I recently was sitting on an airplane and struck up a conversation with a very smart young man, who had recently graduated from high school and was on his way to visit the university where I work. He was taking a gap year to decide what to do next. His parents really wanted him to go to a good 4-year college, but he wasn’t so sure.
“All those years of school were mostly a waste of time. I got really good at doing well on tests that didn’t prepare me for the world of work at all.”
I noted that they probably would help him get into a good university.
“Yeah, but since I’m still not sure what I want to do, I might waste four more years learning more stuff that’s not going to help me. And then I might be in debt up to my ears and still working as a barista, like my cousin. That’s exactly what I’m doing now, working as a barista, but at least I don’t have any debt.”
“Sounds like a real dilemma,” I said. “But I’m guessing you’re not alone.” He shared that many of his friends are in the same boat. “It’s really hard to figure out what to do next. I don’t know what the world will be like in even another five years. What if I get a good job and then it’s outsourced to Asia?”
I could really relate to his concerns. Teaching undergraduates, I see a similar conundrum with seniors in my classes. Even though they will leave a top-notch university with a degree, they are still petrified that they either won’t find a job or will end up doing something they hate. Many of them have been so parent-pressured that they are gearing up for 2–10 more years of school to study medicine, law, or other advanced degrees, even if they’re not really sure that’s what they want to do. If they don’t make it into their first-choice graduate school, they’re devastated.
COVID-19 added to their stress. I was teaching this class when the university was closed and we had to move instruction online. The transition was devastating to my students. All of them were seniors, looking forward to graduation and beginning the next step in their adult lives. Most of them moved home to finish the semester. As I adapted the class to online learning, I made changes to support them during this difficult time. For many of them, the uncertainty was traumatic. The jobs they had accepted were put on hold. A student joining the Peace Corps was told that his program was shut down. Possibilities for graduate school became unclear. Together we built a supportive online community to cope with these challenges and to consider ways that the crisis might inform positive changes in the future.
As we consider how we might shift the paradigm of schooling, let’s return to examining how our ancient ancestors lived and how our bodies and minds adapted to change over tens of thousands of years of evolution. For most of evolutionary history, our ancestors lived as hunter–gatherers. This is a subsistence lifestyle that relies on hunting, scavenging, and foraging plants and other food sources, such as honey. This way of hominin living dates back at least two million years. Groups of early humans relied on one another for survival. Depending on the size of the group and the local resources, this lifestyle required about 500 square miles, so they lived in nomadic bands, from large extended families to larger tribes of up to 100 people. No matter what the size of the group, they coordinated their hunting and gathering to optimize the community food supply. They made weapons, tools, and clothing. They domesticated dogs, they mastered fire, and they invented language. Sometimes these nomadic groups slowly traveled very long distances in search of better food sources. In each new place humans inhabited, they decimated most of the large fauna in the area, resulting in mass extinctions of magnificent large animals: the glyptodonts and dire wolves across North and South America, and the giant goanna of Australia disappeared at the hands of prehistoric humans. Even as recently as about 800 years ago, humans wiped out the huge moa and other large birds in New Zealand.
Over the course of the Neolithic Revolution (12,000 years ago), humans developed agriculture, and some groups settled, growing much larger. Finally, cities rose out of the agricultural landscape. In each new age of development, from the Neolithic to the Industrial Revolution, humans have relied on a limited understanding of cause and effect. We also learned to expect unlimited resources. Having difficulty finding food? Let’s just move to the other valley! Our city is suffering economically? Let’s raid the city next door! While compassion and connection were still operating at the family and “in-group” level, there have always been vicious conflicts over resources in human history. Our thinking has been, for the most part, very instrumental; making decisions that maximize resources and efficiency by any means necessary.
These thinking strategies are a zero-sum game. You either win or lose. This was necessary for human survival at the time. But now it is clear that this way of thinking is obsolete. Indeed, it’s turning out to be a lose–lose strategy; it’s killing us and our habitat. Our societies are self-destructing so rapidly it’s easy to become depressed. However, if you look at the problems that are now arising as a result of developments of the last century, you can find the keys to transforming our societies into thriving communities rather than just-trying-to-survive communities. Making this transformation will require different ways of thinking and understanding our world. This is where schools and teachers can play an important role.
