That systems word

Twenty years ago, there was a trending thing about systems, and then about systems thinking. It was estimated that only 10% of the population could think systemically. People wanted systems introduced into the school curriculum. An incredibly aggressive consultancy called Vanguard commericalised the notion, in a way that missed the point and seriously polluted the debate.

Thirty years ago now, I remember giving a lunchtime talk at Norwich Union. I talked about a wasps’ nest in the brickwork above my bathroom window, and about going up the ladder to try and plug the hole. The point was that this was a fairly even battle. I put silicon sealant into the gap and wasps came in droves to bite off chunks of it to maintain their access. Of course, the prospect of being seriously stung while faffing about up a ladder was uppermost in my mind. I said then that the wasps were a working system, really quite robust and resourceful in the face of a new threat.[1] Of course I was interested in titillating the audience at NU with the thought of what me losing the battle might have looked like.

The contrast here is between me with a linear, rational strategy and wasps doing what it took. I had my wet weather gear to protect me against stings, my planned attack to seal the entrance, my sense of what victory would be. They were protecting their literal way of life. And they did not have a plan!

My sense is that the systems word has been completely debased and emptied of any living meaning. And that the more people try to revive it, the worse that becomes. So, I want to rehearse some recent examples of where the systems insight directly and flatly contradicts received wisdom. The terminology and the nature of the discussion of the issues around systems may be tired and flat, but what is at stake is ever greater.

Soil systems

I am an allotment gardener with a keen interest in food and farming. I have some assistance from a lovely retired couple, neighbours. I learnt my gardening somewhat by trial and error and by listening to the oldies at the allotment and watching what they did. I am in this for the nutritional quality of the vegetables I can grow, and for that wonderful sense of having a glut of food. I love being able to give good food away to family, friends, and neighbours. Community stuff.

And I am facing a theoretical crisis, a crisis of horticultural theory! I have been steadily, by my lights, improving the soil that has been in these allotments for over a hundred years (it is strangely variable over a very small area!). But the early summer heat and drought has caused me to think again, especially about base soil.

The basic gardening thought is to remove the weeds. Weeds of course are just plants in the wrong place, though I can think of thistles and bindweed as an enemy. Weeds are “obviously” in competition with my precious vegetables for nutrients, for water, for light, for space. Except that this turns out to be a wrong thought. A diverse set of plants growing together are usually connected by micro-rhizome fungi and supply each other with water and nutrients. Especially in drought conditions, this effect becomes the difference between a crop and no crop. The piece of technical soil biology you need to know is that the plants and the fungi are fully symbiotic and feed each other: sugars from the plants nourish the fungi and nutrients from the soil are delivered via the fungi to the plants.

But surely rain is rain, water is water? Well yes, but a soil that is well developed and full of micro-rhizomes and roots and lots of carbon material holds infinitely more water than the soils that we plough and dig and expose to the hot sun! This is all about a sponge to hold whatever water there is and recycle it within the soil. That keeps the soil cool and a the vastly diverse and complex ecosystem in reasonable health. And if there is too much rain the same logic holds: any excess water that simply runs or drains away is leaching soil nutrients. One result is that all our food without exception is much less nutritious than it used to be.

I am in the middle of the practical experiment, importing lots of manure and sowing cover crops to keep the soil working. Hands-on doesn’t begin to describe it! And you will know from these blogs that physical immersion is real education. The YouTube videos take you only so far, but I watched some great characters living this stuff. Such as a mid-west farmer saying he grew one third of his crops for the critters above ground and two-thirds for the critters below ground.

But systems. We have got to a place where systems is some slightly funky, slightly quirky way of viewing the same old same old. Distinctive but marginal. But everything I look at in any depth with a systems lens gets turned on its head. In the soil case: don’t dig, don’t clear the soil, don’t use fertilisers, mix all your crops together. Do the opposite of what all those old guys taught you and of what we think of agriculture as being. The opposite, not a subtle version of same old. Not a marginal change but a complete revolution. Virtually every standard agricultural operation is damaging to the soil that supports us all.

