Systems Thinking For Social Change: Introduction
Systems Thinking For Social Change: Introduction
Systems Thinking For Social Change: Introduction
Helps you and others anticipate and avoid the negative longer-term
consequences of well-intentioned solutions.
Identifies high-leverage interventions that focus limited resources
for maximum, lasting, systemwide improvement.
Motivates and supports continuous learning.
More specifically, if you are the director or program officer in a foundation, learning to think systemically will help you be more effective in your
roles as convener, grant maker, and educator/advocate. You will become a
better convener by:
Enabling diverse stakeholders to see the big picture.
Catalyzing conversations of accountability among stakeholders so
that each becomes aware of how they unwittingly contribute to the
very problem they want to solve.
Mobilizing people to optimize the whole system instead of just their
part of it.
You can become a more effective educator and advocate by using systems
thinking to:
Inform policy makers and the public about the short- versus longterm consequences of proposed solutions.
Reduce peoples addictions to quick fixes that are likely to only
make matters worse in the long run.
Champion early small successes that also support peoples higher
and longer-term aspirations.
Introduction
Distill your insights into visual systems maps that are worth a
thousand words.
Identify strategic interventions that best leverage limited resources.
Write more powerful grant requests that incorporate all of the above.
You can use systems thinking as a corporate social responsibility manager to develop more effective partnerships with key external stakeholder
groups in both the nonprofit and public sectors. It can help you:
See the big picture more clearly.
Uncover and own the unintended negative consequences of your
own actions.
Work with external stakeholders to develop solutions that are more
likely to benefit all parties over time.
If you are a professional in the systems thinking community who is committed to social change, you can learn how to integrate the tools of systems
thinking into a proven change management process.
If you are an organizational or community development consultant,
you can use systems thinking to increase peoples motivations to change,
facilitate collaboration across diverse stakeholders, identify high-leverage
interventions, and inspire a commitment to continuous learning.
Introduction
Introduction
applying systems thinking is likely to be most useful, and describes in particular how it can contribute to the pioneering cross-sector coordination
process known as Collective Impact.
Chapter 3 introduces the metaphor of systems thinking as storytelling.
It distinguishes two types of stories: a more common one that tends to
perpetuate the status quo, and a systemic one that stimulates productive
change. This chapter also explains the power of language to create stories and summarizes the basic elements for formulating a systems story.
Chapter 4 deepens this metaphor by illuminating basic story lines and
richer systemic patterns or plots that underlie a diverse set of social issues.
If you are already familiar with systems thinking, you might want to pay
particular attention to the ways in which systems thinking mobilizes
change (chapter 2) and skim the next two chapters for their many social
and environmental examples.
Part 2 describes the four-stage change process. Chapter 5 introduces this
four-stage process as:
1. Building a foundation for change.
2. Seeing current reality more clearly.
3. Making an explicit choice about what is most important.
4. Bridging the gap between peoples aspirations and current state.
Chapter 6 describes how to build a foundation for change by identifying and engaging key stakeholders, establishing common ground, and
developing collaborative capacity. It addresses such challenges as working
with stakeholders who are motivated by immediate self-interests as well
as higher aspirations, focusing their efforts around what can seem like a
boundless challenge, and building relational skills that enable people to
become responsible participants in a complex world.
Chapter 7 explains how stakeholders can take a deep dive into current
reality early in the change processand also why this step is critical. Often,
people begin a social change process with similar aspirations for the outcome but have very different perceptions of what the real difficulty is and
what should be done to solve it. They dont appreciate how their own intentions, beliefs, and behavior affect the performance of others as well as their
own. Failing to see the big picture, they are more likely to propose familiar
solutions that risk perpetuating the very problem they have been trying to
solve. In other cases, people might feel overwhelmed by the complexity of
the big picture and question if they can do anything differently. The chapter
helps readers assess current reality by recommending how to gather and
organize information for a systems analysis; presenting the results of systems
analyses from several social change initiatives; and showing how to create
systems analyses that are comprehensive enough to cover many critical
factors and viewpoints, yet simple enough to communicate and act upon.
Chapter 8 addresses how to build support for the outcome of a systems
analysis. Helping stakeholders accept new insights about the system warrants a separate chapter because the language of systems thinking is often
unfamiliar and the message of shifting from blame to responsibility can
be difficult to embrace. The chapter describes three ways to meet these
challenges: engaging people to develop their own analysis as much as
possible; surfacing the mental models that influence how people behave;
and creating catalytic conversations that stimulate awareness, acceptance,
and alternatives.
Chapter 9 guides stakeholders to make an informed and explicit choice
about the purpose they want the system to accomplish. Since a system
is always designed to achieve something, no matter how dysfunctional
it seems, a pivotal intervention is to help people distinguish, and where
necessary choose, between what the system is accomplishing right now
and what they aspire to accomplish. The chapter provides a way to help
people compare the case for change (in line with what they deeply want)
with the case for the status quo (the often hidden benefits people get from
participating in the system as it behaves now). Because there are usually
trade-offs between current benefits and peoples higher aspirations, the
process supports stakeholders to make an explicit choice based on what
they care about most deeply, feel most drawn to achieve, and are willing
to let go of to achieve what is even more important to them. At this point
shared visioning takes on more meaning, since people also acknowledge
the sacrifices that realizing the vision entails. They become more willing to
optimize the whole system instead of continuing to optimize just their part.
Chapter 10 helps people bridge the gap between current reality and their
consciously chosen direction. It involves identifying leverage points and
establishing a process of continuous learning and outreach. The chapter
describes four generic leverage points: increasing peoples awareness of
their often non-obvious interdependencies; rewiring key causeeffect
relationships; shifting underlying beliefs and assumptions; and aligning the
Introduction
chosen purpose with updated goals, metrics, incentives, authority structures, and funding streams. It also shows how to extend the process begun
in the previous four stages through learning from experience, expanding
the resource pool, and scaling up what works.
Part 3 describes three ways you can use systems thinking to shape the
future. Chapter 11 addresses how to apply systems thinking to strategic
planning. It explains the advantages of systemic over linear theories of
change; introduces two core systemic theories of change; and shows how
these theories can be used integrate leverage points, critical success factors, and disparate priorities to develop coherent and navigable strategies
over time. Chapter 12 answers the question frequently posed by private
and public funders about how systems thinking can contribute to evaluation. The chapter provides broad guidelines for conducting systemic
evaluations and specific recommendations for validating explicit systemic
theories of change.
Finally, chapter 13 provides guidelines for developing your ability as
a systems thinker over time. It offers three ways forward: cultivating an
orientation that integrates the cognitive, emotional, behavioral, and spiritual dimensions of the systems approach; learning by doing; and asking
systemic questions.
In summary, the book provides you with many ways to think and act
more productively, using methods that have been tested over decades with
clients facing a wide range of seemingly intractable social problems. The tactics in the pages ahead can help even highly skilled change makers get closer
to their goals and develop some crucial lifelong problem-solving traits.
For several years, I taught in a national program that introduced systems
thinking approaches to fellows in the Centers for Disease Controls Environmental Public Health Leadership Institute. A report conducted on the
program indicated that fellows learned to:
Think through difficult issues.
Understand what they do not know and how to learn it.
Ask great questions.
Engage others more effectively by seeing reality from
their perspective.
Apply a problem-solving approach that is both flexible
and concrete.
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These results represent the promise of systems thinking for social change
and the opportunities available to you as you read on.