What is “systems?” What is “change?”

A systems change initiative I witnessed on the weekend.

I think my nomination for LinkedIn post of the year goes to Cameron Tokinwise for this one:

Good reminder for those extolling Systems Thinking from Pelle Ehn at the beginning of his still remarkable 1988 book, _Work-Oriented Design of Computer Artifacts_ – that systems are only ever ensembles considered as systems. Systems are not things in the world, but ways of understanding how things in the world relate to each other. Systems Thinking is a choice to interpret the world as sets of systems.

To be concerned about trying to effect system change does not mean that there are systems out there needing to be changed, but that one way to explain why change might be proving difficult is to observe aspects of the status quo as systemically interrelated, and so to try to make (design) a new system, that is, new ways in which those things interrelate.

This is important because systems risk being reified into big, solid things that seem to be unchangeable if you think of systems as really existing out there in the world. The classic example is that Babadook we consider to be Capitalism (as opposed to a variety of social relations – and not all social relations [see https://lnkd.in/gPJ8bdnQ] – we perpetuate).

(And yes, things are bit more complicated when observations of systems are considered to be themselves operations of other systems (the ones doing the observing), making such observations performative, constituting the reality of what is observed, at least in the world of/as experienced by the observer and those other systems with whom/which that observer is in an interdependent (or structurally coupled) relation: von Foerester > Maturana > Luhmann > Wolfe.)

Cameron Tokinwise on LinkedIn, October 2023

I have just today had occasion to bring that up again, talking with a friend about systems change. Like, what is the system? Who says? What are the parts of it we say are the system and why are some things not considered part of the system? And what are we really seeking to change? And what does change even look like?

I continue to mull over this quote and its implications because so much work in the field I am involved in is about “systems change” or “systems transformation” and as long as I have been doing this work, I can see that saying I’m involved in systems change hasn’t really made anything more clear to me. I reject “root causes” of complex problems because, well, complexity tells us that causality is non-linear and effects are emergent so simply addressing “root causes” doesn’t get a predictable change. The root cause of poverty is simply another problem to address, the root of which is something else. The complex world is made of interrelated and interconnected things that aren’t ranked in a discernable hierarchy and that interact constantly in unpredictable ways.

And yet.

We know that there are stable patterns of behaviour that we can look at and call “unjust” and we know there are stable patterns of behaviour that we can look at and call “more just” (one feature of complexity work is that you can never know if you made the best move, but you can usually know that you’ve made a wrong move).

And so, in a conversation with a friend today, I suggested that instead of saying, “We aim to change systems,” why don’t we just say, “We think a just world looks like THIS, and so this is what we will do more of.” You can’t solve all the problems, even if there was a magical root cause that, if we just zapped it with enough transformation, would result in a just world. All that would happen is that competing forces would arrange themselves around other attractors, and new stable patterns would emerge. It might be that, in the battle between individual greed and social compassion for example we get a period of stability for social compassion for a time until individual greed figures out how to tilt the game in its favour again.

In my personal life, I think the world I want to live in has things like organizations and projects done by teams full of people who love and trust one another and that we make things together that people are generally happy with and that we are participating more in the community by singing together, sharing resources and supporting each other. I don’t have a root cause analysis for how I live my life. I don’t sing in choirs because a root cause of alienation and social anxiety is the collapse of co-creative community institutions, and the more spaces for community co-creation that exist, the more felt sense of belonging happens in the world. No. I sing because I love to sing, even when it’s hard and we make mistakes and dry up in performance and slam our foreheads in frustration because it’s hard to sing a minor seventh interval by ear, and I missed my cue again.

The need for theories of change has always struck me as an unnecessary step to making change. There is no perfect theory of change. I’m fond of quoting Micheal Quinn Patton, who said one day, to my delight, “Complexity IS a theory of change!” Good enough. Now get after it, and if things you do create what you think is a more just and caring world, find ways to sustain those things. And if they don’t, stop doing those things immediately. And you can’t do it all, so pick the things you want to do, that are maybe yours to do uniquely, perhaps informed by what others have said are good things to do and do them. Keep an eye on what happens, but trust that your work will travel well in the world. Once it’s out there, you cannot get it back.