\n– Donella Meadows, Thinking in Systems, a Primer<\/em><\/p>\n
Systems are everywhere: natural systems, institutional systems, health systems, food systems, communities, corporations, families, schools, bodies, lives. You could increase the repertoire of behaviours available to certain players. If the actors respond to the same stimuli with different behaviours, that\u2019s a stronger kind of change. Probably more sustained too. If, instead of assaulting a spouse a stressed person goes for a walk, that makes a big change to their outcomes. If a decision-maker under pressure learns to collaborate with staff instead of making snap decisions alone, that would alter the outcomes. Giving people resources can enable them to make changes that would otherwise be slow and impossible. Change requires time and lots of mental processing power. Busy, distracted people lack those things. The easiest way to enable those people to act is to do things for them. That\u2019s what services are for. Potentially more useful than resourcing people to act is giving them sustained cash transfers, access to credit, time and expertise that\u2019s free from expectations, that\u2019s simply \u201cin the bank\u201d, literally redundant. If you want people to bicycle, build a bikeway. Want them to save energy, give them motion-sensor switches. If you want to fight rural poverty, give African\u00a0farmers\u00a0a money-making pump<\/a> they can fix themselves. \u201cNow we\u2019re beginning to move from the physical part of the system to the information and control parts, where more leverage can be found.\u201d wrote Donella. Pope Francis recently wrote<\/a> about \u201cThe disease of closed circles\u201d, where \u201cbelonging to a clique becomes more powerful than our shared identity. This disease too always begins with good intentions, but with the passing of time it enslaves its members and becomes a cancer which threatens the harmony of the organisation and causes immense evil, especially to those we treat as outsiders. [This] \u2018Friendly fire\u2019 from our fellow soldiers is the most insidious danger. It is the evil which strikes from within. As it says in the bible, \u2018Every kingdom divided against itself is laid waste.\u2019\u201d How often we hear something like this: \u201cThere is a systematic tendency on the part of human beings to avoid accountability for their own decisions. That\u2019s why there are so many missing feedback loops \u2014 and why this kind of leverage point is so often popular with the masses, unpopular with the powers that be.\u201d wrote Donella. This is about combating runaway processes. It\u2019s important because that\u2019s how most systems fail: not by scarcity but by unequal distribution of success. Dominant actors use their superior leverage to rapidly accumulate resources, while others are excluded, and the whole system degenerates into disorder. The reason marriage equality, climate change, overseas aid and indigenous issues get the attention of decision makers, and why public health doesn\u2019t, is because they are organised. Public health, by comparison, \u201chas been timid or mostly absent\u201d, as one public health advocate recently complained. Donella wrote, \u201cThe rules of the system define its scope, its boundaries, its degrees of freedom. Thou shalt not kill. Everyone has the right of free speech. Contracts are to be honoured. The president serves four-year terms and cannot serve more than two of them. Nine people on a team, you have to touch every base, three strikes and you\u2019re out. If you get caught robbing a bank, you go to jail.\u201d What predicts the prosperity of nations? According to Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson in their book Why Nations Fail<\/a>,\u00a0the answer is \u201cInstitutions, institutions, institutions\u201d. They meant that prosperous states are the result of effective institutions working without fear or favour for the common good, not captured by elites for their private enrichment. Systems that don\u2019t evolve fade away, become irrelevant or noxious. Sustainability therefore requires continuous evolution, flexibility and adaptation. The most powerful innovations are new human relationships, especially between groups who haven\u2019t worked together before, and new institutions. Pope Francis\u2019s Laudato si <\/a>encyclical is an attempt to change the purpose of the whole human system: the social agreement on what it\u2019s all ultimately for. Big, unstated assumptions govern all human affairs. Change those assumptions and everything else follows. \u2018Every nation and every man instantly surround themselves with a material apparatus which exactly corresponds to \u2026 their state of thought. Observe how every truth and every error, each a thought of some man\u2019s mind, clothes itself with societies, houses, cities, language, ceremonies, newspapers. Observe the ideas of the present day \u2026 see how timber, brick, lime, and stone have flown into convenient shape, obedient to the master idea reigning in the minds of many persons\u2026. It follows, of course, that the least enlargement of ideas \u2026 would cause the most striking changes of external things.\u2019<\/p>\n In Donella’s words: \u201cThe shared idea in the minds of society, the great big unstated assumptions \u2014 unstated because unnecessary to state; everyone already knows them \u2014 constitute that society\u2019s paradigm, or deepest set of beliefs about how the world works\u2026 Money measures something real and has real meaning (therefore people who are paid less are literally worth less). Growth is good. Nature is a stock of resources to be converted to human purposes. Evolution stopped with the emergence of Homo sapiens<\/i>. One can \u201cown\u201d land. Those are just a few of the paradigmatic assumptions of our current culture, all of which have utterly dumfounded other cultures, who thought them not the least bit obvious.\u201d “Hunger, poverty, environmental degradation, economic instability, unemployment, chronic disease, drug addiction, and war, for example, persist in spite of the analytical ability and technical brilliance that have been directed toward eradicating them. No one deliberately creates those problems, no one wants them to persist, but they persist nonetheless. That is because they are intrinsically systems […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[14,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-870","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-strategy-2","category-system-thinking-2","has-post-thumbnail","fallback-thumbnail"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pac6ss-e2","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.enablingchange.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/870","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.enablingchange.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.enablingchange.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.enablingchange.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.enablingchange.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=870"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.enablingchange.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/870\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2571,"href":"https:\/\/www.enablingchange.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/870\/revisions\/2571"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.enablingchange.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=870"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.enablingchange.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=870"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.enablingchange.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=870"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nMaking a better world always means intervening in systems. Scratch any social, health or environmental problem, and I guarantee you\u2019ll find dysfunctional systems.