When they see the earth from space, astronauts report a cognitive shift in awareness called the overview effect. In 1972, Dr. Harrison H. Schmitt, a crew member on Apollo 17 took a magnificent photograph of the entire earth from space and for the first time, huge numbers of human beings got to see the earth from this view too. Some have argued that this view of earth from above began to transform our understanding of the limits of the earth and the ecosystem (White, 2014). This view, so well captured in Apollo 11 crew member Michael Collins’ observation at the start of Part II, has also transformed our ways of thinking by opening up our understanding of large dynamic systems, like the earth, and how important they are to our survival and thriving.
This view is the recognition that we are all interdependent—not just all human beings, but all of life, and indeed, all matter on Earth. This and the advent of particle physics helped us understand that the perception that we are entirely separate entities is an illusion of our minds. The molecules in our body are constantly being transferred from ourselves to our environment and back as part of a system of particles, atoms, molecules, and micro-organisms that operate unseen in the microscopic world. The chair I sit on as I write this is not entirely separate from my body or the pants I am wearing. Subtle shifts of molecules make us truly connected by tiny particles of matter.
From a global perspective of earth, we can recognize that borders are cognitive constructs, and complex global events, such as pandemics and climate disruptions, cross these boundaries. The COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated the futility of counting on borders to protect us from the crisis; public health workers found that the virus had entered the United States early on through travelers from China and Italy. Because the virus is contagious before any symptoms arise and there were no tests available, it was impossible to stop people who were carriers at the borders.
The acid rain crisis in the 1990s made it clear that global efforts are needed to step the negative impacts of environmental degradation and climate change. The sulfur dioxide pollution from coal-fired plants in the northeastern part of the United States was creating acidic rain that was killing aquatic life and forests. While much of it affected the United States itself, enough of it crossed the northern border into Canada to cause an international crisis. However, this problem contained the seed of “the greatest green success story of the past decade” (The Economist, 2002). The Clean Air Act (U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, 1990) included a cap-and-trade approach that required coal-burning companies to cut sulfur emissions in half but allowed them to decide how best to make these cuts. Companies that lowered their emissions more than half could sell these allowances to other companies. This was the beginning of the carbon commodities market, a way to reduce carbon emissions without devastating the economy.
While we can celebrate successes like these, we have a long way to go to shift our thinking to better understand interdependence. Systems thinking can help. Systems thinking involves a shift from win–lose to win–win. In a win–lose scenario, my winning something in the short term might have adverse consequences for others, which may also have a negative impact on me in the long run. When we recognize the interconnectedness of everything, we can see that the only functional way forward is the win–win approach. How do we do this? We change our thinking.
Over the past two centuries, we have solved problems using a mechanistic approach. This is natural, given the limits of our cognitive and technological capabilities during the early modern era. Now, we need to consider much larger complex and dynamic systems. The climate is a very good example. While scientists cannot “prove” that global warming is disrupting the planet, they can point to the increasing probabilities of climate disruptions as the planet warms and can model scenarios based on these probabilities. Unfortunately, like many phenomena, it’s impossible to conduct a randomized experiment to determine the exact cause and effect. Indeed, there are multiple causes and effects that interact with one another. Which variables would you examine? Which would you try to hold constant? From this example, you can see that some ways of examining problems have limitations because they attempt to eliminate variability rather than to examine the variability itself.
Systems thinking is beginning to enter education in the form of curriculum. However, why not turn to systems thinking as we transform our school systems? When we look at the school system through a systems lens, we can extend our limited, instrumental way of seeing it to a more transactional view, where everyone and everything is part of a system, and multiple systems interact, forming larger systems.
