Tag Archives: Systems Thinking

Etmanski: Think and Act Like a Movement

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Al Etmanski’s book assumes readers are striving to achieve real systemic change and his first pattern articulates the importance of movements.  For Etmanski, “Institutional change cannot happen without a movement” (P.49) and “A movement is composed of a million small acts.” (P.48).

This is not new.  Change occurs when enough people are moved to action for a long enough period that it finally happens. Gladwell talks about this type of change in Tipping Point.

The new piece for me was Etmanski’s insistence that systemic change requires us to look beyond our immediate context and missions to the broader goals of the movement. As an example you might identify a gap in mental health support for veterans. To impact the system creating the gap, Etmanski believes you should align your efforts with broader movements like The Movement for Global Mental Health or The Canadian Mental Health Association.

Think back to the occasions when you were involved in developing a mission and vision for your organization.  Was the movement a part of those discussions and considerations?  Was a movement objective devised alongside the mission and vision?

It’s not unusual for us to focus on the local context where we can see the ways our work makes a difference.  Spending time and energy on thinking about how we will contribute to the ‘movement’ seems like an abstract, ambiguous, pointless task.

To keep conversations about developing a movement objective meaningful, Etmanski provides some loose boundaries in his characteristics of an effective social justice movement.

Five Characteristics of an Effective Social Justice Movement.

  1. “They ignite our imaginations” – Do you contribute to a bold vision that disrupts the status quo?
  2. “They are multi-generational” – Do you contribute to movements as they reappear in new forms with successive generations?
  3. “They comprise small acts” – Do you contribute to the same thing that others feel compelled to contribute to?
  4. “They are self-organized” Do you contribute to something in which everyone sees the goal without a central command structure or charismatic champion?
  5. “They marry art and justice” – Do you contribute to something in which art has created new ways of seeing the world and transformed what we see as a possibility?

 

Would you say efforts to help the flood of Syrian Refugees is a movement?  Or the Arab Spring? Or Occupy Wall Street?

 

Impact: Six Patterns to Spread Your Social Innovation by Al Etmanski is a guide for social innovators to move their idea from localized success to broader systemic impact.

 

Making Your Idea Matter

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Having repeatedly heard folks in social innovation circles refer to Al Etmanski, I felt compelled to pick up his book Impact: Six Patterns to Spread Your Social Innovation.  It’s intended to guide innovators after their idea has been mushed, mashed, shaped, sanded, polished and tested.

How does a social innovator shepherd an idea from local success to broader systemic impact?

I recommend picking up a copy for his stories illustrating many of the ideas I’ll be posting.  A quick, accessible, useful read.

Etmanski opens by saying we all have the ability, capacity and responsibility to innovate. We can’t escape by saying ‘I’m not a big idea thinker‘ or ‘I’m a doer not a thinker‘. Further, he identifies three types of innovators needed to spread an idea, no matter how amazing, to achieve broader systemic impact.

Disruptive Innovators: have the unwavering belief that we can do better by challenging the the way it’s always been done..

Bridging Innovators: have the credibility and networks to highlight the benefits of the disruptive innovator’s new idea for institutions and policy makers.

Receptive Innovators: have access and knowledge of the system to change policy, law or funding to make the idea possible. (also known as intrapreneurs).

Which type of innovator are you?  Even more importantly, do you know anyone from the other two types of innovator?

 

Podcast Pick: SSIR – Whose Story Are We Telling? (Andrew Means)

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Before hearing Andrew Means on the SSIR podcast, I would listen to the stories Not-for-Profit organizations tell about their work and couldn’t help but be inspired.  Hearing the exceptional rags-to-riches story about a person experiencing homelessness that used an NPO’s employment program and now manages a local million dollar company would move me to open my wallet.

Another common narrative is based in data.  After hearing that upon completion of the employment program 85% of participants (people experiencing homelessness) became employed, I became convinced the program is ‘doing something right‘.

