Perspectives on Impact

Leading Voices On Making Systemic Change in the Twenty-First Century

Nina Montgomery

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429840760
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Perspectives on Impact brings together leaders from across sectors to reflect on our approaches to social change. Sharing diverse examples from their work, these authors show how we must think more systemically and work more collaboratively to move the needle on the biggest social, humanitarian, and environmental challenges facing our world.

Chapters by:

Niko Canner, Shanti Nayak, and Cynthia Warner (Incandescent)

Duncan Green (OxFam)

Farah Ramzan Golant (Girl Effect, kyu)

Sara Holoubek (Luminary Labs)

Joi Ito (MIT Media Lab)

Leila Janah (Samasource, LXMI, Samaschool)

Amirah Jiwa

George Kronnisanyon Werner (Republic of Liberia)

Chris Larkin (IDEO.org)

Eric Maltzer (Medora Ventures, Middlebury College)

Jane Nelson (Harvard Kennedy School)

Craig Nevill-Manning and Prem Ramaswami (Sidewalk Labs)

Jacqueline Novogratz (Acumen)

Deena Shakir (GV, formerly Google Ventures)

Jose Miguel Sokoloff (MullenLowe Group)

Lara Stein (TEDx, Women's March Global)

Piyush Tantia (ideas42)

Fay Twersky (William & Flora Hewlett Foundation)

Sherrie Rollins Westin and Shari Rosenfeld (Sesame Workshop)

Perspectives on Impact and its sister book, Perspectives on Purpose, bring together leading voices from across sectors to discuss how we must adapt our organizations for the twenty-first century world. Perspectives on Impact focuses on the recalibration of social impact approaches to tackle complex humanitarian, social, and environmental challenges; Perspectives on Purpose looks at the shifting role of the corporation in society through the lens of purpose.

I
Framing thoughts on systemic change

1
Thinking in systems changes everything

Duncan Green

Dr Duncan Green is Senior Strategic Advisor at Oxfam Great Britain and a Professor in Practice at the London School of Economics. Duncan was previously Oxfam GB’s Head of Research, a Visiting Fellow at Notre Dame University, a Senior Policy Adviser on Trade and Development at the Department for International Development (DFID), a Policy Analyst on trade and globalization at CAFOD, the Catholic aid agency in England and Wales and Head of Research and Engagement at the Just Pensions project on socially responsible investment. He is the author of How Change Happens and From Poverty to Power: How Active Citizens and Effective States Can Change the World. He also authors the From Poverty to Power blog.

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I was first moved to write on how change happens and systems thinking by a combination of excitement, fascination, and frustration: excitement at the speed and grandeur of many of the social changes occurring today – continents rising from poverty, multitudes becoming literate and gaining access to decent healthcare for the first time, and women in dozens of countries winning rights, respect, and power.¹ Working at Oxfam gives me an extraordinary and privileged ringside seat from which to appreciate both the bigger picture and the individual stories of inspiring activists across the globe.

This daily excitement is laced with frustration when I see activists take steps that seem destined to fail. Within months of joining Oxfam in 2004, I witnessed two examples, one big and one small. On a field visit to Vietnam, I was taken to see Oxfam’s work with Hmong villagers in the north. As we drove to the remote home of this impoverished ethnic minority, we passed the first, more intrepid backpackers starting to arrive in the area. The Hmong produce wonderful textiles, and it was obvious that a tourist boom was in the offing. Yet our project consisted of training villagers to keep their prized water buffalo warm and well during the winter (involving rubbing them regularly with alcohol, among other things). There is nothing wrong with working on livestock, but what were we doing to help them prepare for the coming influx of tourists? When challenged, our local (non-Hmong, middle-class Vietnamese) staff replied that they wanted to ‘protect’ the villagers’ traditional ways against the invasion of the outside world.

On a grander scale, I had growing misgivings about an enormous, global campaign Oxfam was then leading that implied global activism around trade, debt, aid, and climate change could somehow ‘Make Poverty History.’ The campaign seemed to gravely downplay the primacy of national politics. I developed my argument a couple of years later in a book, From Poverty to Power: How Active Citizens and Effective States Can Change the World. One of the inputs to that book was a paper we commissioned on the theories of change used by different academic disciplines.² It turns out they each operate with separate and often conflicting theories of change, and there is no ‘department of change studies’ to sort it out. I was intrigued, and set out some rather rudimentary ideas about ‘how change happens’ in an annex to the book, marking the starting point for the prolonged conversation that led eventually to yet another book, How Change Happens.

