“From Strategy to Street” with Tim Curtis
Systems thinking is a powerful tool and at ReImagined Futures, we strongly believe in its potential to help us tackle complex challenges. That’s why we decided to organise a series of lunchtime conversations on systems thinking in practice. These are conversations with practitioners which aim to inspire and demonstrate the tangible applications of a variety of systems thinking tools in society and their potential to address complex issues.
In our first lunchtime conversation, entitled “From Strategy to Street”, we hosted Tim Curtis, Senior Lecturer from the Faculty of Arts, Science and Technology at the University of Northampton. Tim is an international expert in social entrepreneurship and innovation. He is an environmental advocate, lecturer, author, and social entrepreneur — in short, a changemaker. He helps individuals and organisations make informed decisions in the midst of complex, difficult challenges, with a focus on community organising and social innovation.
Tim’s interest in systems thinking began in around 1995, a year in which Shell UK attempted to dispose of an old storage facility called Brent Spar into deep Atlantic waters. This sparked social mobilisation that resulted in Shell halting the operation. When deciding what to do with the oil, Shell failed to consider all stakeholders involved, which resulted in a very narrow and non-inclusive decision-making process. Eventually, Shell realised that the issue was far more complex and interconnected than it had originally thought. For Tim, this event illustrated that issues can rarely be solved by means of simple linear procedures, and that the scale of many problems is much bigger than can be seen from the surface.
The current focus of Tim’s work lies in the theory and practice of community organising and social innovation. In 2012, together with his team, Tim set to work on the challenge of making neighbourhood policing more effective by means of analysing the tactics used by the police and community support offices. Tim and his team discovered that strategic decisions were affected by issues such as building trust, resilience and legitimacy. In order to overcome these issues the team developed a process of Intensive Engagement, which is a toolkit aimed at tackling directly structural challenges by means of fostering wide inclusion of all members of society and making sure everyone has their voice heard. Under their “Strategy to Street” programme, they aim to include people in the community who have high levels of social capital into the conversations on issues that affect them. In that way everyone inside that community can offer their skills and contribute to solving social and environmental problems which trouble the community.
Tim believes that in order to develop an effective, long-term solution to social problems, issues need to be analysed carefully, and this requires a thorough understanding of the context. The challenge, therefore, is for social problems to be analysed in a way that explains how the problem interrelates with other social and environmental issues. In short, context matters.
In essence system thinking is about understanding that systems are complex. One cannot understand the complexity of a system only by examining its different elements one by one, the complexity of it all lies in the interrelations between the elements and the emergent behaviour of the whole. Systems thinking goes beyond following a set of reductive linear procedures. Instead, it is an attempt to unravel all the different forces affecting the configuration of a system, with particular focus on the context and how such forces interconnect and affect one another. In summary, Tim invites us to “resist the righting reflex” and avoid jumping to what we think is the solution too quickly. Instead, he recommends paying careful attention to the context and understanding that social innovation is not easy and thus cannot be carried out quickly and without due thought.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7DjpRmA4Ho
Our conversation with Tim was a very inspiring first lunchtime conversation on systems practice. We thank everyone who participated for your interest and engagement! You can watch the recording of the conversation in the video attached to this article.. Stay tuned and see you next time!
This article is co-writen by Laura García García, Viliana Dzhartova and Xiaohan Ma from ReImagined Futures.
