Interview: Systems change network builders

Benjamin Taylor

Benjamin has 20 years experience at public service transformation in the UK. As Chief Executive of the Public Service Transformation Academy, a not-for-profit social enterprise awarded the Cabinet Office Commissioning Academy, he is a leading thinker on system leadership, service design and transformation. He is an accredited power+systems trainer, a visiting lecturer in applied systems thinking at Cass Business School, City University, and has lectured at Nottingham Business School and Oxford Said/HEC Paris.

Some things I’ve learnt:

• Learn the difference between complexity and complicated, technical challenges.
• Dealing with complexity requires collaboration. To succeed co-design, enlist discretionary effort, be honest, accept you don’t have all the answers.
• Community is the antidote to uncertainty.
• To get more power, you have to give up control.
• Take time to ‘see’ the system. Think about illuminating the rules of the game, the effort and learning it takes to stay dysfunctional, the power of community.
• Listen out loud, ask good questions, start from strengths.
• Ask: Who do we want to be? What could I do to create a shared view across the whole system for the people in it? What thoughts or questions does this raise for me?
• Confront people with their gifts.
• Think massive, start very small. Help people to explore and experience change and shape it, within limits.
• Make your best prediction about how your changes will land. Take responsibility for all the outcomes, the actual experience of all the people in your organisation and all the people in your community, however great or sh*t it is. And as it turns out different from your prediction (because it will), think about why that is. Then you’ll be working in learning world too.
• Experimentation is the antidote to certainty, confront people with reality.
• Real change is dirty work. Don’t fool yourself you’ve learned anything until you have tested it in the real world. And even in the ‘real world’, don’t think you are learning if you’re not predicting and reflecting. When we take responsibility for learning about outcomes, we will get there

Some of the challenges:

I see the locus of challenges within our communities of systems practice, rather than externally:

• There are a growing number of systems ‘gurus’ who in my view are all about creating ownership to develop power. This is well covered by the title of a blog piece Richard Veryard wrote on a related subject: ‘Wrecking synergy to stake out territory’. (could you share the link, I cant seem to find this)
• There are ‘Systems Curmudgeons’, the people who stand on their expertise and attack those who ‘get it wrong’.
• And early-stage systems enthusiasts who create new movements that follow a ‘hype cycle’ which ends in failure, that is completely predictable to those who know the history.
• Funding can be a problem too – funding initiatives that take systems thinking out of managing business risk. Doing so makes programmes less organic, less well-adapted, and less effective.
• I think that the only way to counteract all of this is to patiently and consistently build network links, explain weaknesses and try to come up with an overarching narrative that talks about what each model explains, explains what they don’t explain, and explains why.

Systems of interest

I work on helping public services in the UK (and Australia) to transform themselves. More broadly, helping to change people's experiences of organisations, as employees and as customers/citizens. And, wider still, helping people to see systems and change them.

My systems change network  

I am a systems change network enthusiast – more of a curator and a learner/sharer than a joiner. I work at the overlap of theory and practical organisational change. Some of the networks I’ve been involved in:

• SCiO – Systems and Cybernetics in Organisations – the best learning group I've experienced. It includes Practitioner development days and Peer speaker days with about 250 people. This is cheap and accessible.
• The London design and systems thinking meetup group (200+ folk)
• On LinkedIn, Systems Thinking Network and on Facebook, The Ecology of Systems Thinking.
• The ISSS and UKSS (International and UK Systems Societies). I am a visiting lecturer on the very interesting Cass Business School undergraduate Applied Systems Thinking course.
• The Public Service Transformation Academy, a not-for-profit social enterprise I founded, which supports capacity and capability building for public service leaders, and the Cabinet Office Commissioning Academy, which we run. The PSTA will publish its first annual 'State of Transformation' report on public service transformation in April next year - collaborators and sponsors are very welcome!
• Model Report is list I curate as a way of organising articles and links on systems thinking.
• RedQuadrant is a network consultancy which very much welcomes applied systems thinking. We work with about a hundred associate consultants a year from a pool of over a thousand.