We can apply systems thinking to all levels of our educational system and think through the problems confronting us in a new way. Starting with the student: We have much more understanding of human development and its potential than ever before. We now know how very plastic our developmental process is, even through adulthood (Glasper & Neigh, 2019). We are incredibly resilient and there’s no such thing as a lost cause. Back in the day, if a student didn’t do well in school, people thought that they just didn’t have what it takes and were innately inferior to others. Now we know that humans are incredibly diverse and have a huge array of strengths and weaknesses. We all have something to contribute if we are given the chance, and this is a “all hands on deck” moment in human history.
We also can’t give up on the adults in our system. It’s time to stop blaming teachers and start giving them the autonomy they need to help turn this ship around. Teachers are also adult learners and can change quickly when called to the challenge and given autonomy in the classroom. When we teachers address the challenge, there’s no stopping us. We can consciously change ourselves in ways that can help us create thriving learning environments (Jennings, 2015; 2019b).
We can apply systems thinking to our classrooms, which are incredibly rich social systems in and of themselves. We can teach our students systems thinking, or better yet, learn along with them by applying it to our classroom system and discovering elements of how our classroom social system is functioning and how to improve it. And guess what? We no longer have to have all the answers (whew! Isn’t that a great relief?). Kids learn systems thinking quickly, as we will see in Part III of this book, and when they get engaged, teachers can let them take the helm of their own learning.
We can apply systems thinking to our schools and consider ways to disrupt the old factory model. Many schools are experimenting with mixed age grouping, open classrooms, project-based learning, and flexible scheduling. In Part III, I will share examples of how some schools are applying systems thinking to building school environments that spark deep learning. We can apply systems thinking to our districts and state agencies. Once these ideas take off and succeed, there will be no stopping us. Once school boards see how these changes are transforming our students’ lives, they will find ways to provide even greater supports. They might begin to examine school governance and change the imbedded inequities in school funding to ensure all students get equal resources. But now I’m getting ahead of myself. I used to feel discouraged because I had so little hope for change at the top. Now I’m full of hope because I know we can do it. We don’t need to wait for the policy makers to give us permission.
Many have argued that systems thinking is a key competency for twenty-first-century management (Kim, 1999). A system is a group of components that interact to form a unified functioning whole with a specific purpose. The purpose of a system is greater than any of its parts alone—and a system doesn’t work well if it’s missing any of its parts. Systems maintain stability through feedback loops. A simple example of a system is an HVAC system. The thermostat provides the feedback that signals the system to turn on heating or cooling. Systems thinking involves being able to see processes from three levels of perspective: events, patterns, and systemic structures. This might sound complicated, but kids love learning about systems, and we can learn along with them. Building system-thinking skills with our students will help deepen our own understanding. We can learn terms and tools of systems thinking to communicate to each other our understanding of how systems behave and how we might modify the system to improve the outcomes we’re aiming for.
One reason the factory system was efficient is that it created a simple, predictable system. Parts are lined up in an assembly line and workers add one part at a time. Each part is standardized to fit. Each worker has a standardize tool to put the parts together. The end result is a car that meets specific standards. This is a simple context, and at the time it made sense to impose this model on students and teachers to scale education. Classrooms were more homogeneous, content was simpler, and most learning was rote. Sure, some kids fell through the cracks, but this was a necessary trade-off, a function of scaling. At scale, some might argue, there are always products that fall through the cracks, but the number of products that don’t outweigh the cost of the loss.
Today our scaling problems and our classrooms are different, and the costs of failure immeasurable. Our classrooms, like our world, are complex, diverse, and often unpredictable. Our students come from multiple backgrounds with diverse home languages and racial and cultural identities and histories. Many are growing up under adversity, poverty, and trauma. Students still need to learn basic skills, but this is the easy part. More importantly, they need to learn how to learn, across their entire life. Right now, our traditional school systems are sucking the life out of learning, for both students and teachers. We know that learning is a very complex and individual process and that we learn better when we have the autonomy to choose what and how to learn (Deci & Ryan, 2002). This is fundamental.
