving or management consulting has taught us that the best way to solve complex problems is to break them apart. Once you break the problems, systems theorists argue that there is no leverage to be found because the leverage lies in interactions that cannot be seen from looking at separate pieces.

Learning any new language is difficult at first but as you start to master the basics, it gets easier. What I find most fascinating is the rhythm to train your brain to think in systems, while continuing to use best practices from traditional technical problem-solving techniques. I share five systems thinking skills, they work best when used in combination but are also effective independently.

1. Systems thinking is the ability to see system-wide interrelationships and make connections. In everyday parlance, we call it - connecting the dots. It looks something like connecting 5Ps: priorities, people, programs, products, and policies. In working out complex problems that involve multiple stakeholders, cross-team collaboration, and unknown unknowns, framing problems at the intersection of 5Ps is helpful.

   For example: How does the A and B program connect with the X and Y policy announcements or work priorities? Which people should we work with to develop the proposal, while also aligning our policy priorities? How should we extract critical information from policy reviews and how does it apply to our organization and work priorities? Framing complex problems or tasks at the intersection of 5Ps allows the development of holistic solutions.

2. Systems thinking is the ability to hold a diversity of information on priorities and linking them up with key people, programs, products, and policies. The test of systems thinker intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. For instance, Can something (a problem or a stat) be bad but also be getting better at the same time?

3. Making connections and holding multiple ideas and information is not enough on its own. Eventually, it is the ability to communicate these connections to relevant stakeholders to pursue a shared interest and vision, which results in success as a systems thinker. Through practice, systems thinkers are able to cleverly leverage and pursue non-linear interactions and relationships to achieve shared goals and outcomes.

4. The practice of systems thinking starts with the understanding of a simple concept called feedback loops. Reality is made up of circles but we see straight lines. Peter Senge says, if we want to see system-wide interrelationships, we need a language of interrelationships, a language made up of circles. Without such a language, our habitual ways of seeing the world will always produce fragmented views and counterproductive actions.

   In systems thinking context, feedback is a broader concept rather than simple positive and negative feedback. In systems thinking it means that every influence is both cause and effect. Nothing is ever influenced in just one direction. Though a simple concept, the feedback loops overturn causality biases we might have.

5. At the core of being a systems thinker involves being a lifelong learner, and the willingness to unlearn and relearn ideas, concepts, mental models, and ways of working and iterate your solutions to cater to shared goals.

Eventually using all these skills to solve complex tasks helps us to see the deeper patterns lying behind issues, events and the details. These skills are learnable and teachable and often you can use simple tools and develop habits that will allow you to naturally think in systems. In the next section, I share five simple systems thinking tools and habits.

Systems thinking tools and habits

1. For making diverse ideas visible via **Notion**

2. I have recently started experimenting with a note-taking tool **Roam Research** for networked thoughts. You will be surprised how much systems thinking is about systemically capturing, organizing, distilling, and expressing knowledge.

3. Practice deep listening and active reading in day-to-day work - as tools that enable systems thinking.

4. Systems thinking starts with small habits of engaging with diverse people, programs, and interests, and eventually, you are obsessed with using interrelationships to pursue shared goals. Teach for All calls it Network Connector. At work, systems thinkers geek over ‘strategic partnerships’.

5. Systems change also means using our existing co-design approach and consultative processes in building solutions and policies.

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