People speak so easily these days of systems—systems thinking, systems change, connectivity, networks. Yet in my experience, we really don’t know what these terms mean or their implications for our work. We don’t yet know how to act in or think about this new interconnected world of systems that we’ve created.
Those of us educated in Western culture learned to think and manage a world that was anything but systemic or interconnected. It’s a world of separations and clear boundaries: jobs in boxes, lines delineating relationships, roles and policies describing what each individual does and who we expect them to be. Western culture is very skilled at describing the world by these strange, unnatural separations.
We also have believed that, by using these approaches, we could control everything. From manipulating the weather, to stopping aging and death, we hope that science will eventually give us complete power over life. At the organizational level, we strive for a similar level of control. We want to be able to make people, communities, and entire organizations act according to our plans and directives. We want strong, take-charge leaders who know exactly what’s going on, have all the answers, and inspire us with their vision.
By now, most of us have been in organizations and lives that have revealed to us the foolishness of these assumptions. No matter how well we plan, how carefully we analyze a situation, or how strong a leader we find, we don’t succeed nearly as often as we need to. We put more and more effort into planning and leadership approaches that seem only to lead us ever farther away from our goals and aspirations. We have suffered from the unending fads that, like great tidal waves, crash down on our schools, creating more destruction than growth. As the most recent wave recedes, we look over our schools and see debris scattered everywhere—relationships torn apart, survivors struggling to come up for air, ideas and plans tossed askew.
In corporations, fads have failed in exactly the same manner, creating great wreckage. Corporations are no better than any other sector at knowing how to create needed changes, even though school leaders still look to them for the next new idea. It usually shocks those in education to hear that not only schools are failing miserably, but so is every major institutional form, whether public or private, for profit or for public benefit. Corporate CEOs report a startling record of failures of their major change initiatives—up to 75 percent. How many in education would garner support for a project that was successful only 25 percent of the time?
Nothing today is simple or slow. This means we can’t make sense of the world using the analytical processes we were taught or understand the complexity of modern systems by reductionism. In a complex system, it is impossible to find simple causes that explain our problems or to know who to blame. A messy tangle of relationships is responsible for these unending crises. We need a different way to understand and work in this new world of continuous change and intimately connected systems that reach around the globe.
Again, we turn to life to learn how complex systems change, flex, and grow. For four to five billion years, life has been developing its infinite variety, surprising scientists by showing up in the coldest and hottest habitats, places where science thought no life could ever exist. Life is a rich source of ideas and wisdom for how we can approach the challenge of creating schools that have the capacity to change successfully.
A primary lesson of life is that nothing living lives alone. Life always and only organizes as systems of interdependency. Until the advent of Western ideas in the seventeenth century, most humans and spiritual traditions described life in terms of this interdependency and connectedness. But the machine imagery that underpins modern society dismisses this. It replaces dense webs of connections with predesigned charts and plans that describe who is connected to whom. There’s no recognition that life knows how to organize itself. We replaced life’s capacity for self-organization with the belief that without human organizing skills, nothing gets done. If we don’t take control, there is only chaos. We don’t seem to notice how our attempts to impose order create just the opposite effect, more disorder.
By now, we’ve lost sight of the many processes by which life gives birth to order. In our blindness, we struggle with processes that fail to work with life, that in fact are antithetical to how life works. The result is the sorry chronicle of failure at organizational change. It is time to wake up to the fact that we live in an interconnected world, embedded in a fabric of relationships that requires us to pay attention to the dynamics of systems, not to isolated individuals or events.
I’d like to share a few of the dynamics that operate in every living system, and then describe ways to work with them in organizational change efforts.
A Living System Forms from Shared Interests
Although systems are naturally occurring, they do not form at random. A living system is created as individuals notice they have shared interests. Individuals realize that they have neighbors and that they would do better to figure out how to live together than to try and destroy each other. The recognition that individuals need each other lies at the heart of every system. From that realization, individuals reach out, and seemingly divergent self-interests develop into a system of interdependency. Thus, all systems form through collaboration, from the recognition that we need another in order to survive.
We humans have a great need for relationships and meaningful lives. We seek to connect with those whose self-interest seems to include or impact our own interests. We affiliate with those who share a similar sense of what is important. When you apply this dynamic to public education, it instantly reveals a major dilemma. Is a school system really a system? Human systems never form just as a result of geography, so it isn’t district lines drawn on paper that create a school system. Systems take form because people realize that in order to achieve what is important to them, they must extend themselves and work with others.