Look more closely at the stories and you’ll notice they have two common deficiencies.

First, they fail to link the complex nature of the problem to the need for their program.  As a complex problem, homelessness is multi-faceted with causes sprouting from racism, poverty, abuse, family violence, mental illness, and addiction to name a few.  Are you able to articulate how the employment program addresses some of these broader facets of homelessness?

Second, the stories tell us what has been accomplished in the past but fail to articulate why it matters for the future.  Has the story about the employment program taught us about the ways in which being employed will impact people experiencing homelessness in the future?

Means believes our stories need to go beyond our comfortable narratives to include how the program/organization has impacted the broader systemic context.

Yes. Impact.  When I think about measuring impact I am immediately overwhelmed by where to start while remembering past attempts rife with pitfalls and blind alleys.  But Means believes it’s the key to making progress on complex, systemic, nasty, intractable social problems and he has a tidy little formula to get us started.

World with your organization – World without your organization = Impact of your organization 

Tidy to say. Still messy to do.  Fortunately Means gives us a couple tips and some excellent examples to get us thinking about starting.

Counter-factuals:  provide us with an accounting of what would have happened if the organization/program had never existed.  This would mean asking how many of the participants getting a job after completing the employment program would have landed employment anyway.  Then setting this against the 85%.

Displacement: helps us articulate how our work causes ripples in the broader context.  It might mean asking how many participants getting a job after completing the employment program are filling positions otherwise filled by equally qualified people already in the labour market and setting this against the 85% too.

Granted. Quantifying displacement and counter-factuals can be time-consuming and possibly expensive.  But Means is nudging us towards authentically confronting the gap between what we want to accomplish and what we are actually accomplishing. 

The result will be a community making more informed decisions about contributing towards outcomes we actually want to achieve rather than outcomes we pretend we are achieving.

When we join the crowd at the Annual General Meeting, it is with the expectation that we will hear the stories that make us feel like we are in the presence of something that matters.  But the stories are stuck in a rut.  They have a predictable plot involving the usual characters.  Think the movie Star Wars.

Means is nudging us towards telling more complex stories by introducing compelling storylines and new characters illustrating the relationship between complex problems and our work.  Think the movie Interstellar.

 

Whose Story Are We Telling? Featuring Andrew Means from Stanford Social Innovation Review Podcast

 

Is Incremental Change Good Enough?

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I was at an event last week that left me uplifted and energized with undercurrents of irritation and discomfort.  It’s the mix I look for when I attend an event because it signals that I’m learning outside my comfort zone.

I attended an SDX (Systemic Design Exchange) event in which panelists candidly shared their Epic Tries: Innovation Stories from the Field for the first part of the afternoon.  In the latter half of the afternoon, SDXers broke into smaller groups to discuss a question or problem posed by a panelist   I like this format because it gives participants an opportunity to contribute their ideas and expertise to the panelists.  Near the end of the afternoon, we became one large group again to debrief the conversations and what had been accomplished.

However there was one phrase that kept bubbling to the surface that both resonated with me and frustrated me.   It was the idea of incremental change.

Incremental change, as I am taken to understand, is created by seizing opportunities to make micro-changes that eventually coalesce into more substantial change over time. On the surface it makes sense.   It’s easier to move a few smaller boxes that one huge box.  Incremental change is actually a very smart strategy and its very difficult to argue its logic.

Unfortunately, my experience working in government has taught me that the lasting impact of incremental change is undermined by three corrosive forces; lack of coordination, indecision, and apathy.

I have witnessed situations in which one team will make an incremental change, be high-fiving each other while another team is unintentionally countering their change with one of their. This happens all too often in government.  Sometimes I hear the question; didn’t we fix this problem last year?  From year to year we haven’t really ‘moved the needle’ by any lasting measure.

I know a few middle managers in government that really want to do things better but are fossilized into inaction because of indecision above them.  I’m sure some of these indecision-makers would appreciate the freedom to try new things but they have to be mindful of making a ‘career limiting move’.  In the meantime, the idea being considered becomes stale and losses its relevance.  An opportunity to make an incremental change passes and people move on.

