#7: Conflict and consensus
On the possibility of shared understanding in complex systems.
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,
tl;dr: Design practices often talk about building a "shared understanding" of a particular problem or system. In practice, the goal of "shared understanding" is taken to be mean consensus or unanimity, though consensus is neither possible nor desirable in complex environments. Engaging diverse perspectives of a system does not build "shared understanding", but it can help us to tell coherent stories despite significant difference.I am privileged to work in an intellectually challenging environment. My day job is in the Australian Taxation Office’s Design branch (“ATO Design”), supporting our adoption of systems-led design and working on big, meaty transformation projects. ATO Design has a long and storied history. It was one of the first Australian Public Service agencies to take human-centred design practice and apply it in a government context and it has been pushing the boundaries ever since.
Our most recent attempt at boundary pushing (read: rule breaking) is the work we are doing to integrate systems thinking, design practice, and behavioural insights into a single practice we call “systems-led design”. We spend a lot of time talking about what systems-led design is and what it is not. One of the things I have learnt from those conversations is that perspective matters. The vast majority of my colleagues are designers. For them, systems-led design is about taking systems thinking and using it to challenge the premises and assumptions of design practice. For me, it has always been about making systems thinking more practical; more grounded in tactile, human concerns; and more focused on responding to complexity, rather than simply understanding it.
I really, deeply believe that design and systems thinking should be understood from an equal footing. Both of them reveal a great deal about complexity and how we might respond to it, but neither is perfect. We can learn a lot from using one to critique the other and vice versa.
One of the elements of design practice I struggle with the most is the impulse to build a “shared understanding” of a context or concern amongst stakeholders. There are countless invocations of this language (link, link, link, link) in well-respected design sources, including in ATO Design’s own working principles. And yet there is a whole bunch of work in complexity and systems practice that views shared understanding as a fool’s errand—as neither possible nor desirable in complex environments. This is a critique design practice should take seriously. What work do we hope “shared understanding” does in a complex environment? Are we wasting our time chasing after an unattainable goal, when our time would be better spent investigating how different kinds of diverse (or misaligned) understandings can drive systems change?
These are questions that I alone am unable to answer coherently or in their entirety, though I have allies who are fighting similar battles (link, link, link). If we are to be able to answer definitively one way or the other, I think the design and systems communities have a lot of work to do. Answering these four questions would be a good place to start:
What do we mean by “shared understanding”? Are we referring to consensus? Alignment on the essentials? A lack of material disagreement? Something else entirely? Some of these differences might seem semantically insignificant, but they matter. In my time, I have seen design teams chase relentlessly—impossibly—after consensus under the banner of “shared understanding” when they would be better placed asking questions like “what kind of alignment is necessary here?” and “what kind of difference might we be comfortable with?”
Why might “shared understanding” not be possible in complex environments"? One of the basic principles of complexity is that different individuals experience complex systems in different ways. Some of those differences are probably superficial, but there are others that will be material, incongruous and paradoxical. The common impulse is to iron over those differences (what I’ve seen called “analysis” or “synthesis”) in search of shared understanding, but we should not be afraid of difference and multiplicity in our work. Accommodating it does more justice to complexity than pretending it does not exist.
Why might “shared understanding” not be desirable in complex environments? It stands to reason that if “shared understanding” is not always possible, forcing it where it does not fit does nobody any favours. As I’ve previously written, complex systems thrive under conditions that promote diversity. While obviously not always the case, I’ve seen the idea of a “shared understanding” brandished as a rationale for singular, standardised narrative of what is happening in a particular system. This inevitably strips away the richness of the often competing, often paradoxical narratives a diverse group of stakeholders will share in their attempt to explain complexity. It would do us well to reflect on what is lost when we prioritise superficial alignment over meaningful difference.
How have others dealt with this and similar challenges? Design can so often be an echo chamber. The same is true of the systems practice community. A staff member who comes from neither background recently commented to me that both disciplines have an obsession with solving problems from first principles, even thought there is a wealth of knowledge on similar problems in adjacent disciplines. On this problem, I think it is worth acknowledging the work that has been done on agonism, radical pluralism, and deliberative democracy. Each of these disciplines has long recognised that there is more to be done with diversity of perspectives than consensus or alignment.
To finish, and in noting the great work done to date, I take my bearing from the great American political thinker Mary Parker Follett, who in 1918 presciently noted: “The pluralists have pointed out diversity, but no pluralist has yet answered satisfactorily the question to which we must find an answer—what is to be done with this diversity?” Since then, we’ve spent so much time fretting about how to squeeze diversity into some kind of shared understanding, that we still haven’t really answered that question. Perhaps we should take that as a signal that forcing a shared understanding is not the right place to begin.
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>.
Alt: One way of mapping "the richness of the often competing, often paradoxical narratives a diverse group of stakeholders will share " = https://twitter.com/MandE_NEWS/status/1364143665241817090
Totally agree, ..better to find optimal levels of diversity in particular contexts