How many members of a geographically determined school district share the same beliefs about the purpose of education? Most districts contain a wide spectrum of beliefs about the role of education. There are those who believe that education should support the talented elite, which includes their child. Those who view education as the foundation of a pluralistic society where education should open doors for all. Those who believe in a rich life of the mind. Those who want their children trained for immediate employment. Those who want their children taught only the values of their parents or church.
The startling conclusion is that most school systems aren’t systems. They are only boundary lines drawn by somebody, somewhere. They are not systems because they do not arise from a core of shared beliefs about the purpose of public education. In the absence of shared beliefs and desires, people are not motivated to seek out one another and develop relationships. Instead, they inhabit the same organizational and community space without weaving together mutually sustaining relationships. They coexist by defining clear boundaries, creating respectful and disrespectful distances, developing self-protective behaviors, and using power politics to get what they want.
Yet everyone who participates in a school district is a living being, responding to the same dynamics that characterize all other life. Within the artificial boundary lines and well-defended territories, people are self-organizing into real systems, reaching out to network with those who share similar beliefs or aspirations. (This dynamic is clearly evident in the charter school movement.) Many small systems are created within the artificial system of a district. It is these real systems that become clearly visible when we try to change the artificial ones. People often startle us with the ferocity with which they confront and impede our efforts. But it is these real systems we must work with if we want to effect change.
All Change Results from a Change in Meaning
People, like all forms of life, only change when something so disturbs them that they are forced to let go of their present beliefs. Nothing changes until we interpret things differently. Change occurs only when we let go of our certainty, our current views, and develop a new understanding of what’s going on.
See if the following process of change—how life changes—feels accurate to you. Someone in the school or community get upset by something. He or she communicates their upset, and it circulates through the network. Once inside the web of relationships, a small disturbance grows and morphs as it is passes from person to person. It gets quite distorted from the original information, but, as it circulates, it grows in meaning. Finally, the whole system sits up and takes notice.
We’ve all had this experience, probably many times. A casual or offhand comment tossed out in a meeting gets picked up by someone in the organization, and suddenly we’re in the midst of a firestorm of opinions, emotions, and rumors. Or something distressing happens in a school, such as a violent incident, and everyone realizes that things are not as they seemed.
At this point, when the disturbance is at its greatest, change is at hand. The system has been knocked completely off-balance; it can’t make sense of the information by relying on past practice or beliefs. The system is forced to abandon its current construct of the world. It unwillingly plunges into confusion and uncertainty. But now that it has fallen apart, real change is possible. It will change because it sees the world differently. It will reorganize using new interpretations, new meaning. For change to occur, there must be a change in meaning.
Every Living System Is Free to Choose Whether It Changes
We never succeed in directing or telling people how they must change. We don’t succeed by handing them a plan, or pestering them with our interpretations, or relentlessly pressing forward with our agenda, believing that volume and intensity will convince them to see it our way. You can scream and holler as much as you want, but if people don’t regard what you’re saying as important, they’ll just ignore you and go on with their own life. (In this way, all people behave like teenagers.)
It is impossible to impose anything on people. We must participate in anything that affects us. We can’t act on behalf of anyone, we can’t figure out what’s best for somebody else. If leaders or task forces refuse to believe this and go ahead and make plans for us, we don’t sit by passively and do what we’re told. We still get involved, but from the sidelines, where we’ve been told to sit and wait. We get involved by ignoring, resisting, or sabotaging all plans and directives that are imposed on us.
One school superintendent reported wryly how he learned that his committee approach to curriculum development wasn’t working. Every summer, he would appoint a group of four or five teachers from each discipline to develop materials for the coming year. He was pleased with their products and often commented on their creativity. Sometime during the late autumn, as the superintendent made site visits, he would ask teachers how they liked the new materials. It took him too many years, he said, to realize that the only teachers using the materials were those members of the committee that had created them.
This is not an unusual experience for any of us. How many strategic plans, policy manuals, and curriculum materials collect dust on our shelves because we were not involved in their creation? Confronted by so much evidence, we could have learned long ago that people must always participate in the development of those things which affect them.
Systems Contain Their Own Solutions
Living systems contain their own solutions. Somewhere in the system are people already practicing a solution that others think is impossible. Or they possess information that could help many others. Or, they defy stereotypes and have the very capabilities we need.
To find these solutions, the system needs to connect to more of itself. This means meeting with those we’ve excluded or avoided, those we never imagined could share similar interests. Deep inside a school, we often forget how many others—parents, community employers, public officials—care about what’s going on in the classroom. When we invite these people in from the periphery, when we find ways to sit and listen to them, it is a wonderful surprise to discover our connections. We realize that we have common aspirations for our children, that we share many things in common despite our many differences.
