#9: Balancing pragmatism and idealism

Hybridity as the engine of systems change.

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,

Binaries are bad! (<\irony>)

There’s a lot of discourse in the systems practice community that frames the struggle as all or nothing. This tends to manifest as one of two equally troublesome binaries:

• the view that systems thinking is good and reductionist, linear thinking is bad

• the view that an organisation or institution is either systemic or it is not

Each of these views is pervasive. They are often wielded in tandem. Both, ironically, take the linear, totalising view that that the poles of the dichotomy exhaust the possibilities. Even if good systems practitioners don’t really believe them to be true, they have become a form of convenient shorthand that is used to explain why taking a more systemic perspective is valuable. I’m all for shorthand, but not at the expense of accuracy. The risk of the frequent repetition of these binaries is that it leads to a kind of illusory truth effect, in which they come to be seen as factual, unproblematic statements about systems practice. Recent studies have shown that prior knowledge alone wont prevent repetition from swaying our judgments of plausibility. People tend to automatically assume that a statement is true because “unbelieving” comprises a second, cognitively-demanding step. Even when people devote resources to evaluating a claim, they only require a partial match between the contents of the statement and what is stored in memory. It’s easy for shorthand to take on a life of its own.

To be clear, obviously binaries can serve a purpose. All thinking involves making qualified distinctions. The danger with letting the totalising binaries above stand unchallenged is that they quietly undermine so much of what systems practice hopes to achieve. They encourage us to ignore the richness and complexity of the contexts in which we operate. They result in a lot of unfair criticism being levied at organisations attempting to be more attentive to complexity inside larger systems that demand the opposite. I’ve heard people claim, for example, that you can’t adopt systems approaches inside contexts that also seek to hold people to account for particular outcomes (read: every government context, everywhere). This kind of thinking is remarkably naïve and ultimately self-defeating. The struggle forward is always an experimental process, full of contradiction, in which we continually test and retest the limits of possibility and try, as best we can, to create new institutions that will expand those limits themselves. It is not all or nothing.

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Pushing binaries and boundaries

A lot can happen in one week. The past week has seen the release of a number of positive examples of governments experimenting with systems practice inside environments that are ostensibly nonsystemic (if the binaries are to be believed…!)

• NSW Treasury publicly released its Quadruple Aim framework, which they are using to inform their commissioning work. The framework attempts to operationalise the concept of system stewardship and create opportunities for stakeholders to reflect on their work and embed a stewardship approach.

• The Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health System released their final report, which draws heavily on a number of systems and complexity approaches. I would recommend people take a look at Chapter 2 of Volume 1, if they are interested. The report notes:

  The Commission determined that Victoria’s mental health system needed more than improvements to obvious system structures or to existing services or programs. It needed more than just funding for new programs. Instead, it needed a systems approach to change—an approach that sought to understand the underlying conditions that would transform the current mental health system into a mental health and wellbeing system that measures good mental health in terms of a person’s ability to participate, enjoy and achieve their full potential in all aspects of life. To achieve this transformation, this systems change approach would also have to support a fundamental shift in the purpose and structure of the mental health system towards a focus on responsive and accessible community-based services that are integrated with other services to support consumers’ wellbeing.

And yet, both of these examples include recommendations that would set some systems purists alight. The Royal Commission report contains recommendations that call for the implementation of “an activity-based funding model for both bed-based and community-based mental health and wellbeing services” and that the Victorian government needs to “monitor provider partnerships using a common set of indicators.” The NSW Treasury report contains references to outcomes-based budgeting, which they have recently implemented to drive an important shift away from funding activities or programs that lack a clear link to outcomes. 

Yes, these reforms are not perfect, but show me one that is. All attempts at large, transformational public sector reform have to balance idealism and pragmatism. Constructive criticism obviously has its place, but writing off these good faith attempts to be more systemic as “not enough” or “internally inconsistent” encourages all-or-nothing thinking. We can do better.

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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>.