\nMaking systems healthy, so they run smoothly long into the future, is the goal of sustainability activists everywhere. Resilience, another desirable goal, is also about healthy systems.
\nBut how, exactly, does one intervene strategically in a system? That\u2019s where Donella Meadows\u2019 work provides such valuable insight.
\nInstead of wacking discrete problems with ever heavier hammers, her approach suggests subtle ways to intervene in the causes of problems. It helps us think about contexts, communities and interrelationships and flows of information.
\nDonella<\/a>, who passed away in 2001, was an environmental advocate, systems modeller, and student of Jay Forrester,<\/a> the engineer and academic who pioneered System Dynamics<\/a>. She built Forrester\u2019s early computer simulations into the complex models behind the Club of Rome\u2019s trailblazing Limits to Growth report in 1972.
\nHer concern was how to modify systems to move them from degenerating trajectories into sustainable ones. Her approach is clever because she sees systems as about flows of information rather than just structures. And the valuable thing she\u2019s done is recognise that some kinds of interventions are intrinsically more powerful than others.
\nDonella listed 12 different ways to intervene in a system<\/a>, in increasing order of effectiveness, from weak to strong. This approach is valuable for anyone doing change work.
\nOn the down side the names she gives her leverage points are rather inaccessible and her ideas take a while to absorb.
\nSo I\u2019ve taken the liberty of adapting her system to suit the language that\u2019s more familiar to professionals in sustainability, public health, road safety and so on. Plus I\u2019ve added a number of interventions that we\u2019re more familiar with.
\nThe starting point is that you face a system (business, catchment, community\u2026)\u00a0 that is dysfunctional, inadequate for its environmental challenges, out of balance so that part of it is bloating and part is starving, and more and more heat (conflict) is being generated. Or it might be destroying its environment. What levers can you pull? Inspired by Donella Meadows I can think of at least 18 different levers.
\nThis paper is just my opinion. This is an exciting, undeveloped field and everyone\u2019s ideas are welcome.
\nHope you like it.
\n[All quotes from Donella Meadows are from her article Places to Intervene in a System,<\/a>\u00a0unless indicated.]
\n<\/b>
\nLeverage Points in a System<\/b>
\nFirst, as an introduction, I thought I\u2019d ask \u201cwhat is a \u2018system\u2019?\u201d I did a bit of research and thinking, and here\u2019s what I found. Here are 28\u00a0statements about systems<\/a> that seem to capture the richness of the concept.
\nNext, here are the 18 leverage points, arranged from weak to strong, that are inspired by Donella\u2019s work.
\nYou can download a full sized PDF version here<\/a>.
\n![\"18_points_diagram\"](\"https:\/\/changeologyblog.files.wordpress.com\/2015\/08\/18_points_diagram3.jpg?resize=616%2C435\")
\n
\n<\/b>
\n1) Facts<\/b>
\nSometimes an actor is genuinely in ignorance of a vital fact that, if they knew it, would make a difference to their choices.
\nHow many spoonfuls of sugar in can of a Coke? The answer is \u201cjust over 9\u201d. This fact has turned out to be an amazingly powerful meme that\u2019s put Coke and fizzy drink sales into a historic nosedive. What makes it powerful is its simplicity, its concreteness, its surprisingness, and that it tells listeners something important they didn\u2019t know about their own lives. It\u2019s perfectly constructed to go viral.
\nHere\u2019s another: \u201c95% of of adults in Kiama think it\u2019s wrong to give a teenager alcohol\u201d. That\u2019s potent because it tells me about the social norms of my own community, the one I live with every day, and it tells me how to avoid transgressing those social norms. That\u2019s important information that affects my decisions.
\nTo see why these facts are so potent, read Made to Stick<\/a> by Chip and Dan Heath. They show how \u2018sticky\u2019 facts are SUCCES-ful – which stands for \u201cshort, unexpected, concrete, credible, emotional stories\u201d.
