#15: Be eclectic, don't integrate
On supporting difference and variation.
I’m Luke Craven; this is another of my weekly explorations of how systems thinking and complexity can be used to drive real, transformative change in the public sector and beyond. The first issue explains what the newsletter is about; you can see all the issues here.
Hello, dear reader,
This week, along with some colleagues from ATO Design, I had the joy of spending the morning with the new design team from Bushfire Recovery Victoria. We gathered to share what my team have learned over the past 18 months from pushing ourselves to take a more systems-led and complexity-friendly approach to our design practice—what we call “systems-led design”. I love these conversations. I learn so much from being able to shape and share my reflections. Hearing my team articulate how systems-led design has taken shape for them is just as illuminating. For so long, including in this newsletter, I have said that systems-led design is an attempt to “integrate systems thinking, design practice, and behavioural insights into a single practice.” Listening to how my team explain it to others, I now think that is wrong.
Systems-led design is an eclectic practice, rather than an integrative one. It borrows from a range of disciplines, practices and sense making frameworks, and then applies them pragmatically to the situation at hand. Its purpose is to give designers a new language and syntax to help them select and combine different ways of making sense of and responding to complexity. The principles and model we outline in our design guide are a set of enabling constraints. They empower designers and project teams to tailor their approach to the kind of complexity they are working with, while also providing a framework for different design teams to talk meaningfully about a shared practice despite significant variation in application.
This should have seemed obvious from the outset. Attempts to create monolithic, integrated theories of systems thinking or complexity are misguided to the point of being self-defeating. Let’s be clear: no single framework or theory will ever be sufficient to hold the complexity and richness of the real world. I have no doubt that most in the systems and complexity communities intuitively know this to be true, but we are not immune from the cultural and capitalistic impulses that drive people to integrate; to claim they have created something new. It is common to hear collective excitement at the news that someone has managed to integrate multiple systems theories into something new and flashy (quick, give it a name!) and that we must now “transition away” from using the individual strands of thought from which it has drawn its inspiration. We should not celebrate this kind of creation. It deserves to be satirised.
Eclectic practices—like systems-led design—are an effort to guard against the risks of excessive reliance on a single sense making framework and the simplifying assumptions that come with it. They enable practitioners to engage, complement and selectively utilise different frameworks embedded in contending traditions to build complex arguments about a complex world. And, perhaps most importantly, eclectic approaches have been shown to be more effective than integrative ones. Scott Page—a widely respected complexity scholar—contends that “collections of people with diverse perspectives and heuristics outperform collections of people who rely on homogenous perspectives and heuristics” across a wide range of social and institutional settings (p.10). This as true of systems practice as it is of any other field, but diversity and eclecticism cannot properly exist without a language and syntax to sustain it. I’m not sure we are there yet.
Other collected miscellany…
Earlier this month, I reflected on how the use of vector targets could result in the deprioritisation of subtractive change. Well, subtractive change is getting a bashing at the moment! New research has shown that our cognitive default is to search for additive transformations and consequently overlook subtractive transformations. If I were an enterprising PhD student interested in systems and complexity, I would consider doing research on how to push against the tendency to exclude subtractive strategies in systems change work…
Nesta has recently released a new report on how to make group decisions, particularly noting that people should draw on diverse perspectives and heuristics. They note that “diversity is the most important factor for a group’s collective intelligence.” The report has five sections that cover different dimensions of group decisions: group composition, group dynamics, the decision making process, the decision rule and uncertainty.
A fascinating interview with Stuart Kauffman about emergence in complex adaptive systems. The longer version also talk about concepts of adjacent possibilities and exaptation .
By the way: This newsletter is hard to categorise and probably not for everyone—but if you know unconventional thinkers who might enjoy it, please share it with them.
Find me elsewhere on the web at www.lukecraven.com, on Twitter @LukeCraven, on LinkedIn here, or by email at <luke.k.craven@gmail.com>.