What do we mean by systems change? Where does ‘system’ as a concept even show up in our language? Economic and political systems. Energy, food, agricultural systems. Ecological, of course, the natural ecosystems in which we live. IT systems. Transport systems. The solar system. Safety systems. Delivery systems. The school system.

So what does system change even mean? The answer I offer will have varied at different times in my career. Originally I trained as an internal and environmental auditor. In this world a systems audit was the approach to interrogate the accuracy and effectiveness with which a specific system operated. Here, the word system meant the interrelationship of a set of steps in a process that delivered something (often a decision or clear output) as a result. As I worked in local government, this may have been a system that enabled you to pay your council tax, receive benefits or apply for a housing grant. Incidentally the work to develop and improve such systems was known in the late 1990s as business process improvement, an ancestor of what is now – as another example of design hegemony – called service design. 

Later I was working at the intersection of different organisations. Partnership working was a response to the way we sought to address social challenges by reducing them to their core parts and creating an institution or department to address them. Of course, this is neither effective nor sufficient to handle the variety of circumstances that people presented with. Hospitals aren’t great for treating obesity, Jobcentres not great at helping people back into work, schools not always the best route for young people to learn. 

Something different is at work here and that’s the obvious fact that this approach leaves gaps around the edges. While school can plug a large part of a young person’s learning, it can never be a complete match. There are always elements outside of the school’s control both for good, as in the case of a student belonging to a local sports group or undertaking informal learning, and not so good, as in the impact of wider socio-economic and environmental factors that might undermine their efforts to learn. We know that school remains a largely academic route into a young person’s future when not all of our young people are academically-shaped. So to hold the school alone to account for the performance of its children is a strange truth we dare not question. 

I’ve written before about how this showed up in the way we would monitor and track measures of performance. I couldn’t understand why we were holding housing managers to account for the number of rough sleepers, for example, police for the numbers of crimes or council services for the cleanliness of our streets. Aren’t these all, to a greater or lesser extent, due to the interaction of multiple factors? And so although I wouldn’t have used this language at the time, I was seeing first hand what happens when we attempt to manage complex systems.  

We see the same theory flow into our workplaces where again we tend to hold individuals to account for their performance and discount the impact of context or team. Thus for me I began to see systems as both their tangible and intangible manifestations. I guess as a geographer I’ve always been interested in the broader landscape, not just in the nodes but the spaces between them. How it all fits together. That’s how my view of systems expanded beyond organisational processes to our social systems comprising a more complicated collection of organisations and departments working in service to a purpose, such as the education or health systems. Both are, I think, valid systems in the definition of the word, which I describe as being a collection of parts (nodes, actors or points) that exist in a broader set of relationships, the properties and outcomes of which emerge through their interaction. 

Then I came across the work of Dave Snowden and I realised that here was someone who was drawing the same distinction: some systems are ordered, some are complex and some are chaos. Ordered systems are like those IT, process-based systems that we design to achieve a desired output. We can predict cause and effect. Complex systems are by contrast characterised by emergence. Due to a lack of discernible cause and effect between the component parts we can’t predict with any certainty what will happen. A payment or transport system are examples of the former, homelessness or an organisation examples of the latter. 

The question then follows, how do we create change in these different systems? I’ll explore this in part 2.