Systems practice in times of Mindlessness and Return.
“How will we respond when some mark us as ‘enemies of the people’?”
In the spring of 2019, I gave a keynote at a conference for fellow systems practitioners. My core message was an uncomfortable one: we needed to be both more modest *and* more ambitious. We needed to take greater personal risks in shaping the future of systems practice.
I posed four questions for self-reflection:
🔼 How do we honestly tune our clients’ expectations about the real risks and benefits of systems approaches?
🔼 How will we meaningfully add to the intellectual capital of the 1960s and 1970s, which we are still drawing down from?
🔼 How will we ensure that our contributions actually make a difference — within the imminent, pressing time window we have?
These questions had been circulating in the systems community for some time, forming part of regular discussions with my peers. But my fourth question was different. It was prompted by the political shifts of the past decade — the rise of the far and populist right across the EU and, to a lesser extent, the first Trump presidency:
🔺 How will we respond when some mark us as enemies of the people?
No one at the conference seemed to pick up on the question. It didn’t spark debate. Fair enough — I was acting on what was, at the time, a relatively weak signal.
Then, just a few months later, Jair Bolsonaro signaled his intent to gut the humanities and slash funding for the Brazilian education system. To me, that was a clear confirmation of the question’s relevance. Soon after came Covid — the great catalyst of fragility and discontent. Then further upheavals — savage wars, climate catastrophies, the spectre of AI — against the background of a general sense of rudderlessness and decline. And now, the populist firestorm is fully upon us.
“The new sheriff is in town.” Complexity is being thrown out the window. Manifest Destiny, ‘muzzle velocity’, hard power, zero-sum games, winning deals, blanket resets, and tribal binaries are the watchwords of the day.
The question has real urgency now. I see this power play being acted out in all kinds of organisations. Cold-hearted managerialism feels vindicated by the Trumpist spirit of the times. Systems practitioners and effectual entrepreneurs are fair game for the metrics-driven OKR squads.
In 1971 Donald Schon wrote a book — Beyond the Stable State— that is still highly topical. Schon acknowledged the human drive to uphold the ‘stable state’ of a social system to anchor a sense of identity. When the Stable State unravels, the reaction can be threefold: #Revolution (total rejection of the past), #Return (to a previous stable state; localism) or #Mindlessness (evading reflective consciousness). Today we are being confronted with a toxic mix of the latter two.
The point of Schon’s book was to argue that social systems ought to be able to adapt without coming apart at the seams. In other words, they ought to be learning systems and they need learning agents to support that process of adaptation as ‘muckrakers’ and brokers. As system practitioners we need to continue to take up those roles.
But even more than before we will be confronted by systems that do not want to learn, and militantly push through their Return and Mindlessness agendas. In that case, Schon says, there is no other way than to blend into the background, create an insurgency infrastructure and operate as guerilla. Inevitably, this stance comes at great personal risk.
Systems practice is not just an intellectual discipline — it is now very much a space under siege. How do we field our Systems Thinking skills to create clarity in confusion? How do we activate our Systems Tinkering repertoire to continue to make meaningful, humane change? How can our Systems Being continue to be a source of curiosity, courage, and compassion?
(This article expresses my personal opinion, not that of the International Federation for Systems Research, of which I’m a member of the Executive Committee at the time of writing).