\nIf you have facts like these, communicate them.
\nHowever keep in mind that, most of the time, facts are extraordinarily feeble tools of change. The facts might be true, but they are poorly designed to influence human choices. Often we\u2019re not telling people anything they didn\u2019t already know. Or denial and resistance are sparked by the mere act of telling. That\u2019s why most fact-based campaigns are ineffective.
\nSometimes, however, just the right fact, communicated without manipulation, pressure or threat, can make a big difference to people\u2019s personal choices. And when enough people make different choices, systems can change.
\nWhat to do:<\/strong> <\/i>Education or awareness campaigns that convey simple, personally compelling, objective facts.<\/i><\/p>\n2) Skills<\/b><\/h3>\n
\nImpoverished behavioural repertoires lie behind a lot of problems. You could argue that this is a system change, but it\u2019s still relatively weak because the actors are embedded in the same old system, subject to the same contextual forces.
\nWhat to do:<\/strong> <\/i>Use modelling, social learning, experiential learning, training to enlarge the skill repertoire of actors<\/p>\n3) Add resources that increase an individual\u2019s leverage or productivity<\/b><\/h3>\n
\nAn indebted farmer, for example, can\u2019t afford off-stream watering systems, so an incentive payment, at the right time, might prevent his cattle wallowing in mud and polluting creeks. Such targeted, generous, resourcing can make a great difference to individuals.
\nHowever resourcing tends to be a weak lever. It depends on the generosity of stronger actors which is almost always withdrawn in time. It\u2019s about compliance rather than capacity or motivation. And resourcing doesn\u2019t substitute for motivation and can often \u2018crowd out\u2019<\/a>\u00a0long term motivations.
\nAlso, \u201cA subsidy can skew your business really badly.\u201d (said to me by a water authority executive about state government subsidies).
\nWhat\u2019s more, accountability requirements are ever-increasing, onerous and intrusive, often amounting to a perverse \u201ccognitive tax\u201d excessively burdening already complicated lives.
\nKeep in mind, too, that in a competitive market, increasing an individual\u2019s effectiveness or productivity is often a zero sum game, because all their competitors inevitably follow suit, increasing their productivity too, lowering the market price, so that everyone is working harder and faster, but staying poor. That\u2019s the tragic productivity treadmill that\u2019s beset agriculture for decades, effectively hollowing out the landscape by ramping up extraction from limited stocks – the soil and the well-being of farmers.
\nAnd resourcing leaves the system itself unchanged. The same farmer, locked in a globalised spiral of ever increasing productivity expectations and ever reducing commodity prices might not be able to afford to replace the infrastructure when it\u2019s ruined a few years later by a flood.
\nThat said, in less competitive environments, resourcing can often make a difference.
\nWhat to do:<\/i> <\/strong>offer incentive programs, grants, loan schemes, vouchers, subsidies, technical assistance.<\/p>\n4) Provide services<\/b><\/h3>\n
\nIt\u2019s no accident that the explosion of service industries coincides with an increase in working hours and time-consuming demands of post-modern life.
\nI\u2019ve worked with a state government program called BinTrim<\/a>. It sends agents into hundreds of small businesses to help them change their recycling systems, by doing simple things business managers don\u2019t have the time or skills to do, like negotiating with recycling contractors and installing new bins. That\u2019s a perfect example of a service-based intervention.
\nEven the unemployed, as the authors of Scarcity<\/a><\/i> point out, are mentally captured by their condition. They might have time on their hands but they still have little cognitive surplus, and it\u2019s cognitive surplus that counts. They need services too, like free child care (which is also a perfect example of a buffer).
\nServices don\u2019t change large scale systems, but they can make a big difference to small scale systems of individual lives and businesses.
\nWhat to do:<\/strong> <\/i>Design a service that does things people lack the time, cognitive space, or skills to do for themselves.<\/p>\n5) Provide buffers\u00a0<\/b><\/h3>\n
\nAfter reading Donella Meadows, I\u2019m starting to see buffers everywhere. Why do I do my best thinking during yoga classes? Because I\u2019m free from demands and distractions. Why does leaving a 30 minute unallocated time in a one day workshop stop time overruns? Why do so many senior executives I meet look ever-more glaze-eyed and distracted? Why do fish stocks need no-take zones? Why is volunteering so low amongst employed professionals? Why did one Missouri hospital find that the solution to operating theatre delays was simply to keep one operating theatre empty?\u00a0*
\nBuffers protect systems from shocks, they prevent wild boom and bust oscillations, and they create the space people and systems need to adapt, innovate and take risks.
\nGoogle, famously, used to offer \u201820% time\u2019 allowing employees to take one day a week for side projects, leading to profitable innovations like Gmail and Adsense.