The simple context of the factory model school has evolved into the complex context of the twenty-first-century school. A lot of the stress we experience as educators comes from operating as if we’re working in a simple context when we are actually working in an extremely complex system. This new, complex system requires a completely new way of thinking about problems and how to solve them. If we try to solve problems in a complex context using solutions designed for simple contexts, it just won’t work. And that’s why modern education reforms continue to fail.
The problem is, we humans have been working with simple contexts for most of human history, and we’re very good at managing them; it is an automatic human tendency. These tendencies are like our automatic pilot operating system, developed over tens of thousands of years of experience. Today our world is much more complex, and addressing complex problems with simple solutions can actually make things worse. We can no longer rely on this ancient operating system. Complex contexts require a different way of thinking: to slow down and see a situation from multiple perspectives.
Today, so many aspects of our daily lives are unpredictable, and how these aspects will interact with one another is also unpredictable. This causes fear and anxiety. Today it is especially difficult to have a sense of what our children will need to know and to be able to do in the coming decades. With the transformation of work—professions disappearing (such as retail) and the new gig economy growing—our children are likely to be re-inventing themselves and their careers multiple times during their lifetimes (Harari, 2017).
What’s particularly difficult today is that our inherent tendencies, what I like to call our “default perimeters,” are giving us the wrong signals. You can see this in bulldozing parenting: parents pushing their children to achieve and to aim for a very narrow area of expertise (e.g., Harvard Law, or Yale Medical School). This style of parenting doesn’t allow kids to experience failure, which deprives them of the opportunity to learn from failure (Miller & Bromwich, 2019). Perhaps these unfortunate children have a unique gift that does not fit into the parents’ chosen path but that will be invaluable in the coming decades. We just don’t know. The education system has a knee-jerk tendency to make drastic top-down changes for the sake of improvement that never seem to work out as planned. If they were trying to solve a problem with auto design, that might work, but when dealing with human development in the complexity of the twenty-first century, this approach is incredibly shortsighted.
The old way of thinking is limited because of its adherence to linear cause–effect modeling. It is now evident that a change and the cause of that change are different in systems of different levels of complexity. In simple systems, the linear model works. I follow the recipe, put the oven at the right temperature, and the cookies come out as expected. However, complex systems involve multiple feedback loops that are often difficult to see when viewed through a linear mindset.
For an example of how applying linear thinking to problems in complex systems can result in unintended and unforeseen outcomes, consider the history of the Class Size Reduction program in California. Achievement in California schools was down, and the idea of reducing class sizes to improve achievement in the early grades was based in scientific evidence. At the time, California had the largest class sizes in the United States (an average of 29 students per class), and results from the Tennessee STAR study clearly demonstrated that students in primary grades do better academically in smaller classes, and the differences were most evident among low-income and minority students (Mosteller, 1995). So, in 1996 California spent $1 billion to reduce class sizes in primary grades, statewide. Simply applying the results of the STAR study in Tennessee to the State of California is an example of linear thinking: kids are not performing well, our class sizes are large, research shows that reducing class size will result in student improvement, let’s reduce class size. What’s missing in this linear approach is an understanding of the complex and interacting school systems and how making one change might disrupt other learning processes. Two major, unanticipated problems arose when school districts tried to implement this new policy. First, there wasn’t a sufficient number of qualified teachers to increase the number of classrooms and decrease class size. Second, schools lacked the facilities to create space for more classrooms. As a result of this policy change, greater numbers of unqualified teachers joined the workforce, especially in areas of greatest need, and the effect was a washout—administrators saw some gains, but they were not able to attribute these gains to the reductions in class size. Also, kids in poorly resourced schools received less support overall. Because of the way education funding works in California and, to be clear, in most of the rest of the United States (e.g., districts with higher property taxes have more financial resources), better resourced schools were more able to take advantage of this initiative without taking funds from other programs. Better resourced schools could afford to pay more teachers and had more facility capacity. They were also more likely to attract qualified teachers from their poorly-resourced neighbors. As you can see from this example, there were multiple causal loops going on in this huge complex system: availability of personnel and space limited change where it was most needed. There were likely many other factors and causal loops that played out in this school reform debacle; I won’t go into them here, but you see what I mean.
