The Accoutrements of Success
Humans have some predictable shortcomings. Every religious and philosophical tradition has commented on how we seek after power, prestige and possessions. These three things make up the accoutrements of success. Those who have power over people, and therefore over resources, are esteemed. Those whose role, history or knowledge help them perform use prestige to protect and separate. Both turn to the accumulation of possessions as a way to demonstrate the success of their progress. That impressive array of worldly status is hard to critique.
Yet critique is exactly what serious change requires. The same forces that make individuals and institutions feel successful also bind them to systems that may no longer serve. Naming those forces — at the level of institutions, individuals and ideas — is the work of anyone trying to shift a system. It is also the work of anyone trying to design programs, services or policies that produce results rather than merely activity.
Level One: When Institutions Become Their Own Obstacle
Entire systems get caught up in the three drivers and become self-protective. Organisations that own the buildings associated with a particular service or sector become fiercely protective of that asset. It cannot be made redundant, especially if the design and fitout are particular to a specific application. Manufacturers fight to stop the importation of products that might make their processes redundant, even when those products offer superior benefits to users. Hospitals resist the move to home-based care because they have so much investment in large health precincts. Schooling systems cannot imagine a world where micro-schools and independent learning supersede the Germanic tradition of passive children sitting in rows like diligent scholars.
The success and history of institutions thereby become their corrupting element. The myopia of those involved to the potential for change can be blindingly obvious to all but the implicated. Any change process therefore needs to name and demonstrate the damage of adherence to the existing system. This is challenging because the data, academic outputs and government policy frameworks have been built by and for the status quo. Defenders of the system have access to more esteemed speakers, more reports and more public understanding than the new voices on the block. Calling out their involvement in keeping some groups marginalised or disadvantaged can be the equivalent of blasphemy. That has rarely gone well for the prophet.
Level Two: Backing the Horse Called Self-Interest
Individuals also create their own systems of thinking and patterns of behaviour. The saying “always back the horse called self-interest” speaks volumes about our inability to put the interests of others before our own. Even choices that affect us tend to be skewed towards the immediate and temporal rather than the long-term and beneficial. This is one of the challenges with health and wellbeing. We over-estimate the joy we will receive from eating a donut and under-estimate how long it will take to exercise off the calories. We over-estimate our ability and under-estimate the risks. How many people can be “above-average drivers”, after all? The majority of the population classifies themselves as better on the road than their compatriots.
When proposing change, unless the losses that will accrue to individuals are seriously considered and paired with at least equivalent gains, resistance will arise. Losses borne by the individual against gains accruing to society are harder still to sell. This is why everyone wants tax cuts and at the same time demands more service provision from government. Our ability to make non-sensical choices at an individual level means choices need to be well framed, or an enforcement element needs to be sufficiently popular to get over the line. When posing big change, that means having sufficient public opinion behind you. If your proposal is bold, getting the middle majority behind your cause can be hard. Most people are conservative, even when change is in their own interest.
Level Three: When Good Things Mask Hard Truths
The third level of challenge is when good things disguise the shortcomings of either individual choice or system-level choices. It is far harder to name and challenge things that on the surface are accepted as positive or benign. Men being responsible breadwinners was a positive stereotype reinforced by male-favouring industrial legislation, wage rates and acceptable social patterns for generations. How do you challenge the nice guys doing the best for their families, and the social structures that give stability to families? Feminism is a lesson in having to confront many good men, and the women behind them, in order to overturn precepts deemed central to the functioning of a good society. The outcome — a better society where everyone gets to set their own agenda and use their strengths — was hard to conceive when certain strengths had been implied to belong only to men.
Sacred Cows: When Doctrine Outlives Its Purpose
Free market economics is another such sacred cow. The very nature of our economies has shifted immensely over the decades and centuries. Milton Friedman’s belief in competition as the arbiter of good — central to driving down price and creating choice in every market — has become almost unquestioned doctrine in most government treasury and economic portfolios. Any form of intervention, picking winners or compensating for market gaps and failures, is deemed to violate the effective functioning of markets.
What happens when there is no market? Australia, a vast country where wealth, opportunity and choice are concentrated in cities, is a place where markets can and do fail. Those in rural and remote areas, despite wanting certain services and products, simply have too little market power to attract providers. Yet so much of our health and social sector service provision is based on private sector delivery. Healthcare is largely a private sector provider model. Disability supports, aged care, affordable housing and many other responses of government have been left to the market to respond to government subsidy programs. In too many situations, the market does not respond. Rather than embrace a dual-stream delivery model, policy makers double down on creating incentives for the market to expand into thin markets. It is hard to make programs and policies perfect, and the unintended consequences of such actions can be just as invidious: gaming of the system, or simply not engaging with it. Rather than question the free market doctrine, policy makers and stakeholders have an unerring ability to keep promulgating the same system.
Policing is another area where good can mask harm. Laws can be set with police nominated as the enforcement body. If those laws ignore real disadvantage, you can end up with the problem faced in Australia, where incarceration of our First Nations peoples is a vast multiple of their presence in our population. Police can be excused for occasionally stepping out of line with “difficult” elements in society because they “have a tough job to do”. Even when officers ignore crimes like domestic and family violence — because both the law and the justice system are not designed to accommodate families in trouble — it can be hard to make the police service culpable for inaction or, worse, for perpetuating harm.
