Systems Problems vs Community Struggles - ABCD and Systems Thinking

This post will continue to attempt to understand differences between Systems Thinking and Asset Based Community Development while maintaining an appreciation that both have a desire to attain similar beneficial outcomes in mind, that both have their limitations, and that perhaps each can help the other in addressing those limitations. This is still at the explore and experiment stage.

In a system, all the elements, factors, or components making up that system are related to each other and, more importantly, to the purpose or function of that system. A system of civic governance consists of conjoined systems, related by the intended design of institutional resources, and of community assets. These cannot only have different purposes or functions, but they can also be constituted structurally different, complicated for a government institution, and complex for a community, in their means of addressing such purposes. 

First, though, I have an issue with the way the term ”scale” in Mick Ward’s (introduced in the last post) and other ABCD articles is portrayed,  but with the over-popularization of the term muddying the definition. The blog post, ABCD, and Scaling Carrying Capacity pt 2 proposed three types of applied or actualized scale - inherent, induced, and imposed to suggest a common basis for usage.

Proliferate is to my mind actually closer to what people often mean when they refer to ”scaling up” or ”industrialized”. Scaling in a mathematical sense involves some inherent relationship between relevant factors, not merely an exponential increase in arbitrary marketing metrics. Scaling then is best represented by inherent scaling or how Professor Geoffrey West uses it in comparing the infrastructure of cities or the metabolism of animals.

Scaling can be used by entities such as nonprofits, who seek to induce scale to achieve more bang for the budgeted buck, if they recognize that an increase in one aspect, say the number of malaria nets, may be able to be implemented with a relatively smaller increase or even decrease in another related aspect, say costs. However, they need to be wary, and this is especially applicable to situations of imposed scaling, where the increase or enhancement in one aspect of the system diminishes not only another aspect of that system but the entire system itself. 

When one system, a government institution, imposes for their own purposes, an external solution on another system, a community, to scale some aspect, the positive feedback in one area can create negative feedback in others, including components of community self-organization, self-governance, and self-management. It very often detrimental impacts the entire complex community system which is made apparent in the continuing and increasing difficulties assailing the members of that community and a worsening inability to address those difficulties.

ABCD does scale, simply at an induced, linear, one-to-one ratio, necessary to maintain effectiveness. While any externally imposed efficiency by institutions can be seen as detrimental, my question or concern is whether ABCD can be expanded in such a manner beyond a certain limit, say set by Dunbar’s number? Does ABCD begin to naturally scale sub-linearly when extended beyond a certain limit diminishing impact? If so, are there means to extend that limit systemically? One possible means being through Elinor Ostrom’s Institutional Analysis and Development Framework? ABCD is seen by NCP as a systemic means of support for Ostrom’s Commons.

When endeavoring to bridge Systems Thinking with Asset Based Community Development language, terms and words can become a hindrance. Specific terms may have operational definitions within a particular discipline that can be different from vernacular usage or at least more restricted, not to mention across disciplines. Precision in the application or at least agreed upon usage is important when it is necessary to differentiate to understand the unique aspects of each area or domain. One set of such words that will be used here for both domains includes - problems, difficulties, struggles, situations, and messes.

A problem is a matter or situation that is seen as unwelcome or harmful that needs to be dealt with and overcome. This determination is meant to be objective. A "difficulty" is "a trouble" for someone or a strain on them, subjectively requiring a struggle, which in some instances may be a better word choice than difficulty. A doctor has a medical problem when trying to determine what is wrong with a patient but the patient has difficulty with their health with which they are struggling. Systems thinking deals with problems and messes. ABCD deals with difficulties and struggles.

Managers often deal with other people’s problems either as groups and classes of people or with some professions as individuals.  A doctor might have to deal with numerous medical problems in a community setting, or what Russell Ackoff called “Messes” when applied to management, making the situation increasingly complex and addressing the struggles of others all the harder. Change can occur over time in the combination of the mix of problems that a manager needs to deal with but for a particular person directly impacted the difficulty remains. Managers may take on a ”problem with problems” strategy thrown at them in bunches or as messes using metrics in achieving objectives rather than focusing on people’s specific difficulties.

This managerial approach can work to an extent with business or government institutions because the solutions devised are ”good enough” for a wide swath of customers or clients. Enough to hold on to market share or to be reelected. It is not however at the level of specific solutions or what in Disruptive Innovation is referred to as Job-To-Be-Done needed by a specific person or group. A specified creative solution though can often be fully utilized by many people because the commonality is based on common needs and not market-determined products or services.

People may find themselves to be dealing with their own “personal problems” as self-diminishing difficulties, not only is the difficulty persistent but its lack of resolution diminishes over time one’s ability to address it. Furthermore, difficulties like problems come in intertwined bunches but their cumulative effect is detrimental to the person (subject), not merely the situation. 