Rather than rolling out a massive initiative like this all at once, it makes much more sense to start small and pilot test ideas before taking them to scale. This way, all the parts and processes of the system that need to be adjusted can be identified and planned for. Being able to see the entire system, and how its parts interact in causal loops rather than cause–effect dyads, helps us better understand the overall system’s functioning and the levers of change inherent in the system. Without a systems view, it’s easy to conclude that reducing class size doesn’t work. However, when you need to scale a program that requires a massive increase in your teaching workforce without planning ahead, you end up with more unqualified or under-qualified teachers, which causes its own negative impacts on student learning. The primary difficulty with linear thinking is that while it’s technically accurate to describe what happened and when it happened, this doesn’t help us understand how things happened and why.
The linear thinking cause–effect model of “lower class sizes equals better student outcomes” becomes “lower class sizes do not equal better student outcomes” when it fails. Those of us who have spent many years in education have seen this cycle repeat itself time and again. Districts experiment with bold, new initiatives without careful planning because of pressure to demonstrate rapid results. The systems view helps us see and understand more of the factors that play a role in the outcome. Meanwhile, a huge body of careful scientific research is helping us understand these systems and what works to promote development and learning. Unfortunately, many policymakers are not well-informed yet are subject to political pressure, leading to attempts at quick fixes. One country that is paying attention to our outstanding education research is Finland. Many of the successful initiatives that have made their school system the envy of the world originated in education research conducted the United States, but not well-scaled here at home (Sahlberg, 2015).
All systemic behavior involves reinforcing and balancing processes. How these two types of processes interact results in most of the dynamic behavior of complex systems. Reinforcing systems result from positive feedback, which in this context means information indicating change in one direction produces more change in that direction. This is an example of how successive changes can add to the previous change and keep the change going in the same direction; a vicious cycle, or downward spiral.
A common teacher–student (and parent–child) interaction that illustrates this type of reinforcing system is the coercive cycle (Patterson, 1982), or power struggle. In a hypothetical example, it is usually assumed that the child starts the cycle by engaging in a behavior that the adult deems disruptive in some way. This upsets the adult, who responds with harsh discipline. The child doesn’t understand the adult’s actions and feels hurt and angry, so they lash out in vengeance, triggering the adult to engage in even more coercion, and so forth.
While an adult can usually overpower a child, a child can out-tantrum an adult any day, so these types of interactions are extremely exhausting and harmful to relationships. You can see that while this looks like a simple causal loop, there are multiple dimensions that can influence the process and the outcome, including the child’s and adult’s temperament and personality, the adult’s understanding of the child’s behavior, and the relationship between the parties (e.g., parent–child versus teacher–child).
Young children themselves can even understand these reinforcing processes. Once I was observing two preschool boys playing in the sand, making a sand fort. Juan was building a tower with a pile of sticks. Sam was digging a hole for the moat, but suddenly he looked up and yelled, “Juan, you can’t build it there, someone will fall on it!” Rather than discuss the situation calmly, Sam marched up and kicked the tower, smashing all the sticks to the ground. Juan was furious. “That was my tower and you just ruined it!” He yelled as he got up and smashed the moat with his boot. Soon they were tussling on the ground.
From my many years of working with preschoolers, I knew enough to remain calm. But I quickly walked over to them and stopped the physical fighting. “How do we solve conflicts with our friends?” I asked them both. They knew the answer, and, as they had been instructed to in the past, they went to sit on a bench to discuss the problem using a systems thinking approach. After a few minutes, they came running up to me beaming. “We solved our conflict!” I asked them what they had learned. Sam said, “The tower was getting too close to the slide, and I was worried that someone would smash it, so I smashed it first.”
“Then what happened?” I asked.
“Then I got mad because he smashed my tower,” said Juan. “So I smashed his moat to get back at him.”
“Then what happened?” I asked.
Sam said, “Then I got mad that he smashed my moat and I hit him, and then he hit me back, and then I hit him until you came up and stopped us.”
I said, “What did you notice about this situation?”