Naming the System
We frequently hear in community debate that this or that policy, program or service creates diabolical outcomes. The root of the word means wicked, sinister, even demonic. Fiendishly difficult problems to resolve generally have at their heart a mismatch between intent and effect in programs and system design. Overcoming this gap, where history or lack of insight or both conspire to produce poor results, takes more than strength. It requires naming how complex systems work. Simply labelling an outcome as bad is insufficient to drive change. Those involved will touch up some aspects of what is occurring and the system will steam on, rolling over whoever or whatever gets in its path.
It has been said that every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets. To get a different outcome, you need to change the system. That means understanding the power, prestige and possessions of those involved. What has been the payoff to them to date? What do they hold onto that gives them unquestioned rights, resources and profile? How do you challenge that?
The Discipline of Program Logic
Sometimes the resource a system taps is data: data that shows the system is working because vast numbers of people are using it and getting expected results every day. It has been said that what you measure gets monitored. Government datasets are wonderful examples of numbers which are easy to collect but often poor surrogates for what they purport to measure.
In healthcare, a particularly busy area of endeavour, it is easy to point to how many patients have been seen. For anyone sitting on a waiting list, the more critical number can be how long it takes to be seen. For those whose issue is not one the system addresses easily, it can amount to never being seen, or never being taken seriously.
This is where program logic earns its keep. Showing what the inputs to a system are, how they are used to generate activity, how many activities lead to given outputs, and how those outputs generate the outcomes desired, is a rigorous way of thinking. Politicians are very good at talking inputs. Budgets for this program or that have increased every year they have been in government. Input through dollars invested. That is only the start of the process.
How have those dollars led to change? Bureaucrats are very good at producing numbers related to clients seen or widgets produced. That is activity. Whether that activity is efficient or effective is less often demonstrated. Here pundits of the market system like to note how much activity was generated by private providers, assuming that market forces sort the rest.
That is where outputs come in. Outputs are not just how many schools are operating or how many kids are in schools, but how many kids graduate having achieved certain educational levels. The really important thing is the outcome. How many of those kids got jobs, into the courses they wanted to study, with the life skills required to make a success of life? Outcomes are much harder to measure if your purpose for doing the work in the first place is too broad. They are much harder to critique if the context of performance is only middle-class suburbs in metropolitan locations. The really interesting data might be the comparatively small percentage of kids from migrant or remote backgrounds who failed most school subjects, had poor attendance records, and whose futures in the juvenile justice system look assured.
In your change program, which part of this big, messy system are you going to target for critique, and around which part will you gather a coalition interested in change? Is it about getting more inputs? Changing the nature of activity? Ensuring outputs are consistent across different groups? Aligning outcomes with what society is increasingly expecting?
Force Fields and the Ladder of Inference
Doing the detailed thinking about what drives change is critical. Force field analysis — looking at the nature and strength of the forces working to maintain the current situation, and the forces working against change or improvement — can be really beneficial. Knowing what is standing in the way, and how big an obstacle that is to overcome, helps unravel system dynamics.
As you do this detailed thinking, you also need to list your assumptions. The Ladder of Inference is a wonderful model for showing how we go from zero to one hundred in our thinking without realising we have hit the accelerator. Slowing down, and mapping the components of your model, will generate some surprises: inter-relationships you have never seen before, acceptance of attitudes or stereotypes you just took for granted. In meetings, you will start to see people run up the ladder of inference in ways that mean they remain blind to what you are seeing or saying. Having done the hard work of breaking down the problem, you will be able to highlight new elements that make the conversation more productive.
Productivity will generally start when the conversation shifts from blaming users of a system to understanding the weaknesses of the system and key system players. It has been the temptation of history to blame individuals. It is easy to blame people. Much harder to accept that we are all somehow caught up in creating, funding and maintaining systems that do harm to people we may care about.
The Long Arc of Reform
Only a few times in history have new movements really taken systems and culture to task. The Reformation, the Enlightenment and the reformers who kicked off in the 1960s are the most obvious examples. The leaders of these movements were highly educated, articulate and often tough people. Democracy, music as we know it, public education and even the book industry can all trace their roots to Martin Luther’s reforms to the Church in the 15th and 16th centuries. Most of us would have found him a grumpy idealist who was difficult to like. Without him the Reformation would not have occurred. Without that, the scientific revolution that has created the technology, wealth and longevity our lives have revolved around for the last couple of centuries would not have been spurred.
Given the infrequency and the recency with which public institutions and broader systems have been held to account, we are still developing both the process and the capacity to do it well. You can be part of this maturing potential if you critique yourself and your role in the system that is causing problems with the same rigour with which others apply criticism of individuals.
Looking at the System, Not the Face
Looking at the big picture and taking in all the elements is hard. It takes time and many deep gazes at different aspects of the scenery. It is far easier to hone in on the face of someone who does not appear to fit, and to blame them. This will happen in public consultations and civic debate. A person, a case study, a memorable example will enliven a room.
What really needs enlightening is our capacity to look at the system, and what sustains it, with as much vigour and passion. Three levels — institutional, individual, ideological — and one target running through them all: power, prestige and possessions. Naming those forces is where systems change begins.
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