What we need to notice is that the impact is made by noticing. You can test the soil to see how much water it can absorb and how fast: in that thunderstorm do you benefit from the water? But would you ever do that? You can experiment with diverse undersown crops and easily see the difference in yield of your main crops. But would you do that without a focus on how the cover crops build the soil? What it takes is a recognition that the soil is the source of all fertility and that we kill and erode our soils: that is the systemic insight from which all else flows. Not so hard to see, but universally ignored because we are focused elsewhere.

Appetite and eating patterns

Recently there was a government and food industry initiative in the UK to produce snacks for children that had 100 calories or less, and persuade parents and schools to encourage children to eat them. Another attempt to be seen to be doing something about childhood obesity. And another lovely example of a totally unsystemic waste of everyone’s time and resources. We have covered most of this ground before, but let’s review.

Starchy and sugary foods are the barren end of the food spectrum. There is no known dietary requirement to eat any of them for any reason, despite PHEngland advice. Most children eat some sort of breakfast cereal or toast: despite manufacturers claims, this is a nutrient deficient breakfast and it gives the children a glucose and insulin spike. Spiking glucose leads to a rapid cycle of too much then too little glucose in the blood. Many experts say that (for this reason) sugar is more addictive than cocaine.

Our appetite, controlled by something called an “appestat” (I kid you not), runs on fat not carbohydrates. As a first approximation, fat leads to satiety and carbohydrates make you hungry. We demonise fat, so kids must be on a glucose roller-coaster, so then they need to snack, so then we try to control calories, further limiting fat as a consequence. This is what government advice amounts to: stoking a mechanism that will inevitably lead to more obese children as a response to childhood obesity. But the food manufacturers are in clover.

My direct experience. When I have a long drive to do, I don’t eat at all that day. My concentration levels are far better, and I don’t need to purchase food at motorway service stations or eat while I am driving. Works every time, but only because I am fully keto-adapted and have very low levels (20–30g) of carbohydrate in my diet.[2] It seems to me that the sort of sustained attention I am able to give to a basically boring task is a good analogue for what is asked of schoolchildren.[3] Snacking reveals the problem not the solution, but only from a systemic perspective.

While we are there, at the next level up, Sir Michael Marmot, the eminence grise of public health, has an infographic showing the eight[4] key determinants of health. Healthcare is a small factor but is one of the ten. By my analysis, with some checking in with experts, government policy can be expected to lead to worse health outcomes in all ten factors.

There is linear cause and effect in the original programme to get kids to eat fewer calories for their snacks at school. It will be possible to prove that this local linear effect is true and valid. But it mistakes the system.[5] Remember Gregory and Nora Bateson: we see small arcs of larger circles. The larger circle means that our work implementing the insights of the small act come to nothing, or in this case are likely to make the problem much worse.

Self-organisation

One of the emergent themes at this year’s Enterprise Design conference was that of self-organising teams and companies. The big example mentioned on stage was Morning Star, the billion-dollar tomato company, partly because they’re quite good at processes — possibly top 3 in the world, apparently — and the speaker is (you guessed it!) a business process consultant. According to one commentator, despite being world class at execution, Morning Star don’t have any formally documented processes. They’ve got principles and traditions and all sorts, but when it comes to tomatoes, they’re more like the wasps.

A good systemic example came from the aptly-named Jiri Fabian, who was talking about Anarchy as a way to tackle the chaos. As a manger-of-sorts in a self-organising co-owned commercial company, he asked the team to decorate the new office in a style that would be welcoming to their (traditional, corporate) clients. The result? A mishmash of soft furniture, found items, and a hookah pipe. Not at all his vision! As a manager, he would have vetoed the result, cleared away all that stuff, and started over. But, it’s a co-operative, so he figured that the first time they lost a suited-and-booted client on account of the décor, a conversation could be had. To his surprise, it was the opposite, and the super-casual waiting/meeting area was a hit, with business being happily conducted hookah-style.