“It’s a loop!” They both yelled in unison.
“Can you say more?” I asked.
“We were just going around in circles, back and forth, until you stopped us.”
“What do you think might have happened if I hadn’t stopped you?”
They both started to look at me with big eyes. “It would be bad!” said Juan. Sam nodded grimly in agreement.
“What could you do next time so things wouldn’t get bad?” I asked.
Sam said, “I could have talked to him about how kids on the slide might smash the tower.”
Juan said, “Then I could have moved it to the other side.”
When we were back in the classroom, I invited them to draw a picture of the “loop” and they drew a spiral that started out red on the outside and got darker as it closed into the center of the circle.
In contrast, a virtuous cycle is a balancing process that stabilizes system functioning. These are balancing loops, like the thermostat we visited earlier. The balancing process is always trying to find and maintain equilibrium. While virtuous cycles are ubiquitous, they are often more difficult to see than the reinforcing processes because their function is to keep things as they are, and we are much better at noticing when things change than when they don’t change.
Balancing processes include both negative and positive feedback loops that balance the system. There is a gap, or opening in the loop where feedback provides the change mechanism. For example, you want your house to be 70 degrees or cooler; your air conditioning is off in the morning because your house is only 65 degrees after a cool night; as the day passes, the temperature in your house rises. At some point the feedback to the system (in this case the thermometer reaching 70 degrees) triggers positive feedback, and the air conditioning goes on until the temperature is at or below 70 degrees, then it goes off again.
Applying this understanding to our earlier examples, in an adult–child coercive cycle, you can create an opening, or gap, and insert feedback into the system. This might be taking a break from the interaction, engaging in calming and focusing practices, asking another adult to step in, intentional ignoring, etc. What all these approaches have in common is that they disrupt the causal loop.
In the vignette with Sam and Juan, I (the adult) created the gap between the interaction between Juan and Sam. Conflict is not a bad thing, and children can learn from disagreements, but physical violence is never tolerated. In this case, I intervened and gave the boys feedback by directing them to engage in conflict resolution, which allowed them to recover their friendliness towards one another.
When I saw their drawing I asked, “Why is there a dark circle in the middle?”
Sam said, “That’s because it would have been really bad.”
“But it wasn’t bad, was it? Why not?” I asked.
“Because you stopped us,” said Juan.
I asked them if they could add this part of the story to their drawing. Sam drew a person holding a stop sign. “Is that me?” I asked. They both nodded.
“After I stopped you what happened?” I said. They thought for a few minutes and Juan said. “We’re friends again!” and Sam added, “After we talked about it and I said sorry.”
I asked if they could add this to their drawing, and they created a pink circle around the picture and surround it with little hearts.
What I find intriguing about this incident is that the boys actually recognized that the conflict made them feel closer. There’s plenty of evidence that human bonds do indeed strengthen after conflict and resolution, which is a really good reason to let our children engage in conflicts, safely. It’s important to note that what I did was not meant to control them. I simply created a gap, gently stopped their aggression, and directed them to talk. I made sure they understood that hurting one another was not acceptable, and I invited them to consider what they should do instead. This empowered them to engage in the systems thinking process that helped them resolve their disagreement. They learned and grew closer. See how this is a virtuous cycle?
This is a very simple example of a social interaction system process viewed from a limited frame of time. Some processes are more complex and involve multiple strings of events. Events are things that occur on a day-to-day basis. For example, I become annoyed with Jill’s incessant questioning. Patterns are accumulated memories of events. We begin to notice how events in a series play out in similar ways—patterns. When I am under time pressure, I am more likely to become annoyed by Jill’s questioning. Systemic structures are how parts of the system are organized. So in this case, I might want to modify the structure by preparing enough time for Jill’s questioning so I don’t feel pressed for time. Or, I might give Jill some time alone to discuss the lesson.
In these system processes, it’s the events that are most salient. Frequently, they feel like they stand alone because they involve a heightened emotional response. Also, our language is very event-oriented. While its usually easy to notice an event, it takes insight to recognize underlying patterns and structures. Events in a system are like the tip of the iceberg. The patterns and structures operate unseen below the surface.
