What the system is learning about itself
We were recently in a meeting with the Leadership Council for the Economic Immigration Lab. We were reviewing what we had learned in the first year and where and how to take that learning forward into year two. We talked about the lab teams, their experience, the prototypes they had developed, and we talked about the key insights each team had gleaned from being in the lab.
Those key insights, when boiled down, perhaps don’t look like much. They aren’t outrageous or sexy or mind-blowing, and they certainly weren’t news to the Leadership Council. For a split second, I felt a tinge of panic faced with the assertion that our lab teams had come up with nothing that the Leadership Council didn’t know already. But that wasn’t the point — that was never the point — I quickly realised. We never set out to convene subject matter experts to come up with new knowledge to supply to those already steeped in the realm of immigration. We set out to convene a microcosm of the immigration system in New Brunswick in order to let the system see — and learn from — itself.
Because, here’s the thing about those key insights and the prototypes they sparked — they might be transformational. They contradict and challenge the assumptions that perpetuate the status quo. They redefine the ‘immigration problem’ from a user-centred — as opposed to institution-centred — perspective. They have fundamentally interrupted, disrupted and revamped relationships on a micro-scale that have the potential to transform how we create policy in this province.
This conversation sparked a bigger conversation about how we define success and failure in the lab, and forced us to then collectively resasses the purpose and objectives of the lab. Should the lab shift its focus to providing insight and expertise to the Leadership Council, who have a high-level of influence and decision-making power? Or should it continue to exist to hold space for a representation of the immigration system in New Brunswick in order for them to understand, probe, sense and respond to the complex challenge of immigration?
Because the latter is a hard sell. ‘Breakthrough solutions!’, ‘innovative thinking!’, ‘a four-point action plan!’ — these things are easier to sell. ‘Allowing the system to understand and learn from itself in order to adjust in potentially small ways which may — in 10, 20, 50 years — have moved the needle on immigration’ just doesn’t have the same ring to it.
Our sense at NouLAB is that we need to move away from this culture of objectives, results, success and failure. According to Rob Ricigliano, in his talk at the 2015 Sustaining Peace Conference, our ability to understand and affect key systems dynamics, along with the integrity of our approach and how we learn and adapt to shifting fitness landscapes will determine how effective we are in engaging in sustainable systems change.
Our accountability then, he would claim, should come from a novel set of standards:
1. Are we using good systems practice?
2. Are we learning from and adapting to our context?
3. Are we altering fundamental dynamics? Are we changing relationships and patterns?
4. Are we benefiting people in the short term?
Ricigliano advocates for a measure of ‘healthy engagement’ instead of success and failure. He defines this as “how well we are working with a system to improve it over time”.
This sentiment is echoed by Otto Scharmer, MIT economist and founder of Theory U. He asserts that “the success of our actions as change-makers does not depend on what we do or how we do it, but on the inner place from which we operate ” (Scharmer and Kaufer, 2014, p. 18).
For Scharmer, complicit in the system being able to see and understand itself is each individual in the system also journeying inward to see and understand themselves and the ways in which they engage with the system. The transformation of our relationships to ourselves as well as with the system and one another is integral to systems change.
So — by these measures, can we call our first year a success?
1. Are we using good systems practice?
We have taken our cues from seasoned systems thinkers like Frances Westley, Donella Meadows, Peter Senge and Otto Scharmer. Within the context of social innovation labs, we’re lucky to have had coaching and guidance from Roller Strategies, GovLab, Nesta and MaRs, and we are looking to and learning with folks at CoLab, Radius, NSGovLab and In With Forward. Tangibly, good systems practice at NouLAB looks like: diversity in participants (background, age, level of influence and decision-making power, lived experience, and sector); teaching systems thinking and complexity to participants and providing systems mapping exercises to help them understand the concepts of systems thinking and practice; a focus on their personal transformation in how they relate to the immigration system in NB; and continued opportunity to learn from and provide feedback to other participants/teams/alumni from the lab.
2. Are we learning and adapting to our context?
From the micro to the macro, NouLAB is a learning organisation. During the lab, we end each day by asking for feedback from participants — what is working well for them, what isn’t working, what they need and what they could do without. This allows us to adapt the design of the next day/s to meet their needs. After each delivery piece, we perform After Action Reviews to help us make sense of our experience and to capture the insights and learning that is so fresh coming out of an event. This provides us with good fodder when we come back to it — weeks or months later — before designing the next iteration. Now in the stages of planning our third cycle, NouLAB is constantly learning from and adapting to our context. This includes participant feedback, the shifting socio-political landscape of immigration in NB (and the wider socio-political landscape of immigration in Canada and around the world), as well as the landscape of social innovation labs which are constantly evolving and learning from each other.