\nUtah\u2019s homelessness strategy is an interesting case study: \u201cIn 2005, \u2018no\u2010strings attached\u2019 housing was first provided to the chronic homeless, with minimal rent and no drug tests. There were fears that the project would \u2018incentivise mooching\u2019. Utah\u2019s chronically homeless population has since fallen 90%, and by the end of 2015 \u2018may be virtually gone\u2019. Most recipients successfully make rent payments, and costs are much lower than that of providing services for the chronically homeless. While no behavioural analysis has yet been performed, the project may have powerful cognitive effects: providing housing simplifies the lives of the homeless, provides a buffer against shocks, and frees cognitive resources for challenging tasks like quitting drugs and finding employment.\u201d **
\nThe whole idea of buffers, of course, is anathema to managers and economists obsessed with productivity. Their un-systemic thinking threatens to produce a generation of employees who are so productive that they have the attention spans of newts. Creativity, like sanity and happy family lives, depends on having a portion of schedule-free time.
\nWhat to do:<\/strong> <\/i>Cash transfers (via the welfare system), access to credit, free hours and days, paid study leave, flexible work hours, sabbaticals, mentoring.
\n* The hospital example is from Mullainathan and Shafir’s Scarcity<\/em> p.183.
\n** For an overview of this approach\u00a0see ‘Housing First’ in Wikipedia. The Utah homelessness example is quoted from\u00a0Finighan, R. Beyond Nudge: The Potential of Behavioural Policy<\/a><\/em> (2015), Melbourne Institute Policy Brief No. 4\/15, Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research The University of Melbourne<\/p>\n6) Build\/modify physical infrastructure,\u00a0processes or products<\/b><\/h3>\n
\nIn Donella Meadow\u2019s words, \u201cThe plumbing structure, the stocks and flows and their physical arrangement, can have an enormous effect on how the system operates. When the Hungarian road system was laid out so all traffic from one side of the nation to the other has to pass through central Budapest, that determined a lot about air pollution and commuting delays that are not easily fixed by pollution control devices, traffic lights, or speed limits.\u201d
\n\u201cThe only way to fix a system that is laid out wrong is to rebuild it, if you can. Amory Lovins does wonders of energy conservation by straightening out bent pipes and enlarging too-small ones. If we let him do energy retrofits on all the buildings of the nation, we could shut down at least half of our electric power plants.\u201d
\nInfrastructure and products work when they\u00a0lower the time, financial and cognitive costs of acting.
\nThis opens up the whole world of Design Thinking. \u201cDesign\u201d is the \u201ctransformation of existing conditions into preferred ones.\u201d It\u2019s about creating simplicity, convenience, legibility, freedom, closeness, efficiency, safety and sociability.
\nBuilding new infrastructure is a strong intervention. Although it\u2019s expensive and takes time the effects can be very long lasting.
\nWhat to do:<\/em> <\/strong>Build\/modify infrastructure, processes or products to reduce the costs of acting.<\/p>\n7) Build timely feedback loops<\/b><\/h3>\n
\nDonella\u00a0called feedback loops “the basic operating unitsof a system”.
\nEvery day we humans make thousands of decisions, from when to turn the heater off, to what events we attend, to how we exercise, to what food we eat. To control outcomes we need data on the consequences of our actions. That\u2019s called feedback. Having feedback, at the right time, on the negative consequences of actions means we can take corrective action before damage mounts. Really bad systems provide no feedback at all, so damage mounts with no possibility of mitigation.
\n\u201cMissing feedback is one of the most common causes of system malfunction. Adding or restoring information can be a powerful intervention, usually much easier and cheaper than rebuilding physical infrastructure. The tragedy of the commons that is crashing the world\u2019s commercial fisheries occurs because there is no feedback from the state of the fish population to the decision to invest in fishing vessels.\u201d wrote Donella.
\nFortunately the digital revolution has greatly increased the potential to deliver the right information to the right people at the right time. Smart meters let consumers monitor their home power or water use in real time. Wearable technologies like FitBit help me track my heart recovery rate. My phone tells me my bank balance in real time. But my credit card hides this information, causing bad decisions!
\nDonella was especially concerned about one aspect of feedback loops: the delay. \u201cDelays that are too short cause overreaction, \u2018chasing your tail,\u2019 oscillations amplified by the jumpiness of the response. Delays that are too long cause damped, sustained, or exploding oscillations, depending on how much too long. At the extreme they cause chaos. Overlong delays in a system with a threshold, a danger point, a range past which irreversible damage can occur, cause overshoot and collapse.\u201d
\nFor organisations, feedback includes listening sensitively to one\u2019s community and clients. Social media and formal \u201ccommunity engagement\u201d processes, done well, can be valuable feedback mechanisms, allowing organisations to respond to threats and problems before the damage mounts.
