#24: The 2D trade-off

How to make informed decisions about taking a systemic approach.

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, dear reader,

I spend a lot of time trying to convince public sector leaders that they need to take a systemic approach to their work. That task is made easier by the booming industry of success stories and case studies of what systems work looks like in practice. We should—and I do!—celebrate those successes. They show that new ways of thinking about and organising public services are possible. But it has become all too common to frame these successes against the backdrop of the failure of other forms of public management. We all love a goodies versus baddies plotline, but it’s really not that simple.

Early in my career, I was spruiking my wares to a senior Australian public servant and he was unconvinced. You’re giving me examples of where it’s been tried and it’s worked, he said, but can you share an example of where it has been tried and it failed? At the time, the question really threw me. I didn’t have an example to hand. It is not something I had ever been asked before. I was used to speaking to people who were already converted, not those that needed to be convinced.

What I’ve realised since is that my sales strategy was an attempt to force him into an incomplete trade-off. I thought that if I could provide examples of where nonsystemic ways of working had failed (“nonsystemic/failure”), then he would jump at the prospect of replicating examples of where systemic approaches had been a success (“systemic/success”). I was asking him to make a linear, one dimensional trade-off that selectively ignored half of what was possible. He was pushing me to make space for the second dimension.

This realisation has changed how I have conversations with senior public servants about the risks and benefits of systemic approaches. Public servants are trained to make trade-offs and manage risks. Those that make it to the top usually do both well. Those people are seldom convinced by an incomplete trade-off. Where we can’t provide examples of systemic failure, people can’t properly assess the downside risk. Where we ignore examples of nonsystemic success, people can’t properly assess the marginal benefit of the upside risk. In the absence of a complete trade-off, it’s entirely rational for people to default to the status quo.

I’ll probably be criticised for yet another 2-by-2 matrix and that’s OK! There are countless other dimensions that could be layered on top of this model, including the likelihood and consequence of risks in each of these categories. We also should be having conversations about what kind of public services we ought to value how and those values inform assessments of risk. Even so, I find this model useful. It helps me have honest conversations with those I am trying to convince to think and work in different ways. I like a goodies and baddies plotline as much as the next person, but even the greatest heroes have their flaws.

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Not unrelated miscellany…

• An earlier edition of this newsletter discussed some of the other troublesome binaries that tend to surface when people talk about the value taking a systemic approach.

• The newly-formed PolicyLab at the Australian Department of Industry is hiring for people with experience in design, behavioural insights, citizen engagement or foresight. One would hope they are also looking for people excited about experimenting with systems work…!

• One astute reader sent me this quote from Pema Chödrön’s book When Things Fall Apart following the recent issue of this newsletter that cautioned against the use of the word ‘solution’ in systems work. Perhaps instead of talking in terms of success and failure we might ask how we can create the spaces for systems work to fall apart and come back together again?

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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>.