My inspiration

• Barry Oshry's work –Power and Systems and The Systems Letter. Watch Barry at SCiO and PwC.
• Navigating Complexity, Arthur Battram
• Viable System Model, Stafford Beer – start with the explainers on SCiO then go on Beer, and try Patrick Hoverstadt's Fractal Organisations. Patrick’s Patterns of Strategy, co-authored with Lucy Loh, should transform the field of strategy and is enormously valuable in many contexts. 
• For a 'the process as a system', try Joiner's Fourth Generation Management, Scholtes' Leader's Handbook and Team Handbook, for public services try Richard Selwyn's free Outcomes and Efficiency, dip a careful toe into I Want You to Cheat and other works by John Seddon and from the same stable, but stepping into ‘the community as a resource’ or strengths-based approaches, try Richard Davis' Responsibility and Public Services. 
• For a beautiful little summary that goes way beyond its title, look for Total Quality Management by Develin.
• The Little Book of Beyond Budgeting by Steve Morlidge is another tiny read that sneaks systems thinking in by the back door and makes total sense, and Beat the Cuts by Rob Worth brings us back around to a Deming-esque view of public service processes (not necessarily systems – but critical to know).
• Try anything from Peter Block, especially Flawless Consulting and his work on Abundant Community. Anything from Marv Weisbord, particularly the short Tools to Match Our Values, and some Ed Schein... and I could go on! Adaptive Leadership by Heifetz and Lipsky is valuable too, as is the literature on 'wicked problems' and related concepts. 
• I think there's little more powerful in organisational life than combining the Viable Systems Model with Elliot Jacques' Organisational thinking (updated, and with valuable additions, not all of which I agree with - in the brilliant but very academic Systems Leadership Theory by Macdonald et al). Luc Hoeboeke's Making Work Systems Better is perhaps the only work I know that combines them, as I do in my work.
• Two fairly recent additions are Ed Straw's video Stand & Deliver: How consultancy skills and systems thinking can make government work
• And I haven't even mentioned soft systems method, Nora Bateson's work… or the book I co-authored (not systems thinking in a meaningful way, but opening up thinking) - The 99 Essential Business Questions.

As a systems network builder, how do you fund yourself?

All pro bono! I can't help myself – I just find myself doing it – and I've never received a penny (well, about £150 per 'visiting lecture' – but that means forgoing a bit more income for a consulting day). We don't even pay expenses at SCiO. However, it shades right across my day job(s) at RedQuadrant and the PSTA, so I support myself somehow. One day I would like to make all my living in systems-related work, (though isn't every type of work systems-related?), and I certainly get amazing value from the networks I am in. 

Interview: Systems change network builders

Lucho Osorio-Cortes

A markets systems specialist at the BEAM Exchange and Practical Action Consulting. He has more than 15 years’ experience in international development and specialises in the facilitation of market systems development and organisational learning. Lucho coordinates The Market Facilitation Initiative (MaFI), a working group of the SEEP Network helping practitioners to become more effective facilitators of inclusive market development programs.

Some things I’ve learnt:

• The people who live and breathe in the system are those who have to come up with the solutions to change it. Inputs from external experts are useful but they have to make sense to the people in the system.
• The system, not the poor, must be the unit of intervention if we want sustainable impact at scale.
• You have to listen to the system. Truly listen; without confirmation biases, without ego, without expectations, without intention, listen quietly and openly.
• Market engagement is empowering in itself. We do not always need to empower ‘poor’ people before they are ‘ready’ to engage with other market actors.
• Never trust actors who always say yes and never question you as a facilitator.
• Never underestimate the transformational power of seemingly irrelevant actors. Let them ‘do their thing’ and pay attention to the reactions of the system.
• Every event in the system has the potential to change it, opening new, sometimes unexpected, entry points and closing entry points that we thought were open. Flow with the energy and rhythms of the system.
• Scaling up is a fractal process. The whole system has to resonate with the solutions implemented in a fragment of it. The more the fragment has the properties of the wider system, the easier the solutions from the fragment will be accepted and adopted by the broader system.
• Facilitation is not always equivalent to ‘light touch’. Facilitation is the creation of appropriate conditions for the market actors to change their system in ways that make sense to them, at their own rhythms and maximizing their own resources.  Sometimes intense and long-term investments have to be made to get the system moving.
• Market systems can deliver sustainable impact at scale if three processes take place at the same time: empowerment for engagement, interaction for transformation and communication for uptake.
• We see what we measure; we measure what we value.
• Do your homework to avoid obvious mistakes but then jump in the water and learn as you swim.

Some of the challenges:

• Firstly, in my view there is a huge disconnect between theory and practice.

Theorists often say, ‘we get it’, but they don’t. What they don’t get is that the deeper you get into it, the more counter intuitive this work is. At the same time practitioners in the field will say ‘I have practical experience, I get systems’ and this is dangerous too. The two groups could learn a lot from each other.

• Secondly, people in development are often very keen on the ‘hard’ aspects of systems change; economics, viability, measurement and evaluation, program design.