\nWhat to do:<\/strong> <\/i>collect data on consequences and feed it back to the actors (but not in formal evaluations: the delay is too long); build processes that regularly touch base with your community, customers or supporters.<\/p>\n8) Inclusive decision-making<\/b><\/h3>\n
\nSystems need coordination and this specialised role requires a staff or bureaucracy. The sociologist Max Weber thought that \u201cthe needs of mass administration today make [bureaucracy] completely indispensible.\u201d Once a bureaucracy comes into existence, however, it tends to take on a life of its own, with its own interests, ruled by careerists, giving rise to \u201ca universal \u2018Tragedy\u2019\u2026that dooms every attempt to realise ideas into reality.\u201d he concluded gloomily. *
\nOne solution to the inflexibility and narrow-mindedness of bureaucracies is to believe we can do without them, relying on Adam Smith\u2019s \u201cinvisible hand of the market”. A more mature approach, however, probably lies in governance innovation, especially the many methods of inclusive governance, ranging from deliberative budgeting to citizen juries, which inject outside voices into the decision-making processes of organisations.
\nFor a nice introduction to inclusive methods see: Open Your Council<\/a>
\nFor a more complete list of inclusive governance methods, see:\u00a0The Engagement Toolkit.<\/a>
\nWhat to do:<\/i><\/strong> <\/i>If you\u2019re an \u2018insider\u2019, invite a diversity of actors to collaborate with you on important decisions. (And don\u2019t forget to inform and inspire them before they deliberate). If you\u2019re an \u2018outsider\u2019, convene a diverse decision-making forum, with multiple actors, and invite the decision-makers along. The essential skill here is facilitation.
\n* Max Weber quote from\u00a0Swedberg, Richard (2005) The Max Weber Dictionary,<\/em> p19, p188<\/p>\n9) Create a community-of-practice<\/b><\/h3>\n
\n\u201cIt never fails to amaze me how services could be so much improved if all those involved in supporting those in need actually liaised properly with each other – housing with health and substance misuse services as well as social services and other charitable organisations.\u201d – Sue Waterston, www.fiveactions.org<\/a>
\nSiloing is a\u00a0commonplace dysfunction of systems. Pope Francis described it perfectly<\/a> \u201cThe disease of poor coordination. Once leaders lose a sense of community among themselves, the body loses its harmonious functioning and its equilibrium; it then becomes an orchestra that\u00a0produces noise: its members do not work together and lose the spirit of camaraderie and teamwork. When the foot says to the arm: \u2018I don\u2019t need you,\u2019 or the hand says to the head, \u2018I\u2019m in charge,\u2019 they create discomfort and parochialism.\u201d
\nIn system terms, siloing is about failed information flows. The solution is to create a community where the actors meet, learn from each other, understand each other\u2019s perspectives, coordinate their efforts, share services and work together. Once people meet face to face then more remote methods can continue the conversation, like email discussions, newsletters, Facebook, blogs and so on. Keep in mind that online interactions don\u2019t create the kind of community we are talking about here: community can only start when people meet face-to-face because communities depend on trust, and the human mind isn\u2019t designed to trust a screen.
\nA nice case study is Communities for Children<\/a>, a national system of paid regional coordinators who convene a network of all the agencies and providers whose decisions affect children\u2019s wellbeing in a geographical area. They meet monthly to coordinate their work, spot gaps, share knowledge, and collaborate on projects. That is a good model for the kind of \u201ccommunity\u201d that tackles failed information flows. On a less elaborate scale, a bimonthly breakfast meet-up supported by a LinkedIn discussion group might do the job.
\nIncidentally, one thing a community needs is places to meet. So \u2018place-making<\/a>\u2019 in all it\u2019s forms, starting with just putting circles of chairs in the street, is a valuable community enabler.
\nWhat to do:<\/strong> <\/i>convene networks, communities of practice, cross-disciplinary groups, partnerships, silo-busting initiatives. If no one else is convening all the actors to sit down together, be the one who does it. The essential skill here is facilitation.
\nAn excellent guide to facilitating a network or community of practice is Collaborating for Sustainability<\/a>, which comes with case studies<\/a>.<\/p>\n10) Accountability: creating \u201cskin in the game\u201d for decision-makers<\/b><\/h3>\n
\nCreating consequences for decision-makers, so they face personal costs for their actions helps keep systems healthy. Complacency, incompetence, bias, self-enrichment, corruption, recklessness all thrive in consequence-free environments.
\nNew York\u2019s crime rate fell when local police supervisors were made personally responsible<\/a> of the crime rates in their area.
\nThe Global Financial Crisis, meanwhile, was caused by Wall Street bankers operating in an accountability vacuum. (This quote<\/a> sums it up nicely: \u201cplaced in a dark room with a pile of money and no one watching, they took it all\u201d!)
