Changing complex systems
Part 1: The building blocks of systems change
by Elena Bondareva
As we strive to further accelerate the global transition to the clean-energy economy while celebrating incredible progress, I’d like to start sharing what I have learned over nearly two decades of research and practice in change: how we orchestrate and sustain it across projects, organizations, and society.
Why do I care?
I came of age during the traumatic dissolution of the Soviet Union. A kid of two university professors, I saw what it meant to strip a society of its value system without meaningfully replacing it. Once-respected professionals, my mom and dad were now paid in towel fabric, plates, tea – because anybody who relied on the government was, well, instantaneously overboard without a life raft. Surgeons, police officers, scientists were bartering on street corners. At school, we routinely sat for hours on end without teachers, who were forced out into the fickle market economy. Playgrounds got dismembered for parts. There were no extracurricular activities. And I remember committing, before even hitting my teens, to figuring out how to do change well, preserving human dignity, rebuilding rather than destroying and unlocking possibility rather than entrenching despair. My post-graduate research at Cornell University allowed me to delve into broad-spectrum societal change, and I have not stopped since.
What’s the problem?
In addition to being inevitable, change is necessary. As the assumptions underpinning most systems around us have outlived themselves, but not before leaving us with the legacy of endemic suffering, poverty, environmental collapse, and climate change, we need comprehensive, concerted, and rapid change.
Still, 70%+ of all transformational initiatives fail*, jading their objects and bruising the leaders who put their neck on the line.
Why are we getting change wrong?
Today, I’ll give you one reason: the very focus - incl. of post-mortems – on “main reasons” is counterproductive.
Is it worth identifying the top three parts that a car needs to run safely? Maybe. But you wouldn’t get in unless all the hundreds of parts, many unglamorous, were working well together. As a system.
Complex systems – and that is what most of us are trying to change – are more like a spider web than they are like a spice cabinet. Pulling on any one element affects the entire thing that likes being exactly how it is whether we agree with that or not.
All up, I have two decades deep into distilling the building blocks of effective systems change: what differentiates continual from step-change improvement? What are the social, institutional, and industry factors involved? What has to go right in order to catalyze the positive change that is possible and yet seems out of reach? What opportunities for accelerating systems change exist in today’s real-time, globally connected reality? How can one know whether an issue is near its tipping point? And how can you determine your best role in taking a vital but fringe issue past the tipping point where it is broadly adopted by society?
These questions – fuelling my career – will fill more than one blog. Let’s start with the building blocks, and let me know if you’d like to hear more.
* McKinsey and Company, 2015.
Please let me know whether you are finding this helpful and what you’d like to hear more of.