I believe that activists can change the world, but first let’s define what we mean by the word ‘activist.’ A narrow interpretation would say that it means people engaged in protest movements and campaigns around topics as disparate as climate change and disabled peoples’ rights, usually on the margins of ‘the system,’ people who from the days of the abolitionists have been making change happen. But the list of ‘change agents’ (English is sadly devoid of non-clunky descriptors in this field) is much wider. I include reformers inside the system, such as politicians (both elected and unelected), public officials, and enlightened business people. And the civic world beyond formal institutions is far too rich to narrow down to a single category of ‘campaigners.’ Faith groups, community leaders, and the many self-help organizations that women form are all often influential players. Even within aid organizations, those engaged in what we call ‘programs’ – funding or running projects to create jobs or improve health and education services, or responding to emergencies such as wars or earthquakes – are just as involved in seeking change as campaigners. When I use the word ‘activists’ I mean all of the above.

This chapter argues that systems thinking – embracing the complexity of the world, rather than trying to reduce it to simple (and simplistic) chains of cause and effect – can transform the ability of activists to bring about the changes they seek, whether in society, politics, or business. It sets out the practical implications of learning to ‘dance with the system,’ in terms of the kinds of people we need to be, and the kinds of questions we need to ask (and keep asking), as we seek to change the world.

How change happens: Systems thinking changes everything

Political and economic earthquakes are often sudden and unforeseeable, despite the false pundits who pop up later to claim they predicted them all along – take the fall of the Berlin Wall, the 2008 global financial crisis, the Arab Spring (and ensuing winter), Brexit, or the rise of populism. Even at a personal level, change is largely unpredictable: how many of us can say our lives have gone according to the plans we had as 16-year-olds?

The essential mystery of the future poses a huge challenge to activists. If change is only explicable in the rear-view mirror, how can we accurately envision the future changes we seek, let alone achieve them? How can we be sure our proposals will make things better, and not fall victim to unintended consequences? People employ many concepts to grapple with such questions. I find ‘systems’ and ‘complexity’ two of the most helpful.

A ‘system’ is an interconnected set of elements coherently organized in a way that achieves something. It is more than the sum of its parts: a body is more than an aggregate of individual cells; a university is not merely an agglomeration of individual students, professors, and buildings; an ecosystem is not just a set of individual plants and animals.

A defining property of human systems is complexity: because of the sheer number of relationships and feedback loops among their many elements, they cannot be reduced to simple chains of cause and effect. Think of a crowd on a city street, or a flock of starlings wheeling in the sky at dusk. Even with supercomputers, it is impossible to predict the movement of any given person or starling, but there is order; amazingly few collisions occur even on the most crowded streets.

In complex systems, change results from the interplay of many diverse and apparently unrelated factors. Those of us engaged in seeking change need to identify which elements are important and understand how they interact.

My interest in systems thinking began when collecting stories for my book From Poverty to Power.³ The light bulb moment came on a visit to India’s Bundelkhand region, where the poor fishing communities of Tikamgarh had won rights to more than 150 large ponds. In that struggle numerous factors interacted to create change. First, a technological shift triggered changes in behavior: the introduction of new varieties of fish, which made the ponds more profitable, induced landlords to seize ponds that had been communal. Conflict then built pressure for government action: a group of 12 brave young fishers in one village fought back, prompting a series of violent clashes that radicalized and inspired other communities; women’s groups were organized for the first time, taking control of nine ponds. Enlightened politicians and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) helped pass new laws and the police amazed everyone by enforcing them.

The fishing communities were the real heroes of the story. They tenaciously faced down a violent campaign of intimidation, moved from direct action to advocacy, and ended up winning not only access to the ponds but a series of legal and policy changes that benefited all fishing families.

The neat narrative sequence of cause and effect I’ve just written, of course, is only possible in hindsight. In the thick of the action, no one could have said why the various actors acted as they did, or what transformed the relative power of each. Tikamgarh’s experience highlights how unpredictable is the interaction between structures (such as state institutions), agency (by communities and individuals), and the broader context (shifts in technology, environment, demography, or norms).

Unfortunately, the way we commonly think about change projects onto the future the neat narratives we draw from the past. Many of the mental models we use are linear plans – ‘if A, then B’ – with profound consequences in terms of failure, frustration, and missed opportunities. As Mike Tyson memorably said, “Everyone has a plan’til they get punched in the mouth.”