ABCD focuses on people inspiring them to focus on their strengths collectively.  This “what’s strong, not wrong” approach works both collectively and individually. For both those for whom it works individually and for communities it can be seen as an enhancement of Carrying Capacity. Both Cormac Russell and I have written about Carrying Capacity extending it to human communities. Carrying Capacity normally refers to populations, usually animal populations but each individual in that population contributes. Upon further reflection though, I believe Carrying Capacity needs to be better related and differentiated from Social Capital than I have done in the past. 

Carrying capacity is systemic, the aggregated ability to gather food, build shelter, or protect family by members of a population within an environment. The Carrying Capacity for a population is the summation of individual members but unlike many animal populations, humans in a community can contribute to Carrying Capacity to a far greater extent individually to other members of the community.

The community as a whole has another means of extending overall Carrying Capacity or what could be considered a derivative and that is leveraging the collective Social Capital of its members. Humans can get other humans (and domesticated animals) to do things for them. Social Capital can leverage Carrying Capacity but to my mind is also likely based on Carrying Capacity in some manner so is there an overall limit?

This becomes more relevant if two or more communities are competing in the same civic realm for resources, especially if one is what has been termed a Clique Community and the other is a Colony Community but it is often not limited to only these two. Usually, within a particular civic space in this instance of the jurisdiction of a Local Government Authority in Leeds, there is a community laying, sometimes figuratively, sometimes literally, between the two.

Is it possible to become completely dependent upon systems of Social Capital and lose connection with any sense of Community-based Carrying Capacity, as might happen with a clique community? Is it possible for a colony community to transition from a restricted Carrying Capacity, due to imposed marginalization, to generate sufficient Social Capital leveraging to make changes to an institutional system outside of the community? As a colony community might perhaps be persuaded to attempt.

Systems thinking should still though be able to help the manager or doctor or caseworker deal with problems and messes so that they are better suited to help people deal with their own difficulties and struggles. Systems Thinking only approaches but do not, however, achieve the direct implementation of a solution or mitigation of a specific difficulty faced by a specific person or group of persons. It is the Knowing-Doing Gap that has been discussed before. Difficulties do get addressed all the time but it’s usually not Systems Thinking taking the final step. That invariably requires a different skillset be it a medical professional or somebody delivering hot meals to the housebound. How the community self-organizes around that and moves to self-determination is where ABCD comes in recognizing that self here is not personal but the community as a whole. 

One strategy with the appearance of great potential is “Strategic Doing” but that will have to wait for further examination. For now, it is still necessary to find a means of creating a deeper link between Systems Thinking and ABCD. One might be suggested from the thoughts of two persons, Cormac Russell of Nurture Development and John Atkinson of Heart of the Art. Together, they challenge us to lead community as a living system in a manner that attains empathy, not merely sympathy. Cormac provides a model, an inspirational model that practically may never be achieved but nevertheless should still be continuously strived towards.

“Imagine a world where institutions did more to support interdependence at the centre of community life, especially with citizens most vulnerable to not having their gifts seen or received…"

Hydraulics and Community - A Systems Thinking Perspective

In the last post, Cormac Russell and John McKnight used a hydraulic mechanism as a simple form of a closed system to serve as a simile explaining in a clear, understandable manner the asymmetry of the power dynamic between communities and institutions conjoined in a system of civic governance from an ABCD perspective. This post will look at that same system based on the Kumu Presentation Community Assets versus Institutional Resources using Causal Loop Diagrams which takes more of a Systems Thinking perspective and considers differences between the two.

ABCD and New Community Paradigms (NCP) are in agreement with most of the premises of the hydraulics and community assets system. Both see city leaders claiming to want their residents to see local government as trustworthy and reliable but relegating the role of a citizen to what happens after the city’s professionals’ work is completed.  A perfect example of the hydraulic relationship, an inversion of democracy, the role of professionals goes up, the role of citizens goes down.

Both agree components of community function have been expropriated by institutions or appropriated by the acquiescence of communities so that now people think that more police equals more safety and that more hospitals equal more health. This is illogical from a Systems Thinking perspective as well. Institutional entities define themselves and justify ever increasing budgets by consistently saying they need more funds to deal with all the different problems that the very systems that they propagated helped to create. Their structural role and legacy in the system allow them to sustain that system and the system in turn to sustain them. 

Cormac and John provided three successful examples of taking back collective responsibility for community functions though all were more project-based than systems based and all depended upon viable systems being in place to make them possible.

The manager of a Swedish housing development depended upon a system of support from community builders, connectors at the lunch, as well as welcomers and askers in the neighborhood. Cincinnati Starfire created enterprise space that could feedback to participants' own neighborhoods with resources and money effectively becoming community builders but it was filled with an existing economic and social system. Henry Moore believed that the community had all kinds of functions that could be performed without the city having to do the work. The community took up the challenge and they did the work themselves based on their own existing social system.

There is, however, an example of ABCD being applied on a more systemic basis that is told by Mick Ward, Chief Officer, Transformation and Innovation, Adults and Health, Leeds City Council.  He sets out a history of community development and organizing that gave rise to ABCD in the City of Leeds, England but they started with a strong systemic foundation.

