#16: Old habits die hard

The challenge of building more systemic organisations.

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.

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Hello reader,

tl;dr: Getting people excited about systems and complexity focuses too much on helping them learn new things, and too little on helping them unlearn old ones. Supporting people to unlearn nonsystemic mental models is easier said than done—but is central to the task of transforming organisations to be more systemic.

It is really easy to get people excited about complexity and systems thinking. It’s easy to set up demonstration projects as an outlet for that excitement and point to their success using methods that are arguably nonsystemic.* It’s easy to fall victim to the perils of basin bias and call these early successes paradigm shift. It’s much harder to turn excitement into real, enduring change—to push people to be consistently and coherently systemic and complexity-friendly.

*Oh look, my single systemic project delivered X outcome and, yes, I can tell you this with certainty after 6 months. We are systemic now.

Transforming people and organisations to be more systemic is quiet and humble work. It takes time. It requires change at different levels, all with the ultimate aim of making it easy for people to think and act in systemic ways, and hard for them not to. I’m not convinced anyone has really been successful (yet!) in landing these kind of transformations, particularly in large organisations. We are all learning. I hope we are all unlearning too.

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Unlearning is easier said than done

The most common route to becoming excited about complexity and systems is to attend a training or event that presents them as an alternative to other ways of doing and being. These events typically involve a mic drop moment where someone will declare that the world is complex and systemic, so we can’t continue to understand and respond to it in nonsystemic ways. I must have participated in hundreds of these events. People leave with enthusiasm for doing things differently and perhaps some new tools and mental models to bring different to life. They add these new tools to their arsenal and head off to change all the systems in which they operate.

The problem is that we all come with a lot of nonsystemic baggage. We have learned to think in linear, anthropocentric, mechanistic and ordered ways. Our institutions encourage and reward these behaviours. A lot of this baggage needs to be left behind for people to really embrace more systemic ways of doing and being. This kind of unlearning is challenging at the best of times. Most people struggle even when they can clearly identify the habit or thought process they are looking to jettison. Despite full knowledge that New Zealand changed its give way rules in 2012, I still fall back into old habits on each trip home. I originally learnt it a different way. This example is trivial compared with unlearning nonsystemic mental models, where we confront two additional challenges:

1. We don't have full consciousness of our nonsystemic baggage. Many of our nonsystemic mental models are hidden from our conscious view. They are our water. They are difficult to demarcate and conceptualise. Making them visible and giving them names (linear, anthropocentric, mechanistic and ordered) is the first step in helping people move beyond them. This does not happen without deliberate effort. It requires shared spaces where people can come together to surface and name their individual mental models, make connections across difference, and articulate what a group needs to leave behind to achieve change.

2. Even if we can name our baggage, we can only ever achieve a partial view of how it affects our behaviour. For example, linear cause-and-effect thinking is pervasive. It shows up in almost every element of our everyday lives. We might be able to name it as an unhelpful, nonsystemic mental model, but we would struggle to identify all ways it shows up and the second-order habits or practices that can’t exist without it. This is quite different from simpler habits or practices that we commit ourselves to unlearning. Even though I still get the give way rules wrong, I can trace that behaviour back to having learned to drive a particular way. To the best of my knowledge, my penchant for pre-2012 give way rules doesn’t affect the way I make pancakes.*

*my pancakes are not good. Linear thinking is to blame.**
**extra points for those of you that spot the irony above.

This stuff isn’t easy. The process of unlearning requires us to be simultaneously anti-, despite- and post- the use of nonsystemic mental models. We can’t escape that this is always going to be contradictory, interstitial, and in the making. That is always going to be uncomfortable. Perhaps comfort is one of the other things we need to leave behind.

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Not unrelated miscellany…

• Anna Birney recently published a practitioner’s perspective on the question: How do we know where there is potential to intervene and leverage impact in a changing system? The paper provides four qualities can help to understand the dynamics of a changing system, and how these dynamics might be identified and translated into strategy and interventions.

• I’m a big fan of The Great Mental Models Project produced by the team at Farnam Street. Check out the sample chapter on probabilistic thinking. You can also listen to Shane Parrish, the founder of Farnam Street, talk about mental models on the Making Sense podcast.

• Over the past couple of years, Nesta has been mapping out the various innovation methods and approaches they have come across. They observe that people often have a personal bias (read: entrenched, unconscious mental models) when considering innovation methods and that making different options visible is a first step in challenging those biases. 

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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>.