Start from the possibility not the problem
Five Lessons from System Shifters
We need entire systems to work to different principles, to be more socially inclusive, regenerative and reparative, to give people a sense that they have a stake in the future. To help answer that question, in late November 2022, our learning festival Making the System Shift brought together more than sixty system shifters from around the world, engaged in every domain from health and care, to learning and work, food and farming. They were innovators and investors, entrepreneurs and public servants, community wealth builders and movement makers. The festival became a collaborative exploration of the immense possibilities of system change.
Over the next four weeks we will be sharing five lessons we at the System Innovation Initiative took from our discussions: Those lessons in how people are shifting systems are:
Start from the possibility, not the problem
Make the small big
Coherence creates leverage
Make money follow purpose
Learn your way through change.
Lesson One: Start from the possibility not the problem
System shifters are not defined by the vehemence of their critique of what is wrong with systems. What stands out about them is how they marry this to a sense of possibility: a belief that a different, better system is possible. They encourage people to step into that possibility with them.
First, they demonstrate in practice how a system can be organised around an alternative set of operating principles. We call this shifting from “system now” to “system next”, the system as it is to the system as it could be.
Sometimes that sense of possibility comes from outsiders. One of our inspirational, original case studies was how Al Etmanski and his many collaborators shifted the Canadian system for supporting young adults with a disability, away from one where experts decided what young people needed and provided them with services, to one which supported young people to act on their own decisions, guided by the aspiration to live independently. Al and his team demonstrated those principles in small-scale working examples of an alternative system in action.
Alvaro Salas joined us to tell the story of how Costa Rica built a community-based, preventative health system based on practical models he and others first developed in a handful of barrios. Those models demonstrated that health was delivered to patients by doctors but a quality of life generated in communities where people supported one another to live well.
Second, those demonstrators become attractors pulling systems to towards them. Data which shows how the alternative generates better outcomes is vital. But that is not enough on its own to create the momentum for change. The alternative needs to be attractive and accessible, to make sense to people and even to make an emotional connection with them.
That’s why the artist Amhara Spence, quoting Toni Cade Bambara, urged us to “make the revolution irresistible”. Christian Bason and Kenneth Bailey argued that design plays a critical role in creating experiences in which we rehearse how to live differently.
That job of pulling the system in a different direction often falls to insider-outsiders: people, who work inside the system but who can connect it to ideas outside. Raquel Mazon Jeffers at the Community Health Acceleration Partnerships in the US describes their role as a “tugboat” pulling the larger systems of health and care towards more affordable, effective community based models.
Dream a Dream in Bangalore is another tugboat, which after a patient effort over many years found the system moving in its direction. When Vishal Talreja started Dream a Dream more than 20 years ago to promote student well being through creative learning, he was an idiosyncratic outlier to a rigidly conventional education system. Now several states in India have become so concerned about student well being they have made it a measure of success and invited Talreja and his team into the heart of the system to show it how to change.
Third, they create coalitions to make the possibility real. That means understanding the different reasons people have for joining a coalition for change.
Rod Allen a former deputy minister for education in British Columbia, gave a blow by blow account of how to build a coalition for change across an entire system, patiently bringing together school principals, teachers, policy makers, parents, students and politicians to see the case for shifting the education system away from academic test scores to focus on building young people’s capacity for collaborative agency to tackle real work challenges.
Creating the time and space for shared imagination was vital to that: “We made the case that our system was winning the game but we were playing the wrong game. The things we were doing were probably necessary for young people's development, but not sufficient. We could have taken a problem solving approach. How do we fix the current system? Instead we went to a dreaming place. What could we have? What could we do? We held those conversations for a long time.”
System shifters create a generative cycle in which deeper relationships create a more ambitious sense of what is possible and the shared commitment to that goal in turn deepens relationships between the partners. Relationships and possibilities breed one another.
A sense of shared possibility excites people to work together in a way that a shared problem does not. Suresh Kumar built a community-based palliative care system in the Indian state of Kerala based on the simple principle that no one should be alone in the last stages of their life. People joined his movement because they were excited by the prospect of working with other people on something that would make a real difference to their community.
Relationships breed a sense of possibility; as they become stronger and deeper so people find they can take on more together. Richard D Barlett, instigator of collaborative organisations like The Hum and Loomio stressed: “If I want to take on an ambitious, challenging, confronting movement, I need to be fueled by good feeling, by hope, by enthusiasm, by companionship and good meals. That conviviality is the essential ingredient at the core of all of this.”
As relationships deepen they allow us to imagine new possibilities; a shared commitment to a common future strengthens relationships. To paraphrase Marvin Weisbrod, co-founder of the Future Search Network: do not start with the problem and how to fix it, start with the possibility and the people who care about it. System shifters might be visionaries but they are never loners.
What alternative set of principles do you want to demonstrate?
How will you make the alternative attractive, to pull the system in your direction?
How will you create a coalition around the possibility you care about?
