Thinking like a system
The benefits of looking through a systems lens.
By Rowan Conway, Jeff Masters and Jake Thorold.
Follow Rowan and Jake on Twitter @RowanEConway and @thorold_jake .
This article is an extract from the RSA report From Design Thinking to Systems Change: How to Invest in Innovation for Social Impact
“Systems thinking is a context for seeing wholes. It is a framework for seeing interrelationships rather than things, for seeing patterns of change rather than static snapshots.” Peter Senge
Looking through a systems lens can be overwhelming. It can feel that the complex systems we are trying to influence are intractable and doomed to stasis. But as systems theorist Donella Meadows said, systems thinking asks us to see all situations as dynamic, with latent momentum that can create change. As she observes: “Dynamic systems studies usually are not designed to predict what will happen. Rather, they’re designed to explore what would happen, if a number of driving factors unfold in a range of different ways”.
Systems encompass many actors, competing incentives and hidden nuances. It is a mistake to assume that just because human centred design processes create innovations that meet human needs, that their diffusion into a system will follow a linear route that mirrors that of consumer markets. This is particularly the case with major and complex public sector markets, such as the NHS. Figure 4 illustrates this a ‘linear fallacy’ — one that oversimplifies the journey from design of an innovation to scaling and diffusion.
Figure 4: The linear fallacy
As the next illustration (Figure 5) shows, in reality what happens all too often is that the route from innovation to scaling, and thereby systems change, is fraught with obstacles. This list is not exhaustive and not all obstacles will be present in every case. The point is that scaling is usually far from a linear inevitability and the development of a product or service innovation may be just the beginning of a process of generating impact.
Figure 5: Innovation hits barrier to change
Rather than achieving impact an innovation gets mired in “reasons why not”. Perhaps competing incentives leave an innovation unrealised, or strict regulatory frameworks, fear or cultural opposition create barriers or headwinds. Perhaps the wider context isn’t ready for the innovation because it requires complementary changes in other areas or, as is often the case in government, there are strict procurement strategies in place that prevent new products or ideas from accessing a market. The complexity of institutions may prevent the replication of innovations at scale in public service environments (for example, a human centred process innovation that has delivered exceptional impact in reducing aggression in patients within one hospital environment, may fail to scale to other hospitals because of competing rules and incentives). Donella Meadows describes this response as “systemic policy resistance”:
“Policy resistance comes from the bounded rationalities of the actors in a system, each with his or her (or “its” in the case of an institution) own goals. Each actor monitors the state of the system with regard to some important variable — income or prices or housing or drugs or investment — and compares that state with his, her, or its goal. If there is a discrepancy, each actor does something to correct the situation. Usually the greater the discrepancy between the goal and the actual situation, the more emphatic the action will be…Such resistance to change arises when goals of subsystems are different from and inconsistent with each other.”
As Figure 6 shows, when innovations designed to address social challenges hit barriers to change, they can ‘bounce’ off the system sending the innovation back to square one. We call this the system immune response.
Figure 6: The system immune response
This immune response sees the promising innovation rejected in the same way that the body would resist a pathogen. The current system releases antibodies (barriers to change) to neutralise the pathogen (the innovation). To proactively counter this immune response, innovators should not just focus on user needs (although this is key to developing effective solutions), they must also comprehensively map the system which they hope to change, employing a range of techniques to appreciate the complex dynamics at play. This is what is referred to by ‘systems-centred design’: design that actively considers and the particular dynamics of existing systems and looks to innovate in ways that are relevant to them or, more ambitiously, actively influences them.
Different kinds of problems require different methods of systems analysis. Horst Rittel coined the phrase “tame and wicked problems”. In this framing, tame problems are those that have a rational and linear pathway to a solution, the problem is relatively easy to define explicitly and can be understood by a variety of people. In contrast, wicked problems are hard to define and whose nature remain ambiguous and elusive. As John Kao states: “Such wicked problems often involve a large number of diverse stakeholders who do not see the problem or indeed much of anything else in the same way. They might be separated by disciplinary boundaries, by values, or by their role within a system, ie government versus private sector. Another characteristic of wicked problems is that one does not necessarily know they have been solved, except in hindsight.”
Thinking like a system means taking a holistic view: viewing the problem as made up of a set of interacting components that continuously produce feedback. It also means accepting this situation as dynamic, with the relationships between elements in the system as important in understanding how the system will behave as the component parts. The starting point to understanding these dynamics is to identify the dimensions of the problem.
