Genevieve Maitland Hudson says that the rhetoric around 'systems change' can cause more headaches than it cures.
On yesterday’s Today programme Sarah Montague interviewed biologist Sean B. Carroll about his new book The Serengeti Rules: The Quest to Discover How Life Works and Why It Matters. Not a book with immediate application to social programmes, but all the same one that is likely to touch a chord with many in the sector because it explicitly uses medical models to address larger scale dysfunction in biological systems.
That sounds familiar.
‘Systems’ talk is all the rage in the social sector. It’s one of a group of words that forms a distinct semantic field, along with ‘complex’, ‘emergent’, ‘evolutionary’, ‘behavioural’ and everyone’s all time favourite ‘change’, that are dropped into social innovation discussions on Twitter like dispersible aspirin into water. But with the effect of causing rather than curing headache.
The excitable rhetoric would lead any interested person to assume that there’s an important insight here that is going to lead to something valuable. What is it exactly that its leading lights believe that ‘systems change’ will do for social programmes?
Conscientious, if irritated, reading suggests three main themes:
- ‘Systems change’ might help the social sector to respond to ‘complex’ and/or ‘wicked’ problems
- 'Systems change’ might reform ‘late capitalism’ in super new ways
- ‘Systems change’ might save money
The last theme seems more a politic statement of intention than a finding rooted in any evidence of a new systems-based approach that has demonstrably saved money. We can probably set it aside until more evidence comes in. In any event it’s the first two that really get the systems advocates going.
Theme 1 is the most developed ‘systems change’ programme. This is largely because it is an old insight: meeting immediate demands may do nothing to relieve underlying causes, and may even, as research on food banks in Canada suggests for example, make things worse in the long run. Understanding the ‘system’ may help to relieve these problems. Thinking critically about the effects of social programmes may equally prevent unforeseen outcomes from, in turn, becoming systematic. Well and good.
Theme 2 is something else altogether.
Before attempting to make sense of its grand ambitions, it’s probably a good idea to try and get to grips with what this kind of ‘systems change’ might be about.
Definitions don’t really help, as NPC’s guide pointed out.
A list of the properties of systems might work if it didn’t immediately take us back to ‘emergent’ and ‘complex’.
The philosopher Ian Hacking calls these kinds of words ‘elevator words’. They aren’t objects in the world, nor are they ideas, and their definitions are circular. They are supposed to help us to make sense of objects and ideas by providing scaffolding for thinking. If they aren’t doing that they aren’t much use, and the suspicious mind starts channelling Karl Mannheim and wondering what functional, extra-theoretical role they are playing.
Suspicions grow when you realise, and you soon do, that there isn’t anything very new or different going on here. Historians, sociologists, thinkers of all stripes in fact, have been doing this kind of analysis for years. Pretty big names in the history of ideas have had things to say about how systems work: Hegel and Marx and Pierre Bourdieu, Simone de Beauvoir, Edward Saïd and Thomas Kuhn, to name only a very few.
These kinds of thinkers have typically highlighted the ways in which ideas, groups, institutions, cultural norms and practices produce intentional and unintentional effects. They point to the cumulative ways in which this happens, to the mutually reinforcing frameworks that bring about stability, and to their effects on us. Some of these thinkers go on to suggest that these frames are not inevitable, and could, even should, be changed.
‘Systems change’, when you stop to look at it, is a familiar kind of thing.
Why then the new name and gleaming rhetoric?
Marketing, is probably the simple answer. This is a rebrand to take the more ‘toxic’ elements out of an old idea and to stake a claim to a new expertise.
In a paper for the Maintainers conference, Dan Gregory gives an account of ‘social innovation’ as an approach to social engagement cleansed of the kind of political ideology that might deter right-of-centre funders and privileged young innovators from getting stuck in.
By analogy you could argue that ‘systems change’ does for collective action what startups do for individual social engagement: dress it up in hipster clothing. The kind of clothing that suits Silicon Valley investors.
When Impact Hub Birmingham publishes a paper on Town Halls for Social Change and talks about "an agile understanding of collective impact" and "openly co-creating society", it is perhaps fomenting a mild revolution in which blockchain and wiki homes stand in for less palatable public meetings, mass demonstrations and Jeremy Corbyn. This kind of ‘system change’ can then duly attract the "fusion of traditional finance tools" in its pleasant tinkering with capital and "combine the best of a co-working lab, civic accelerator and social impact financing platform" for good.
‘Systems change’ of this stripe is unlikely to challenge established democratic processes or economies. It sounds much more like the ‘Chat to People’ function on www.countryos.com than a revolution.
There may well be important insights to gather from the kind of ‘systems’ theory that underlies The Serengeti Rules. But when drawing on this kind of theory it’s worth bearing in mind another old insight: obscure terminology rarely promotes progressive reform.