\nAt its simplest, accountability means measuring and shining a spotlight on hidden data about the consequences of decisions. We\u2019ve all heard the phrase \u201cwhat gets measured gets done\u201d. You have only to look at the ways NAPLAN (standardised school testing) has warped the curriculum and teaching practices of schools to see how systematic and powerful the mere fact of measuring+publicising data can be. \u201cIn the lead up to NAPLAN, it becomes \u2018all about academia\u2019 and the social\/emotional\/spiritual aspects of learning seem to take a back seat\u2026.NAPLAN limits our capacity to develop the non-NAPLAN aspects of holistic education.\u201d said one primary school principal.<\/a>
\nDonella gives a more positive example: \u201cThe Toxic Release Inventory \u2014 the U.S. government\u2019s requirement, instituted in 1986, that every factory releasing hazardous air pollutants report those emissions publicly every year. Suddenly every community could find out precisely what was coming out of the smokestacks in town. There was no law against those emissions, no fines, no determination of \u201csafe\u201d levels, just information. But by 1990 emissions dropped 40 percent. They\u2019ve continued to go down since, not so much because of citizen outrage as because of corporate shame. One chemical company that found itself on the Top Ten Polluters list reduced its emissions by 90 percent, just to \u201cget off that list.\u201d
\nShaming is a very effective form of accountability. Shaming means exposing transgressions against morality or social norms. The mere threat of shaming helps actors self-regulate their behaviour. Tuna manufacturers could not endure the graphic exposure of dolphin by-catch in the 1990s driving changes in fishing practices (and dolphin-free labelling). Shaming of clothing brands for exploitation of child labour has had similar effects.
\nWhat to do:<\/strong> <\/i>Collect data on consequences of decisions by powerful actors and feed it back, graphically, to the public. Examples include performance measures, independent monitoring, accreditation systems, rating systems, ombudsmen, rules about transparency, freedom of information laws, shaming campaigns. For an individual, commitment apps like stickK, Pact and Beeminder have similar effects.
\n[An interesting book on shaming campaigns is\u00a0Jennifer Jacquet (2015) Is Shame Necessary? New Uses for an Old Tool,<\/a> Penguin Books]<\/p>\n11) Level playing field (limit the gain to dominant actors)<\/b><\/h3>\n
\nIn essence it\u2019s about limiting \u201csuccess to the successful\u201d, an area full of potential for confrontation and violence because the powerful are highly motivated to maintain their privileged leverage and work tirelessly to pursue every conceivable advantage.
\nNegative feedback loops tend to be\u00a0healthy, but positive feedback loops are potential threats. According to Donella, \u201cA negative feedback loop is self-correcting; a positive feedback loop is self-reinforcing. The more it works, the more it gains power to work some more. The more people catch the flu, the more they infect other people. The more babies are born, the more people grow up to have babies. The more money you have in the bank, the more interest you earn, the more money you have in the bank. The more the soil erodes, the less vegetation it can support, the fewer roots and leaves to soften rain and runoff, the more soil erodes\u2026 Positive feedback loops are sources of growth, explosion, erosion, and collapse in systems. A system with an unchecked positive loop ultimately will destroy itself. That\u2019s why there are so few of them. Usually a negative loop will kick in sooner or later. The epidemic will run out of infectable people \u2014 or people will take increasingly strong steps to avoid being infected. The death rate will rise to equal the birth rate \u2014 or people will see the consequences of unchecked population growth and have fewer babies. The soil will erode away to bedrock, and after a million years the bedrock will crumble into new soil \u2014 or people will stop overgrazing, put up checkdams, plant trees, and stop the erosion.
\n\u201cReducing the gain around a positive loop \u2014 slowing the growth \u2014 is usually a more powerful leverage point in systems than strengthening negative loops, and much preferable to letting the positive loop run.\u201d
\nSuccessfully combating runaway processes requires strong laws and neutral umpires like independent judiciaries, commissions of inquiry, independent financial regulators, and independent corruption investigation bodies.\u00a0It’s\u00a0the logic behind anti-monopoly and competition laws.
\nThe internet has been economically revolutionary because online platforms tremendously reduce the cost of starting a business (e.g. eBay, Etsy, Shopify, WordPress, Pencil etc), creating millions of new economic participants and combating the\u00a0monopoly power of big actors.
\nWhat to do:<\/strong> <\/i>anything that redistributes wealth (for example progressive taxation), privileged access to information (for example Freedom of Information laws) or which \u201clevels the playing field\u201d by equipping less leveraged players to participate in the system <\/i>(for example\u00a0<\/i>universal high-quality public education,\u00a0affirmative action programs, and low cost internet platforms).
\n12) Full cost pricing<\/b>
\nPrice signals are have powerful behavioural effects. For example, in 1999, World Bank consultants<\/a> reviewed past studies and concluded that, all else being equal, a price rise of 10 per cent tended to produce a reduction of tobacco consumption of about 8 per cent.