Point being that we can’t predict the effects of our (in)actions, and that our instinct to do things traditionally is just habit and might well be out of step with the wider system.

Schooling

I watched Carol Black’s wonderful documentary film Schooling the World. All sorts of wonderful, well-intentioned people making sure that kids around the world get the “benefit” of a western education. Superb interviews with people in rural Ladakh, a place that westerners fall in love with and want to help, not recognizing that their help destroys the things they love about the place.

School education can lead to opportunities, especially economic opportunities. It is held to be a royal road to a job. That can happen. That is one side of the coin. The number of people who this system fails are vast. About half of city kids in the US don’t graduate from high school.[6] In India maybe 90% of kids with a school education end up with a job that justifies the education, to look at it in reverse. Which means, as the film explores, that we need to look at what they have lost. They have lost their way of life and their culture, meaning they are equally adrift in Delhi or in Ladakh.

Lots of pain in families broken by kids going away, first to school and then to Delhi. Lots of urban squalor of displaced people with no resources to care for their environment. And lots of cannon fodder to be exploited both as workers and consumers in totally inappropriate patterns and systems.

Can this really be described as education for a future? I have long thought from my own experience and that of my kids that the UK education system was completely broken. I see no evidence that it is actually for the benefit of the kids. Carol Black wants to know why it is compulsory. It clearly does not lead to the outcomes it promises, and that is why I have it as a case in this blog post. In the small arc, it happens sometimes that some school education and some college education “lead” to profitable employment. But the larger cycles of patronizing authority and commercial exploitation mean that this is a small minority outcome against an ocean of pain and frustration.

The key real meaning of education to me, and the key to real work, is to recognize that there are many cultures, many ways for people to form an economy. To think that we have discovered the one true economy against all the evidence is unbelievable and monumentally stupid and hubristic. The lies we are told about competition and scarcity of resources are enough to totally destroy the validity of anything else that is taught. The opposite insight, that we have discovered lots of ways in which our ideas about economy fail and that we need to share these failures in light of other people’s models seems impossibly far from school.

Of course, the systems insights explored in this short blog are examples of where our education gets to promote the polar opposite of what needs to be understood. It just does. And it has precious little ability to correct itself when it does.

Systems theory

I remember a map with an attempt to place 1500 systems methods in relation to each other. There is almost no agreement between systems experts about how to proceed with systemic exploration.[7] There are lots of spats and fallings-out. So, I am absolutely not saying “do it right”. I am merely saying that the chances are close to 100% that you have not yet understood the larger circles that the arcs you are observing are part of. We don’t know. We will never know. We need all the diversity we can muster to get angles on important questions.

Above all, the chance that what you really need to do is diametrically opposed to what you have been taught to do, seems to be more than half! More likely wrong than right! Get in there.

[1] Leastwise, I guess they hadn’t practiced. I certainly hadn’t. And in the modern parlance of Nassim Taleb, they’re anti-fragile rather than robust.

[2] Which, at 4 calories per gram, is ironically a rough equivalent to each one of those 100 calorie snacks…

[3] Just think how much more efficiently they’d be able to memorise and regurgitate, and possibly rebel against the system!

[4] Health Foundation, What makes us healthy Only 10% or less is linked to healthcare.

[5] My shorthand for this kind of difference is to say that the world is not flat, that the seemingly-linear results from one place cannot be generalized to other places.

[6] I remember reading a study in which the graduation rates in, I think it was, Washington DC, had plummeted. Turns out that the school system (now there’s a word!) had started enforcing a rule that said students who missed more than so many classes couldn’t graduate. The kicker? The rules also said that a student who was more than so many minutes late to class would me marked as absent for the whole class. And with school gates not opening until shortly before classes start, and older children ensuring that their younger siblings get safely into their own schools, a lot of high school students can’t reliably get from one school to another that (of course) starts at the exact same hour. Voila, low graduation rates and difficulty getting even a McJob.

[7] Barry Clemson notes that “most systems methodologies are less different from one another than are their practitioners”, and that “it’s not possible to objectively determine what can and cannot be done with a given systems method.”