Bureaucrats can digest this. But when you look at what makes or breaks a project, so often it’s the skill of facilitators. How they see the world and interact with it (e.g. the market actors and the forces that influence their behavior).   

Facilitating systemic change requires skills and attitudes that bureaucrats can’t grasp and or measure easily with their current paradigms and practices. This makes it difficult for donors and other development agencies to invest because they can’t see the importance of the human element and the need to enable flexibility, uncertainty, trial-error-learning, and adaptability in the development process.

• Thirdly, the discourse of value for money dominates donors’ mindsets and is dangerously permeating the perceptions of the public.

But no functional system can be resilient without what I would call “exploratory inefficiency”. There is a risk that if we don’t produce evidence of the effectiveness of the market development approach the fad will go and donors will look elsewhere. But there is a paradox: under the traditional donor-implementer paradigm, the approach finds it very hard to deliver on its promise of sustainable impacts at scale and, therefore, to produce evidence of its success.

As a result of all this, MaFI is currently in the process of evolution from a general focus on market systems development to one on that explores the cognitive aspects of facilitation of market systems development programs. Questions like - how do successful facilitators behave? How do they think? What paradigms and tools they use? How do they identify key stakeholders and engage with them?

Systems of interest

I work on market systems and peer-learning networks in Latin America, South Asia and Eastern Africa. Most of my work is designed to help practitioners gain a better understanding of how to use a systems lens in their efforts to make markets more inclusive, productive and efficient. 

If these practitioners are more effective at facilitating (enabling, catalysing) structural changes in market systems, more people will get out, and stay out of poverty for longer periods of time. This will happen with less effort, less cost and less friction, compared to traditional development approaches that focus on the poor and deliver solutions devised by experts from outside of the system.

My systems change network

The building blocks and principles that make up the field of market systems development have been around for many years, but the communities of practitioners who see themselves as part of this field started to form during the 2000s.  There are many platforms where practitioners connect. I have been involved or participated in the creation of:

• The SEEP Network
• The BEAM Exchange
• The Latin American Network for Market Systems Development
• The Academy of Professional Dialogue

For example, I helped to create MaFI, which aims to close this gap in knowledge by advancing practical principles and tools that assist practitioners working in pro-poor market development to move from market assessments and program design to implementation.

During my time as the coordinator of MaFI (since 2008), the group has produced learning products based on MaFI's online discussions, webinars, and in-person meetings, and also seeks to influence the debate about rules and principles of international aid that hamper inclusive market development.

The value of the market systems development field is relatively big and growing. I would guess that, currently, there are around 20-30 market systems programs running, worth around $3-10 million each. Some people may argue that there are more market systems development programs but I have seen many of them that fail to use the principles of the approach properly. When it comes to the implementation of these programs, the devil is in the detail. For example, how you select and train your staff, how you build a culture that enables open sharing of mistakes and learning, how to change tactics and even strategy quickly, how to use less program money and more systemic resources, how to pay attention to early indicators of change that give you clues about the future behavior of the system; how to select, engage and communicate with market actors, how to help them experiment with new ideas, etc.  

My inspiration

• Quantum physics (the duality of nature -e.g. light- and the need to embrace probability and uncertainty). The Tao of Physics.
• Theory of relativity (the importance of the different perspectives of the observers, the connection between matter and energy – the equivalence of seemingly different entities if we look deep enough).
• History (the non-linearity of cause-effect in society, the importance of small events, the Butterfly Effect in society, the importance of institutions, rules and beliefs, nothing is sacred or fixed -just human constructs that we decide to respect or idealize, the failed war against drugs). Why Nations Fail.
• Behavioural studies from psychology, management and economics. Predictably Irrational, Dialogue and the Art of thinking together.
• Macro-economics (e.g. interest rates and their effects on the economy, connectedness and interdependency in international trade, Ricardo’s ideas about specialisation and trade, effects on taxation in productivity).  The Art of War and the Tao Te Ching.
• A few authors I admire: Bertalanffy, Einstein, F. Capra, David Bohm, Heisenberg, William Isaacs.

As a systems network builder, how do you fund yourself?

I do most of the network building out of pleasure. I love seeing connections happen. I fund this with my own resources and through specific consultancy projects.

My next questions

I am currently exploring how market systems development can contribute to the field of impact investment. Donor-funded programs introduce cultures, procedures and incentives into the organisations working to transform market systems that clash with a more organic, bottom-up, exploratory, endogenous approach. I think impact investment has the potential to do this if companies of different sizes and scopes have the right contextual (systemic) conditions to drive change that makes business sense while adding social and environmental value.