\nIn system terms, cost is a strong negative feedback loop that disciplines behaviour and controls runaway gains. Hence it\u2019s a signal that actors try very hard to avoid! One way they do this is by removing \u2018externalities\u2019 from their account books \u2013 like polluted air, lost soil, workers health, damage to other other people\u2019s infrastructure. Producers like to \u201csocialise costs and privatise profits\u201d. A well-designed tax can retrofit some of those externalities back into the pricing system.
\nThe mix of taxes and tax breaks can act like a steering wheel that directs whole systems away from, or towards, cliffs. A carbon tax, for example, steers the whole economy away from fossil fuels, causing not just changes in behaviour but the blooming of entire new industries. Cheapness, meanwhile, is often a bad thing. Cheap petrol, for example, tangled modern cities in a fantastic blight of concrete freeways and barely endurable air pollution.
\nA stunning success of a well-placed tax is the landfill levy in Australian states, effectively a tax on dumping waste in landfill. First introduced in the 1990s to cover the \u2018externality\u2019 of replacing aging landfills, it has since pushed the cost of landfill to over $300 a tonne in NSW, not just reducing waste dramatically but also conjuring into existence new recycling industries<\/a> worth $11 billion a year and employing some 30,000 people. Richard Pratt, Australia\u2019s fourth richest man until he died in 2009 was a paper recycler. That\u2019s what a well-placed tax makes possible.
\nPermit trading schemes, which sell a limited supply of tradable permits, achieve the same effect. And they also generate funds which can be put to good uses.
\nWhat to do:<\/strong> <\/i>If you are a government, establish taxes, levies and permit trading schemes to price externalities into actors\u2019 calculations. If you\u2019re not a government, start a think tank or lobby group to argue for full life cycle pricing. Argue for reduced subsidies for socially and environmentally damaging activities.<\/p>\n13) Establish counterweights<\/b><\/h3>\n
\nWhen disparate individuals or groups organise themselves and push back against the powerful, they literally change the shape of the system. Unions\u00a0are probably the greatest example of counterweights. Industry groups and co-ops are others, down to the humble neighbourhood\u00a0community action group.\u00a0Organising a counterweight is more powerful than any of the leverage points listed so far because organised lobbying is how most\u00a0political changes actually get made.
\nOrganising is an act of system redesign because it creates new actors and increases the gear ratio of less powerful actors, shifting the distribution of power across the whole structure.
\nAn action group does not have to be large to be successful. The most extraordinary changes have, as Margaret Mead famously observed, often been the collective endeavours of small, committed groups.
\nUnlikely alliances between existing actors can have the strongest system redesign effects. The unlikely alliance between Australian Conservation Foundation and the National Farmers Federation, for example, created Landcare, a movement that has physically transformed the Australian Landscape.
\nWhat to do:<\/strong> <\/i>Organise a community or industry into a co-operative or lobby\u00a0group. Convene an alliance of existing actors to lobby for change.
\n[ P.S. The go-to place for everything about community organising is The Change Agency.<\/a> They have organising toolkits and a community organisers\u2019 fellowship.]<\/p>\n14) Change the rules<\/b><\/h3>\n
\nLaws and regulations establish sanctions for undesirable behaviour, reinforce social norms and enable communities to self-police.
\nMandatory laws \u201chave been the tool of choice for many important welfare optimisation problems \u2013 seatbelts, bicycle helmets, cigarette advertising, rental property standards, fair mortgage contracts, water fluoridation, milk pasteurisation, superannuation, minimum wages, and much beyond.\u201d *
\nThe power of laws is why corporate lobbyists work to hard to weaken labour, environmental and financial regulations. And why progress so often depends on strengthening those laws. Think recent public battles over the Renewable Energy Target, food labelling rules, the Future of Financial Advice Act, and the Racial Discrimination Act.
\n\u201cThat\u2019s why my systems intuition was sending off alarm bells as the new world trade system was explained to me,\u201d wrote Donella. \u201cIt is a system with rules designed by corporations, run by corporations, for the benefit of corporations. Its rules exclude almost any feedback from any other sector of society. Most of its meetings are closed even to the press (no information flow, no feedback). It forces nations into positive loops \u201cracing to the bottom,\u201d competing with each other to weaken environmental and social safeguards in order to attract corporate investment. It\u2019s a recipe for unleashing \u201csuccess to the successful\u201d loops, until they generate enormous accumulations of power\u2026\u201d
\nWhat to do:<\/strong> <\/i>start a campaign, or a think tank, to get laws passed, or existing laws defended, or enforced.
\n* Quoted from Finighan, R. Beyond Nudge<\/a><\/p>\n15) Build\/defend institutions<\/b><\/h3>\n
\nInstitutions are born when organised campaigns succeed in passing legislation, solidifying their intentions into existence. New social functions, like fair working conditions, environmental protection or financial regulation, are conjured into permanence, backed by state power, budgets, executives and staffs.
