Creating Systems Change Requires People
While I don’t find marriage boring or lacking sentimentality, I’ve spent many an hour thinking about Lori Gottleib’s description that:
“Marriage isn't a passion-fest; it's more like a partnership formed to run a very small, mundane, and often boring nonprofit business. And I mean this in a good way.”
Building our home has always felt like organizational development on a micro scale. And like any organization, it has involved combining different cultures and ways of being. And even though we’ve known each other for some time now, our marriage and partnership still feels like a constant process of discovering new things to learn about how we each view the world and our mental models. When we operate from a place of urgency we spark and have conflict about specific moments or events. When we slow down, it is easier to see that what we are arguing about is connected to our broader values, assumptions and beliefs. From that place of spaciousness and slowness, we are better able to understand each other and the small mundane nonprofit that is our family.
Many of the same principles of organizational development on a micro scale apply to organizational development on a larger scale. To better understand larger scale systems change, last week I took a course at SFU called “Becoming a Systems Entrepreneur - Implementation, Scaling and Systems Impact taught by Janey Roh, Lindsay Cole, and Lisa Gibson. The course taught me that change work is inner work, that change work requires relationships, and that you cannot change organizations and culture without recognising the people in the processes. You cannot force change, you must bring people along with you. Below are some of my takeaways from last week’s course.
Systems Change Work is Emotional, People Centred Work
On the first day of the course, our instructor Lisa Gibson spoke about how systems change is a complex, rather than a purely technical process, that involves an understanding and shifting of resources and power in order to shift culture. For true systems change to happen, the dominant system has to die, and before death, hospicing must take place. Different systems don’t arrive from tweaking the old, they come from a rethinking and emergence of the new. Each of us has a different role to play as systems entrepreneurs. We may be the people who are hospicing the old, or the people imagining the creation of new systems. To support systems, we must be in touch with loss and birth, because creating newness and possibility requires being alongside grief and loss as well.
I admit, the first time I encountered this idea a few years ago, I thought it was nonsense. “Not only must I suffer through the injustice produced by dominant systems, but I must also care and support people who are grieving old systems dying as well?” The idea simply did not interest me, and irritated me at the same time. A few years later though, I am more acquainted with grief and the experience of having my ideas and expectations crumble, and as a result, I have more empathy for people around me, even when I don’t agree with them. My empathy has limits, but my own grief over the past few years has softened me, and I can now more clearly see that everyone holds grief, and that change heightens fear, turns a person inward, and makes it difficult to connect to expansive ways of being. It has helped me see that connecting to the humans in systems change work is an important component in moving systems forward.
Another speaker, Morẹ́nikẹ́ Ọláòṣebìkan, shared that change work benefits from having empathy for others, even those you disagree with and who might be sexist, racist, or hold other phobias/are other “ists”. This doesn’t mean justifying their behaviour, it doesn’t mean holding hands and singing kumbaya, it means seeing empathy as a change strategy.
Alongside empathy, Morẹ́nikẹ́ emphasized the teachings of Audre Lorde that it is important to be able to operate from different modalities, because there is a moment for fire and a moment to be water. There are times to dismantle and there are times to flow and build.
It is Emotional Work to Understand the Self
During the course, we spoke about our orientating creative question and our theory of change, how we think change happens. As we spoke about these, it felt clear that this question is important, and one to talk about openly and explicitly because our collaborators may be operating from different theories of change from us. When this misalignment exists and we are unaware of it, it can cause blockage and conflict in our work. In addition to theories of change, it is important to recognise how we and those around us react when feeling stuck so that we can help one another shift to a different, less constrained way of being.
Doing systems change work requires deep inner practices. One way to shift how we are feeling is participating in somatic therapies and technologies. During the course we discussed ways to connect to our bodies and discover ways to shift or make a move that we may not be aware of otherwise. I admit, I struggle with somatic practices, but I found myself surprised during the course and thereafter as well about how listening to my body can shift my state of being and be a helpful source of knowledge.
We need to understand each other to bring one another along
It is emotional work to communicate persuasively. In a storytelling workshop we had with Naomi Devine, we learned about how “communication is not about simply stating facts. Facts alone do not convince people to change their behaviour or act and think differently.”
Facts alone are not effective because we have three hours a day of new cognition. We cannot replenish our ability to process and pay attention to new information until the next day begins and this ability is reduced by bad sleep. Knowing that our capacity for new information in a day is limited, our communications efforts must strive to break through the attentional barrier.
And so, although often people think about key messages first when developing a communication plan, it is beneficial to think about who one’s audience is and what their needs, fears, and concerns are before delving into key messages. The more one can define their audience, and understand who they are, their motivations and values, the more effective communicators we become. When we speak only about facts, it is easy for our communication to become a space where we shout at each other from our respective positions. Speaking about values and shared broader ideas creates greater shared space.
Culture Supports Systems Change
In the course, our instructor Lindsay Cole spoke about how when we are involved in social change work, we need ways to evaluate what we are doing and change course when necessary. There are many different evaluation methodologies, and each evaluation method encapsulates different ways of knowing and principles.
One model that really struck was the Single, Double and Triple Loop learning model that calls us to think about how we evaluate and learn. So for example, if evaluating or reflecting on why a project isn’t successful, one loop of that learning would involve looking at what happened in the course of the project. That level of analysis is focused on what was done and what the reaction was. A second order of analysis would be the double loop which involves looking more deeply at people’s understanding and asking for example, “Was there a shared understanding of concepts?” This loop is interested in looking at systems and at the rules of the system. At the triple loop, what is important is deeper structural issues. These deeper loops are important so that our system change efforts and failures are not simply understood on their own. Being restricted to the single loop and asking questions solely on that level makes it more likely that when something goes poorly for instance, we may move from that experience and “failure” to approaching future interventions in largely the same way. To avoid this, we must ask deeper questions.
Systems Change Requires Trust
In one of my favourite parts of the course, instructor Janey Roh talked us through what it means to scale a project, inviting us to ask the question: How should one maintain fidelity to original concepts when we scale? To explain this point, she asked us about our process of making a sandwich. We all had slightly different processes but for all of us, our sandwich included bread. This simple example illustrated that there are spaces that are important to keep consistent, and others that are integral to the identity of a project.
In other words, when it comes to scaling practices, Janey offered that it is helpful to ask: “when it comes to codifying practices, where do we need to codify practices, and where do we need to allow for emergence and not be so precious?”1
In some places, scaling means replication, but Janey offered that a more generative process is to be clear on “what is actually important to prioritise and codify and focus on that, and what is open to interpretation.” When there is too much control, we need to be careful that we are not “replicating dominant oppressive systems.”2
Systems Change Involves Experimentation
A major take away from the course was how cultures of experimentation are needed to create systems change. A culture of experimentation involves a culture of learning, compassion and loving accountability where failure is recognised as an opportunity of learning. A spirit of loving accountability makes it safer to try new things and test ideas.
What is your favourite systems change entrepreneurship learning resource? Please do share!
Favourites
Getting Curious With Jonathan Ness and adrienne maree brown: One of the learning resources for the course, this podcast episode was a wonderful conversation about understanding and recognising one’s own systems change role and in doing social change work with pleasure.
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Janey Roh
Janey Roh