Leeds had been prioritizing tackling loneliness, for older people especially, for many years before adopting ABCD. They had already established Neighbourhood Networks before hearing about ABCD. They then came across Cormac Russell speaking and saw a means to support older people to be even more connected to where they lived.

According to Cormac, the growth of loneliness in modern societies has been increasing since leaving more rural areas for cities leading to the rise of programmatic (and yes, systematic) interventions as loneliness becomes the new pathology being targeted by institutions. More pertinent, can this be reversed by simply changing the direction of the closed system and how does one go about doing that?

This erosion follows the evolution of consumerism shifting to the idea of a consumer society in which one could simply buy what one wants to be produced even that which was formerly the responsibility of the community and put it into the marketplace. We handed over community functions at which we are best competent and capable to perform by employing face-to-face relationship with each other by outsourcing to the institutional realm.

Institutions are closer to being closed systems, similar to a hydraulic system, created as a means of control or applied top-down constraint. Communities, however, are open systems. Their processes are not only nonlinear, but they are also unseen and not understood

Leeds began using a ‘classic’ ABCD framework of establishing a Community Builder in the neighborhood, who identified, enthused, and supported community connectors. Additionally, some “small sparks” funding was provided and community-led asset maps were developed. Early successes demonstrated the approach was worth pursuing in three Neighborhood Networks in Leeds which were part of their previously established ‘Senior Network Support (SeNS) Project’. 

This could have only been possible with a strong community and political support from the leadership of the Leeds City Council and the Health and Wellbeing Board approving funding increase the pathfinder sites, a dedicated post in LCC to commission and support the work, ABCD training both for the pathfinders and those wanting to develop ABCD approaches, supporting ABCD catalysts further supporting emerging ABCD sites to promote ABCD across the city. Still, 12 sites are a long way from covering all of Leeds with over 140 neighborhoods. While this can only be considered a success but can it, using Ward’s term, be successfully proliferated across the entirety of the City of Leeds on this same basis?

Ward wants to expand ABCD as an ‘approach, or ‘way of working’ across Third Sector organizations and services, seeing an opportunity to work with a large range of organizations in the city to move towards a more asset-based approach in their day to day work. This would put ABCD within the civic realm between community and institutions. 

It is not expected though that these organizations, not being ‘pure ABCD’, would be able to use the full ABCD framework as they tend to be city wide-based, rather than neighborhood-based and therefore not as likely to really dive deep and nurture all the potential assets and functions in a community. This suggests then that there is still a need for a more pure ABCD to be established in civil society, perhaps becoming a means of defining civil society, but outside the civic realm, maintaining its independence.  Can ABCD then become a significant part of the civil society’s foundation for the city’s civic realm and how does it do this across all sectors, economic, political, and demographic making up the City of Leeds or anywhere else? 

I have to admit to being skeptical of Cormac and John’s answer as to how this could be addressed by the institutional realm lead by stepping back.  It seems to assume that institutions, those in power within those institutions, and most importantly, the systems establishing and sustaining those institutions will locate some of that appropriated authority back into community life again voluntarily. Perhaps if you are lucky enough to live in Leeds but I have less hope for most places entrenched institutional power.

I have little faith in depending on the accountability and trustworthiness of institutional leaders. Getting even regular folk in our communities to see that people in our institutions, our schools, our police departments, our hospitals, are at their limits, in truth over their limits, and are becoming counterproductive because of all the functions we have given can be arduous. How a community could be resurrected by taking on functions that are the strength of the social contract of neighborhoods in our towns seems a better question but the answer will at least in part be systemic.

The means, Cormac and John say, is stepping forward into our own power, our collective cultural power with the agreement that through social contract there are certain things teachers, police officers, and healthcare professionals are not going to do. Responsibilities that we decide to take back as community. Those social contracts however need to be reestablished under the current systems which are firmly entrenched and will likely need some form of systemic disruption that must be innovative in nature rather than incremental but not lose sight of the purer ABCD vision.

What the Causal Loop Diagrams of the Kumu systems presentation reveals are four possible pathways. 

In the first path, the system maintains its current configuration placing institutional power in a dominant position. Under the current configuration, institutional power has a decided, structural advantage which is made even more resilient through a variety of what Systems Thinking refers to a systems archetypes. Persistent patterns of causality arising from the interaction of causal loops that entrench the system in a manner that is exceedingly constrained but still resilient despite being seen as being detrimental.

Second, both community assets and institutional resources could be reconfigured so that each has a negative influence over the other. 

Third, a more positive configuration initiated as suggested by Cormac and John and made real to a large extent by the City of Leeds. The reverse pushing the other way to increase community assets by outside forces against institutions also requires energy but the system isn't configured to work either effectively or efficiently in this manner. 

Finally, a fourth path based on changes to be initiated by the community itself with or without institutional cooperation. The energy though required to push up or down in either direction does not come from either of the pistons or external sources but must be found in the configuration or structure of the entire system. It is doubtful though, in my view, that either an ABCD approach alone or a systems approach alone could be successful.