It is crucial to remember that, in organizations, we are working with webs of relationships. As webs, there is a lot to be learned about organizational change from contemplating spider webs. Most of us have had the experience of touching a spider web, feeling its resiliency, noticing how slight pressure in one area jiggles the entire web. If a web breaks and needs repair, the spider doesn’t cut out a piece, terminate it, or tear the entire web apart and reorganize it. She reweaves it, using the silken relationships that are already there, creating stronger connections across the weakened spaces.
At this time in our history, we are in great need of processes that can help us weave ourselves back together. We’ve lost confidence in our great human capabilities, partly because mechanistic organizational processes have separated and divided us, and made us fearful and distrusting of one another. We need processes to help us reweave connections, to discover shared interests, to listen to one another’s stories and dreams. We need processes that take advantage of our natural ability to network, to communicate when something is meaningful to us. We need processes that invite us to participate, that honor our creativity and commitment to the organization.
Life’s Dynamics for Self-organization and Change
– A living system forms from shared interests.
– All change results from a change in meaning.
– Every living system is free to choose whether it changes.
– Systems contain their own solutions.
If our intent is to help a school system change, we need to take these four dynamics seriously. Most change efforts (in all types of organizations) ignore every one of them. The result is not only failure to change but exhaustion and cynicism. How much time and resources have been wasted trying to force schools and people to change according to an imposed plan and process.
I’d like to describe how working with these dynamics can dramatically change our approaches and our success with organizational change.
Discover What’s Meaningful
Both individual and organizational change start from the same need: the need to discover what’s meaningful. People change only if they believe that a new insight, a new idea, or a new form is important to them. If it is a larger unit, such as a school or community, the search for new meaning must occur as a collective activity. People need to discover that there is sufficient shared interest among the community, shared meaning strong enough to bring people together and to hold them together as they do the work.
Discover One Another
Discovering shared interests, even small ones, changes people’s relationships for the better. If we recognize a shared sense of injustice or a shared dream, magical things happen to our relationships; we open to each other as colleagues. Past hurts and negative histories get left behind. People step forward to work together. We don’t hang back; we don’t withdraw; we don’t wait to be enticed. We seek each other out, eager to discover others who might help. The call of meaning, the importance of the problem, sounds louder than past grievances or our fears that we don’t know how to have an impact. If we can discover something important to work on together, we figure out how to do the work, together.
I’ve worked with a number of faculties torn apart by the impact of technology. The more technologically eager faculty accuse the reticent ones of being out-of-date and resistant to change—they berate their colleagues for not climbing on the technology bandwagon. I always suggest that a different conversation is needed. What if we stop assuming that technology’s value to a teacher is self-evident? What if we stop assuming that anybody who doesn’t adopt new technology is an antiquated Luddite whose only interest is to stop the march of progress? If we give up those assumptions, we can begin a different conversation, one that helps us connect to one another and learn more about what we each find meaningful in our profession. We need to step back from the technology issue and ask one another what called us into teaching. We listen to the aspirations that are voiced. And what we always hear is that most of us went into teaching for noble purposes—we wanted to make a difference in the lives of young people; we were excited to help kids learn.
If we have this conversation first, we discover one another as colleagues. We realize we want very similar things. We realize that the person we had judged as dead on the job still carries a passion for learning. Or that the teacher who belittles students still cares about them. Now we can talk about technology. How might computers assist colleagues to become more effective at their craft? How might technology make it easier to do the work they have defined as meaningful? If those links are made, then colleagues log on to e-mail and use the computers sitting on their desks to enhance student learning. And if they don’t, at least we know them now as colleagues, not problems.
This process of inquiring together about the meaning of our work also helps us stop the labeling behavior that is far too prevalent these days. We are quick to assign colleagues and students to a typology or a syndrome, and then dismiss them, as if this tells us enough about them. There have been more than enough studies in education that prove how teacher perceptions influence student behaviors. It would be good for us to learn from these, and free ourselves from all this labeling that creates such negative consequences.
Use the Network’s Communication Capacity
Living networks display incredible communicating power when information is meaningful to them. Meaningful information lights up a network and moves through it like a windswept brush fire. Meaningless information, in contrast, smolders at the gates until somebody dumps cold water on it. The capacity of a network to communicate with itself is truly awe-inspiring; its transmission capability far surpasses any other mode of communication. But a living network will only transmit what it decides is meaningful. I have watched information move instantaneously across great distances in a global company; I have watched information in four-color graphics die before it ever came off the printer. To use a network’s communication capacity, we must notice that its transmission power is directly linked to the meaningfulness of the information.