This focus on the events only, rather than the entire system, was adaptive to our survival when we needed to respond to immediate danger and when cause and effect was easier to predict. However, these days, this response can backfire. With our adapting twenty-first-century minds, we can see how to redesign systems, and in this way, we have much greater leverage to affect the future in these times of rapid change.
The key to unlocking school transformation is systems thinking, but our old factory system is based in a long-outmoded, mechanistic worldview designed to promote linear causal thinking. A student enters the “factory” in kindergarten and each teacher-worker along the assembly line inputs knowledge, year by year, as if the student were on a conveyor belt. The knowledge is compartmentalized by subject area. “We’re installing the language arts module this morning.” Each learning module is standardized to result in the desired outcome—fact-based knowledge.
The problem is, complex human systems don’t work this way anymore, if they ever really did in the past. In fact, few systems, even those in manufacturing, are really this simple anymore. Fortunately, the understanding of complex dynamical systems is growing, and schools are beginning to teach students these ideas. Indeed, new science standards include systems literacy (National Research Council, 2015). However, the goal is not just to learning about systems but to apply systems thinking to learning itself. All across the world, there is a growing field of work to create more dynamic, systemic, and evolutionary systems of learning.
When we practice systems thinking we discover that change is emergent and that outcomes can arise that are more than their constituent parts. Learning itself can be seen as a system. Take a moment to think about how a baby learns mobility. As a young mother, watching my son go through this process was fascinating. First, he learned to flip himself from his back to his tummy. The day he was able to turn over by himself, he was thrilled! It was like a lightbulb went off as he experienced his body flip over. Then he went through the “cobra” stage, where he could push up his chest with his arms, but his legs were still out behind him. Eventually he got his knees bent and his legs under him, but he could only push himself backward, so he ended up scooting into corners and getting stuck. Finally, he figured out how to coordinate his arms and legs to crawl. At this point, he was unstoppable, and we quickly had to babyproof the house!
Which brings me to another system: the house the baby inhabits. If a baby isn’t given room to move around and explore, the development of their motor skills may be stymied. On the other hand, if the environment isn’t safe for an exploring baby, they can get hurt falling down stairs or sticking fingers into outlets. So, we parents think about the interaction between the baby’s emerging mobile body and the home environment. This is a very simple example of how we can apply systems thinking to supporting child development: recognizing the innate drive to learn and creating the environment and opportunities to do so.
The human body is an emergent system, and human mobility is also a system that emerges from the body. Babies don’t need a factory to help them learn to walk. We don’t have to break down the process for the baby, separating out each step. The baby does this naturally, and eventually the walking-toddler emerges from this dynamic process of experimentation and trial and error, propelled by extraordinary motivation and fierce determination.
To think systemically, we first need to zoom out far enough to see the whole system. Then we need to examine the system from multiple perspectives looking for interdependent leverage points. We need to keep the long-term outcomes in mind and notice where unexpected outcomes materialize. Watch for win–lose thinking and fault-finding, which can stall the process. Tolerating ambiguity, paradox, and chaos will help us look beyond our default perimeters. We can examine flows and accumulations in the system and any time delays that create inertia, or stickiness.
Like Sam and Juan, you can draw maps of systems to see if you can unpack them. When you have a situation that calls for a system analysis, talk it through. What happened? What did you see, hear, and feel? Describe your experience in the fullest detail. Nothing is off limits; it’s all part of the system in some way. The responses to these questions can form the key variables in a causal loop, or loops. Don’t be afraid to make a mess and start over. There’s no “right” answer. There are multiple perspectives. You are hunting for places you can nudge the system to encourage a shift here or there. Often, the process requires a lot of trial and error. Finally, and most importantly, view yourself as part of the system. As my friend and colleague Dr. Alexander Laszlo (2015) says, “Be the system change you wish to see in the world.” In other words, know how you impact the systems you create and inhabit. To do this, we really need some deep self-examination, which is discussed in the next chapter.