Let me illustrate with a metaphor. Baking a cake is a linear ‘simple’ system. All I need do is find a recipe, buy the ingredients, make sure the oven is working, mix, bake, et voila! Some cakes are better than others (mine wouldn’t win any prizes), but the basic approach is fixed, replicable, and reasonably reliable. However bad your cake, you’ll probably be able to eat it.

The trouble is that real life rarely bakes like a cake. Engaging a complex system is more like raising a child. What fate would await your new baby if you decided to go linear and design a project plan setting out activities, assumptions, outputs, and outcomes for the next 20 years and then blindly followed it? Nothing good, probably.

Instead, parents make it up as they go along. And so they should. Raising a child is iterative, an endless testing of assumptions about right and wrong, a constant adaptation to the evolving nature of the child and his or her relationship with their parents and others. Despite all the ‘best practice’ guides preying on the insecurity of new parents, child-rearing is devoid of any ‘right way’ of doing things. What really helps parents is experience (the second kid is usually easier), and the advice and reassurance of people who’ve been through it themselves – ‘mentoring’ in management speak. Working in complex systems requires the same kind of iterative, collaborative, and flexible approach. Deng Xiaoping’s recipe for China’s takeoff epitomizes this approach: “We will cross the river by feeling the stones under our feet, one by one.”⁴

Systems are in a state of constant change. Jean Boulton, one of the authors of Embracing Complexity, likes to use the metaphor of the forest, which typically goes through cycles of growth, collapse, regeneration, and new growth.⁵ In the early part of the cycle’s growth phase, the number of species and of individual plants and animals increases quickly, as organisms arrive to exploit all available ecological niches. The forest’s components become more linked to one another, enhancing the ecosystem’s ‘connectedness’ and multiplying the ways the forest regulates itself and maintains its stability. However, the forest’s very connectedness and efficiency eventually reduce its capacity to cope with severe outside shocks, paving the way for a collapse and eventual regeneration. Jean argues that activists need to adapt their analysis and strategy according to the stage that their political surroundings most closely resemble: growth, maturity, locked-in but fragile, or collapsing.

I was not a quick or easy convert to systems thinking, despite the fact that my neural pathways were shaped by my undergraduate degree in physics, where linear Newtonian mechanics quickly gave way to the more mind-bending world of quantum mechanics, wave particle duality, relativity, and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. Similarly, my experience of activism has obliged me to question linear approaches to campaigning, for example, as I hesitantly embraced the realization that change doesn’t happen like that.

Once I began thinking about systems, I started to see complexity and unpredictable ‘emergent change’ everywhere – in politics, economics, at work, and even in the lives of those around me.

When change happens: Crises at critical junctures

Change in complex systems occurs in slow, steady processes such as demographic shifts and in sudden, unforeseeable jumps. Nothing seems to change until suddenly it does, a stop – start rhythm that can confound activists. When British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan was asked what he most feared in politics, he reportedly replied in his wonderfully patrician style, “Events, dear boy.” Such ‘events’ that disrupt social, political, or economic relations are not just a prime ministerial headache. They can open the door to previously unthinkable reforms.

Such ‘critical junctures,’ as the economists Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson call them, force political leaders to question their long-held assumptions about what constitutes ‘sound’ policies, and make them more willing to take the risks associated with innovation, as the status quo suddenly appears less worth defending.⁶

Much of the institutional framework we take for granted today was born of the trauma of the Great Depression and the Second World War. The disastrous failures of policy that led to these twin catastrophes profoundly affected the thinking of political and economic leaders across the world, triggering a vastly expanded role for government in managing the economy and addressing social ills, as well as precipitating the decolonization of large parts of the globe.

Similarly, in the 1970s the sharp rise in oil prices (and consequent economic stagnation and runaway inflation) marked the end of the post-war ‘Golden Age’ and gave rise to a turn away from government regulation and to the idealization of the ‘free market.’ In communist systems, at different moments, political and economic upheaval paved the way for radical economic shifts in China and Vietnam.

Milton Friedman, the father of monetarist economics, wrote:

Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.⁷

Naomi Klein, in her 2007 book The Shock Doctrine, argues that the Right has used shocks much better than the Left, especially in recent decades.⁸ Klein cites the example of how proponents of private education in the U.S. managed to turn Hurricane Katrina to their advantage: “Within 19 months, New Orleans’ public school system had been almost completely replaced by privately-run charter schools.” According to the American Enterprise Institute, “Katrina accomplished in a day what Louisiana school reformers couldn’t do after years of t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of figures, boxes, and tables
• Introduction
• Part I: Framing thoughts on systemic change
• Part II: Bringing disciplinary approaches into dialogue
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Further reading
• Index