\nWealthy elites and their supporters work very hard to capture such institutions, or, if they resist capture, to destroy them. Lonely institutions are easily victims. Hence defending useful institutions is just as important as creating new ones.
\nWhat to do:<\/strong> <\/i>start a \u201cFriends of\u201d group to defend a threatened institution. Work to pass laws to strengthen institutions or build necessary ones. Monitor institutions to ensure they work for the larger good.
\nOn a more humble scale, any activity that is formalised, has dedicated personnel, and measured goals, acts like an institution, even if it\u2019s just a community group or office committee. It changes the system (and it needs to be kept on track for the common good as well).<\/p>\n16) System innovation<\/b><\/h3>\n
\nA shorthand way to think about innovation is that it\u2019s about how a system learns<\/i>.
\nDonella wrote: \u201cSelf-organization means changing any aspect of a system lower on this list \u2014 adding completely new physical structures, such as brains or wings or computers \u2014 adding new negative or positive loops, or new rules. The ability to self-organize is the strongest form of system resilience. A system that can evolve can survive almost any change, by changing itself. The human immune system has the power to develop new responses to (some kinds of) insults it has never before encountered. The human brain can take in new information and pop out completely new thoughts.\u201d
\nThree kinds of interventions\u00a0strengthen the ability of systems to innovate:<\/p>\n\n
\nWhat to do:<\/i> <\/strong>Get together with friends and construct a better alternative. Instead of a campaign, start a \u2018start-up\u2019! Organise a community leadership program.
\n[Innovation can be a systematic practice. For an excellent introduction read the article Design Thinking<\/a> by Tim Brown, CEO of the design firm IDEO.]<\/p>\n\u00a017) Pivoting the purpose<\/b><\/h3>\n
\nDonella wrote: \u201c\u2026the goal of a system is a leverage point superior to the self-organizing ability of a system. If the goal is to bring more and more of the world under the control of one particular central planning system (the empire of Genghis Khan, the world of Islam, the People\u2019s Republic of China, Wal-Mart, Disney, whatever), then everything further down the list, physical stocks and flows, feedback loops, information flows, even self-organising behavior, will be twisted to conform to that goal.\u201d
\nWho sets goals? That\u2019s the role of transformative leaders. \u201cThe number one determinant of change is active and visible sponsorship by the leadership.\u201d *
\nSome leaders feel frozen by constraints, but, for courageous leaders, there are always higher purposes they can use to guide their systems. I once facilitated a debate by school principals on the purpose of education: was it about academic performance, citizenship, or spiritual development of children as whole people? (\u2018whole people\u2019 won).\u00a0 A transformative leader sees greater purposes others are blind to, and brings them into existence by courageous and consistent words and actions.
\nTo illustrate the point, Donella uses Ronald Reagan\u2019s promotion of neoliberalism: \u201cNot long before he came to office, a president could say \u201cAsk not what government can do for you, ask what you can do for the government,\u201d and no one even laughed. Reagan said over and over, the goal is not to get the people to help the government and not to get government to help the people, but to get government off our backs. One can argue, and I would, that larger system changes and the rise of corporate power over government let him get away with that. But the thoroughness with which the public discourse in the U.S. and even the world has been changed since Reagan is testimony to the high leverage of articulating, meaning, repeating, standing up for, insisting upon new system goals.\u201d
\nWhat to do:<\/strong> <\/i>in the systems in which you play a leadership role, courageously speak and act as if a transformed purpose was already a fact.
\n* Told to me by John Davey, an organisational change consultant.<\/p>\n18) Change the mindset or paradigm behind the system<\/b><\/h3>\n
\n\u201cParadigms are the sources of systems,\u201d wrote Donella Meadows, \u201cFrom them, from shared social agreements about the nature of reality, come system goals and information flows, feedbacks, stocks, flows and everything else about systems. No one has ever said that better than Ralph Waldo Emerson:<\/p>\n
\nWhat to do:<\/strong> <\/i>paradigms are intangibles that are created and reinforced by day-to-day conversations and communications. So: know your values, speak and write them confidently. Enable other believers to speak out. Place your believers in positions of influence. Create think-tanks and institutions based on those values.
\nHere is Donella\u2019s prescription: \u201cSo how do you change paradigms? Thomas Kuhn<\/a>, who wrote the seminal book about the great paradigm shifts of science, has a lot to say about that. In a nutshell, you keep pointing at the anomalies and failures in the old paradigm, you keep coming yourself, and loudly and with assurance from the new one, you insert people with the new paradigm in places of public visibility and power. You don\u2019t waste time with reactionaries; rather you work with active change agents and with the vast middle ground of people who are open-minded.\u201d
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\nDear readers:<\/strong> Have I left anything out? Is this the best order of ideas? I\u2019m happy to amend this model based on feedback. – Les<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"