Systems Thinking Part 4 — Why We Fail to See Systemic Patterns
We are surrounded by systems. There are the sanitation systems that coordinate the pickup of our trash and dispose of our waste water. There are vast agricultural supply chains that get food from farms to markets to our mouths. School systems, the cells in our bodies, global climate, micro-climates, immigration, our democracy — the list goes on and on.
There are basic tools we can use to start to breakdown even the most complex systems, such as identifying elements, interconnections, and goals, or mapping out stocks, flows, and feedback loops; however, in practice, it is also helpful to be aware of the common blind spots that prevent us from recognizing systemic patterns. Through the lens of homelessness and its various causes, this post will highlight five of these blind spots.
#1 Bounded Rationality
First articulated by economist Herbert A. Simon, bounded rationality occurs when we make a completely rational decision based on the information in our immediate surroundings, but ultimately it is a bad decision because we’re missing information about the larger system in which our decision is embedded.
- As a homeowner, it is totally rational for me to try to do everything I can to block new construction in my neighborhood. Doing so preserves my views, keeps my neighborhood looking a certain way, and a lower housing supply means higher housing prices. However, while this might benefit me in the short-run, in the long-run higher housing prices might mean that my children cannot afford to live near me, low-income workers have to live farther away to find affordable housing and commute, which makes traffic worse, and of course expensive housing also results in homelessness, which isn’t good for the neighborhood or my home price.
- There are 112 federal programs and agencies across 8 different departments spending a collective $150 billion a year on mental illness. These efforts are not coordinated, are some times at odds with one another, and ultimately are not as effective as they could be if everyone worked together.
#2 Short Term Events vs. Long Term Behavior
President George W Bush once remarked, “There’s an old saying in Tennessee — I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on you. Fool me … you can’t fool me again.” Unfortunately we’re not always as wise as President Bush. Perpetually distracted by the latest headlines and current events, we often fail to recognize or consider long-term trends and patterns that reveal what’s really going on with systems.
- We see the short-term behavior of someone with a substance abuse problem getting drunk or using drugs and assume they are having fun. In reality, addiction is often a response to pain, with many studies showing a high correlation between the intensity of a person’s substance use and the intensity of childhood trauma.
- Despite seemingly constant news headlines about violence, murder and theft in our communities, crime rates are at 50 year lows.
#3 Delays and Buffers
Many systems have built in delays, lags, and buffers. This means we might do something to a system, but there is a significant time or distance between that action and the response. For example, if I chop down a forest and replant every tree, it’s still going to take 20+ years before the forest is back to the way it was. These delays can be very frustrating and often confuse the impact of our interventions.
- California is in the middle of a housing crisis. Despite new funding and policies to increase housing production, it still takes 3–4 years to get something built. Despite residents demanding action now, it will take many years to fully exit the crisis.
- Beginning in the early 1980s, a wave of mentally ill people suddenly found themselves living on the streets. Today our country’s largest mental health facilities are jails. Both of these developments are the long-term result of closing state mental health hospitals, defunding mental health treatment, and changing mental health laws, policies that gained momentum in the 1950s and 1960s.
#4 Non-Linear Relationships
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall. He fell. He broke. Our minds like clear cut, linear relationships. Unfortunately the world isn’t always that straightforward.
- The one thing every person experiencing homelessness has in common (beyond a lack of housing) is that it was never just one thing. Homelessness is almost always the result of some combination of a lack of a social support system, family upbringing, financial resources, educational opportunities, physical constitution, and mental health, with the order and relative importance varying from person to person.
- For people experiencing long-term, chronic homelessness, they often need affordable housing AND supportive services. Both interventions need to happen simultaneously for someone to be successful. Instead, we often only provide one or the other, and then we’re surprised when people end up homeless again.
#5 A Divisive Mindset
Systems thinking is a holistic, integrated framework for seeing the big picture. Unfortunately, it is not always in our nature to consider issues from multiple perspectives or to incorporate alternative information. This manifests in many unproductive ways:
- We only see things from our perspective. We tell ourselves, “I am rational. I see things as they are. I have a logical perspective that takes all factors into account. Unfortunately most people are not rational like me.” This could look like attribution error, when we believe we are driven by internal factors but others are influenced by external factors. For example, with homelessness our gut reaction is to think people are lazy or milking the system because we see ourselves as ethical and hard-working. However, when we personally fall on tough times, we can tell you all the external events that led to our misfortune (e.g. a crappy landlord, an unsympathetic employer, an injury).
- Groupthink results in making collective decisions that discourage creativity or alternative perspectives, and it can often results in “othering” people who have different opinions or who have different backgrounds. It’s common to hear community members say homeless people are from somewhere else and are not really part of the community. The phenomenon of “Not in My Backyard” (NIMBYism) is another classic example . We don’t want “them” living in our neighborhood.
- With all this othering and blaming, responsibility is often seen as a burden. It’s something to be avoided. We come up with explanations that attribute causes to something or someone else. Residents blame the City. The City blames the County. The County blames the State. If all parties simply took collective responsibility, they could each contribute their part to fixing the problem.
Part 4 of 5
Systems can often get stuck in a place where nobody wants them. In the fifth and final installment of this series, we’ll look at how you can go about changing any system.