There are lots of ways to organise problems and there are many tools that can be used to understand particularly important systems dynamics. In the think like a system, act like an entrepreneur model of change the wider systems view must understand the following:
· The type of problem;
· The problem situation; and
· The power dynamics in play.
Understanding problems
Warren Weaver mused in 1948 that: “science has, to date, succeeded in solving a bewildering number of relatively easy problems, whereas the hard problems, and the ones which perhaps promise most for man’s future, lie ahead”. Social challenges often present hard problems – complex and systemic. Knowledge Management theorist Dave Snowden uses a sense-making framework he calls Cynefin to make distinctions between problems that sit in ordered systems and unstructured systems. In this framework a default state of ‘disorder’ is the starting point for those trying to make sense of a system. Problems sit in one of four domains — two ordered and two not:
Table 1: Cynefin Sense-Making Framework
Careful deliberation is required to ensure a full understanding of the domain in which a given problem lies. By identifying the type of system and problem that they are dealing with, innovators can better understand the correct kinds of responses to arrive at a solution. While we suggest a less drastic split, there is much wisdom in Einstein’s assertion that ‘if I had an hour to solve a problem I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about solutions.’
Understanding problem situations
The situation in which the problem is located is a further analysis that thinking systemically will require. Leadership theorist Ronald Heifetz distinguishes between technical problems — where the solution is bounded and finite, and just needs to be correctly applied to the problem — and adaptive problems — where learning is required and the solution must be co-created by service and service-user. In understanding how to apply this distinction Heifetz describes three problem situations:
· In Type I situations the problem is clearly defined, the solution to that problem is known, and the challenge lies in matching and applying the solution to the problem.
· In Type II situations, the problem is clear, but the solution is unclear. To solve the problem, some kind of learning is required. This may be the development of a new technical ‘fix’ to solve the problem, or it may require adaptive work, involving all parties to the problem in a shared journey towards the solution. No party can ‘solve’ the problem alone.
· In Type III situations, both the problem and the solution are unclear and require learning to understand and resolve. Technical fixes are not available. Adaptive work is required.
Heifetz goes beyond other thinkers (see, for example, Mackenzie et al) in focusing not just on the problem situation, but on the extent to which learning is required and the how far the solution needs to be co-created by all actors involved.
Thinking systemically about problems requires that at a certain point the boundaries of a problem are set. Without boundaries, a systems mindset is at risk of analysis paralysis — where systems maps create overly complicated analyses of problems, which produce so much data it is impossible to act. Here, Donella Meadows calls for flexibility, she says: “The right boundary for thinking about a problem rarely coincides with the boundary of an academic discipline, or with a political boundary… Ideally, we would have the mental flexibility to find the appropriate boundary for thinking about each new problem.”
Understanding power dynamics
Flexibility is also important in understanding the power dynamics at play within a system. Cultural theory is a useful systematic methodology for understanding power dynamics and motivations within social systems. By using it to understand the politics and culture around a problem, it can help to identify blockages and enablers of change. When applied to a problem, cultural theory can help in understanding how far a proposed solution will resonate with the dynamics of an existing system — and therefore be effective — or run counter to them, and risk rejection by the system. Cultural theory divides a social system into four domains: hierarchical, solidaristic, individualistic and fatalistic:
Table 2: Cultural Theory Domains
Power dynamics revealed by a cultural theory analysis can help to suggest the types of intervention that will have the highest chances of success in any given system. For example in a highly hierarchical setting, such as a factory with entrenched chains of command, it is likely that interventions that seek to drive change by drawing upon solidaristic motivations will fail due to the regimented nature of the system. Taking a wider system view that understands cultural norms and patterns of behaviour as well as the interplay between actors in a system sheds new light on ways to address complex challenges. Using cultural theory can help to match the correct type of intervention to the problem based upon the dynamics of the system.
By going beyond user research and undertaking the thinking like a system part of the process, innovators develop a depth of understanding of the broader ecosystem they are looking to enter. Systems thinking unveils the frictions that inhibit change, the veto points and countervailing forces that combine to create this system immune response. A product of this kind of this process may be that certain interventions are jettisoned because the possibilities for change are revealed to be highly limited. In their place may be new ideas and problems previously unconsidered, yet seemingly with a feasible route to achieving impact. The next phase of the process is to act entrepreneurially.
We explore how innovators must also act like entrepreneurs, looking for the opportunistic moments in our next article: Acting like an Entrepreneur.
For full references and bibliography please visit the RSA website to download the report.