Meaning behaves like energy. It doesn’t behave in mechanistic ways. Therefore, we can abandon many of our mechanistic assumptions about what is required for organizational change. We don’t have to achieve “critical mass”; we don’t need programs that “roll out” (or over) the entire organization; we don’t need to train every individual or part; we can stop obsessing if we don’t get the support of the top of the organization. Instead, we can work locally, finding the ideas and processes that are meaningful in one area of the system. If we succeed in generating energy in one area, we can watch how our other networks choose to notice what we’re doing. Who takes notice? Where have our ideas traveled in the organizational web? If we ask these questions, we learn who might be ready to take up this work next. My colleague Myron Rogers describes this approach to organizational change as “Start anywhere and follow it everywhere.”
Involve Everybody Who Cares
For too many years, I’ve learned the hard way that participation is the only change process. Any time I’ve used only a small group, nothing has worked well. As organizational change facilitators and leaders, we must invite in all those who will be affected by the change. Those whom we fail to invite into the change process are the very people who will poison our process. But broad-based participation is not just a strategy to avoid resistance or to find supporters. The simple fact is that we can’t design anything that works without the involvement of all those it affects. None of us is smart enough these days to know what will work for others. We can’t see what’s meaningful to them, and we’re ignorant about their work situation. The complexity of systems requires that we engage everybody just so we can harvest the intelligence that exists throughout the organization.
There is a great deal of evidence for how well whole systems change processes work. What is lacking are not case examples or processes but the commitment to involve everybody. We keep hoping we don’t need to—that if we design a good plan, people will accept it on its merits. We haven’t yet absorbed the simple truth that we can’t force anybody to change. We can only involve them in the change process from the beginning and see what’s possible. If change becomes meaningful to them, they will change. If we want their support, we must welcome them as cocreators.
Learn as You Go
Shifting our approaches to organizational change, so that we are working with life’s change dynamics, is a gradual process that requires patience, generosity, and time. No one is able to act in new ways just because they decide to. We all get yanked back to old ways of doing things, especially when we feel tense or confused. All groups need to keep alert to their process, their learnings, and how the change effort is unfolding and emerging. This watchfulness is accomplished simply by developing a set of questions that the group commits to asking regularly, and with discipline. Here are some examples of the types of questions that work, but it’s important to create your own and then hold yourself responsible for asking them frequently:
Key Questions to Keep Asking
– Who’s missing? Who else needs to do this work?
– Is the meaning of this work still clear? Is it changing?
– Are we becoming more truthful with each other?
– Is information becoming more open and easier to access?
– Where are we using imposition? Participation?
– What are we learning about partnering with confusion and chaos?
I have to admit that the greatest challenge for me and those I work with lies not in adopting new methods but in learning to live in this process world. It’s a completely new way to be, unlike anything I was taught. I’m learning to participate with things as they unfold, to expect to be surprised, to enjoy the mystery of it, and to surrender to what I don’t know and can never know. These were difficult lessons to learn. I was well trained to create things—plans, policies, events, programs. I invested more than half my life in trying to make the world conform to what I thought was best. It hasn’t been easy to give up the role of master creator and move into the dance of life.
But I’ve gradually learned there is no alternative. As our dance partner, life insists that we put ourselves in motion, that we learn to live with instability, chaos, change, and surprise. We can continue to stand immobilized on the shoreline, trying to protect ourselves from life’s insistent storms, or we can begin moving. We can watch our plans be washed away, or we can discover something new.
Being present for what’s happening in the moment doesn’t mean that we act without intention or flow directionless through life without a plan. But in an unpredictable world, we would do better to look at plans and measures as processes that enable a group to discover shared interests, to clarify its intent and strengthen its connections to new people and new information. We need less reverence for the plan as an object and much more attention to the processes we use for planning and measuring. It is attention to the process, more than the product, that enables us to weave an organization as flexible and resilient as a spider’s web.
As we learn to live and work in this process world, we are rewarded with other changes in our behavior. We become gentler people. We become more curious about differences, more respectful of one another, more open to life’s surprises. Although life’s dance can look chaotic from the outside, difficult to learn and impossible to master, our newfound gentleness speaks to a different learning. Life is a good partner. Its demands are not unreasonable. A great capacity for change lives in everyone of us.