This is not to say that we don’t make mistakes, or that we’ve always made the right decision, ony that we have embodied a culture of learning and that helps us to recognise, react to and learn from our mistakes. We’re getting good at recognising mistakes, and learning to appreciate the learning they bring us.
3. Are we altering fundamental dynamics? Are we changing relationships and patterns?
This might be the most slippery condition for success, and yet, the most effective. This is ultimately the goal of any public or social innovation lab — to fundamentally change the dynamics of the systems that aren’t serving anymore. And yet, how can we track this? Is altering fundamental dynamics on an individual scale — even multiple individual scales — enough to tip the system into a state of reorganisation and change? How can we be sure that the systems change we hope to see over the next few decades — which will become more and more downstream of the lab process — is indeed a result of the lab process? And yet, we are seeing small shifts, hearing personal anecdotes, experiencing how the system is learning from itself: one participant who feels like she has wind beneath her wings again and has a renewed sense of purpose and passion for her work that comes from a feeling of agency to act; participants who started out as strangers and were, by the fourth workshop of the first cycle, opening up their homes for the out-of-town participants to stay with them; and moments when you can feel the realisation of participants in the room of some small way they have been complicit in, or helped to uphold, the system they are actually there to change. I believe that these small ripples will contribute to shifts in the fundamental dynamics of the entire system, and will perhaps have more impact than any prototype that actually comes out of the lab.
4. Are we benefiting people in the short term?
There are ways in which the lab benefits people. Participants benefit from dedicated time and space to solve a challenge they are working on, new tools to further their work, time for reflection, and new personal and professional relationships. Furthermore, some people benefit from the work that teams will do in prototyping their ideas. The residents of Parkton, for example, will have the opportunity to be involved in placemaking and active citizenship projects; teachers nominated for the Capacity for Courage programme will benefit from free training and grants to realise their diversity and inclusion goals in the classroom, and their students will benefit by extension; and as a parallel immigration stream gets prototyped, a few internationally educated nurses will benefit from a faster immigration process and a salary while obtaining the necessary accreditation to practice in New Brunswick. The prototypes that come out of the lab are not focused on benefiting the most people in the short term, but about fundamentally improving the system so that its benefits are widespread. That said, there are some benefits, and we have yet to record any suffering as a result of the lab.
5. Are we encouraging the transformation of our relationships to ourselves as well as with the system and one another?
We all play a part in upholding the systems and structures we see in the world — even the ones we don’t agree with. That being the case, perhaps the biggest leverage point that we have, as individuals, is to change the way we think about, value and interact with a system. In order to do that, we must acknowledge the ways in which we are upholding that system and our underlying values and beliefs that make upholding the system possible. We introduce this concept to participants of the lab through the teaching of Theory U and Systems Thinking, and we consistently ask them to locate themselves within the systems they are looking to change, and to identify the barriers and opportunities their positionings reveal. The check-in from our last lab day for cycle two was indicative that participants are indeed assessing their own roles in perpetuating the systems they actually are seeking to change. For example when asked what has changed in them since the beginning of the lab process, some response were: “I’m encouraging my organisation to continue to participate in immigration and integration community conversations”; “We need to listen and take into consideration what IENs [internationally educated nurses] are saying to us”; “We have to be willing to take more risks (within reason) to improve the likelihood of success of our newcomers”; and “Thinking of how I can contribute/volunteer personally”. These changes in perspective that manifest at the individual level will have impact on the organisations and communities our participants are a part of, wherever they go and whatever roles they play in the future.
It can be difficult to convey the impact of the Economic Immigration Lab to the funders, the Leadership Council, even the participants themselves, especially as we seem to exist in a culture of action plans and silver bullets. By reframing ‘impact’ as efficacy in relating to and intervening in systems, we can provide much better markers of the potential ‘impact’ of the Economic Immigration Lab, and in the ripple effect of small, sustained actions by those directly involved with the system.
References:
Ricigliano, Rob. “Dump the Terms Success and Failure.” Speech, Sustaining Peace, Earth Institute, Columbia University, New York, May 31, 2018.
Scharmer, Otto, and Katrin Kaufer. Leading from the Emerging Future: From Ego-system to Eco-system Economies. Kbh.: Nota, 2014.