At this point you might be tempted to say “that’s the way it is in government”.  When I first joined government I was astonished at how casually people accepted this as a reason for not doing better.  This apathy is the most lethal killer of any kind of change and signals someone that believes doing better is not possible.  Worse, it signals a person who believes doing better is no longer their responsibility.  The system is the people who run it.

My apologies.  I see this post has taken a turn towards hopelessness.  But I think hopelessness is how many people in government feel as they tirelessly and continuously push an agenda of change from their cubicles.   I’ve seen it in the faces of people around meeting tables who know they will return to dealing with the mindless, soul-crushing minutiae that matters urgently today but is forgotten tomorrow.

But not all is lost.  The people I meet at SDX refurbish hope that change is possible.   I agree that change is hard.  But it is also inevitable.  The greatest potential for meaningful incremental change comes from intentional coordination and integration of our efforts.  This leaves me with three questions to which there may not be answers. Yet.

  1. What can I do to coordinate people and their incremental changes?
  2. How can I access and support indecision-makers so they feel comfortable transitioning to decision-makers?
  3. How do I influence others to shift from the ‘way it’s always been’ to the ‘way it can be’?

The Way We’ve Always Done It

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How do you feel when you start a new position with a new team?   For me it has always been a mix of excitement and awkwardness.  Mostly awkwardness. Because I don’t know the unwritten rules of the place and I don’t want to make an embarrassing faux pas on my first few days.

To explain this, Gray would say the team I am joining has a shared set of beliefs they use to navigate their work relationships called the bubble of belief.  Beliefs I do not yet possess because I don’t have their shared experience of working together.  The kitchen is a perfect example.  On one occasion before attending a meeting,  I had gone to the kitchen to make a cup of tea.  I picked a cup from the cupboard and boiled water like I have thousands of times.   Unfortunately I turned up to the meeting using the boss’s favorite cup.  I could feel a tremor of discomfort when I entered the room because everyone else knew not to use that cup.

Bubbles of belief exist in every corner of our lived experience.  They are shared maps that groups use to navigate relationships in the reality they co-create.  Unfortunately, they are maps that occasionally lead us over a cliff too.

Have you ever heard this phrase at work “Because that’s the way we’ve always done it”?  

It’s always been done that way and continues to be done that way because “….new information from outside the bubble of belief is discounted, or distorted, because it conflicts with the version of reality that exists inside the bubble” (p.45, Liminal Thinking).  Gray calls this self-sealing logic.  There are many examples of how this type of thinking has had disastrous effects. Blackberry couldn’t see past the keyboard design while Apple gobbled up their market share with the touchscreen.  In 2000, the Blockbuster CEO passed up the opportunity to purchase Netflix for $ 50 million saying it was a niche company.  Netflix is now worth more than $30 billion. I wonder how many times these words were uttered in the Northlands boardroom while Katz busily outmaneuvered them.

Why is it so difficult for people to see past their self-sealing belief bubbles?

Gray points out that people evaluate a new idea in two ways; internally (does it make sense?) and externally (can I test it?).  Most new ideas fail to get past the internal test because they challenge the bubble of belief and so they automatically do not make sense and therefore do not need to be tested.  A video streaming service must have seemed impossible to the CEO of the most successful video rental business so therefore there is no need to test what it’s potential could be.

Think back to a time when you came forward with a fantastic, innovative, can’t miss new idea that was dismissed by the group.  Was the groups defending its’ bubble of belief?  Do you think your new idea challenged group identity?

Conversely, take a minute and think about what happens when your beliefs are challenged.  How do you defend them?

 

Liminal Thinking Principle 5:”Beliefs defend themselves.  Beliefs are unconsciously by a bubble of self-sealing logic, which maintains them even when they are invalid, to protect personal identity and self-worth.” (P. 49, Liminal Thinking)