Systems Practice - Practice Can Mean Making Mistakes and Repeating to Learn from Them

The latest Systems Practice project ”Jerusalem Vision” dealing with Jewish Palestinian relationships has been approached from around the edges in the last post and the two preceding. With this post we will begin zeroing in. As always, this blog is not intended as a substitute for the course. Instead, it takes more of a bird's eye view to see how it might relate to other aspects of new community paradigms.

For me, Systems Practice is basically applied Systems Thinking, thought experiments with pictures (graphic systems maps) using alternative forms of cognitive navigation to steer through challenges, especially wicked challenges. This again needs to be recognized as a sizable cognitive shift for many. Though it can be far more intuitive than might be expected. A favorite metaphor of mine for this new thinking is navigation during the Age of Discovery, a paradigm shift as notable as modern man’s mission to the moon as told in How We Got To Now with Steven Johnson / Time (Emmy Winner). We still need all of our existing “sailor skills” but we are adding a new layer of mapping skills based on a new way of looking at the world.

I still consider myself as having a limited background in Systems Thinking. Many if not most people taking the course though were even less familiar with Systems Thinking and far more familiar with the usual linear reductionist approach to understanding which means breaking things up into smaller pieces for ostensibly better control. The challenge then is developing a means of helping others to cross over to a more holistic, Systems Thinking approach or in the case of a systems practice approach through a group process. I still don’t believe that there is a strong enough foundation in Systems Thinking provided at the beginning of the Systems Practice course and introducing the systems mapping tool Kumu at the very start could help with that. Those with less experience in Systems Thinking may have problems with Systems Practice but those with that do have that experience will still need to be open to taking different perspectives.

Despite any issues raised in the last post with the article A Systemic View of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict and its related systems map, its author David Peter Stroh is also recognized as the author of ”Leveraging Grantmaking: Understanding the Dynamics of Complex Social Systems”, concerning the Calhoun County, Michigan study, which used Systems Thinking to address homelessness. The report was cited in the blog post Learning to Apply a Systems Practice to the Wicked Problem of Homelessness and has also been cited in the past when discussing Collective Impact and other times since then.

The Calhoun study looked at the “whole system," not one system for funders, one for providers and another for everybody else. The community’s incentives structure existed to provide quick fixes to address the immediate problem, rather than creating sustained change. One study observation was “The most ironic obstacle to implementing the fundamental solution was the community’s very success in providing temporary shelters and supports.” Systems Thinking was used to determine where intervening with higher level approaches such as housing first could effectively occur. This approach worked even with rising unemployment in the area. Stroh also wrote an insightful article on “Exposing the Hidden Benefits of Business as Usual: Why the Status Quo is So Difficult to Change,” which can also be seen as being applicable to a Systems Practice effort.

This is the third completed Systems Practice project. Waiting this time until the end of the Systems Practice course before blogging allows for a bird’s eye view of the entire Systems Practice process. It also allows inclusion of the other past Systems Practice projects found in the New Community Paradigms Systems Practice wiki-page, which include “Addressing Homelessness in Portland, Oregon” and “Addressing Plastic Pollution in Thailand” as well as looking at Systems Practice from a more philosophical perspective categorized as ”Systems Practice UK”.

The SP UK course’s more philosophical indoctrination did help to realize some important insights more fully. One is appreciating the difference between people finding themselves in a complex system and those finding themselves in complex situations, recognizing that these aren’t mutually exclusive. People in the actual applicable problem situation will have different perspectives from those considering the relevant more abstract system in which those situations arise.

The project Plastic Pollution in Thailand and the UK Systems Practice more philosophical perspective gave rise to my own perspective that Systems Practice (SP USA) is not a philosophy. It is a playbook. They actually have a playbook, Systems Practice Workbook Omidyar Group that describes the process undertaken in implementing a Systems Practice approach to deal with wicked problems (the impossible of the course’s title). It has no issues with taking from any of the different Systems Thinking approaches, whether ontological, epistemological, soft or hard explored in the Systems Practice UK series that suits its pragmatic purposes.

The “Addressing Homelessness in Portland, Oregon” project was an extension of the ”Financial Modeling and Last Mile Homeless Food Truck” project and I was the team leader. With ”Plastic Pollution in Thailand, I joined a group, with an already established focus, which unfortunately broke up before the end of the course though I still brought the project to a conclusion. The most recently completed project was the one most in line with the ideas behind ”Direct Democracy and Systems Thinking.” The topic Palestinian and Jewish relationships in the City of Jerusalem was chosen democratically among the eight members of the group out of nine possible topics.

The greatest value the previous two Systems Practice projects brought to the Jerusalem Vision project is what was done wrong or went wrong in those projects. Before the first Systems Practice course, I had worked solo and still tend to do that. Systems Practice though significantly informed and induced me to substantially change the approach I took when working with a group.

My first mistake with Systems Practice was creating a systems map using Kumu far too early in the process before the course had barely started. I came with my cup perhaps too full, putting me out of alignment with the course and with being able to collaborate with the others on the team I was supposedly leading. It took a while to realize that the differences were due to Systems Practice's attempt to focus on group interactions in coming up with solutions.

A primary issue that Systems Thinking seeks to address, because of a tendency of a reductionist approach of breaking systems into smaller components, is to only look at factors in immediate or near-immediate approximation instead of following causal pathways further out to discover hidden relationships. What may be a positive causal force at one point of the system may then become a negative causal force at another point. Systems Practice does address this though perhaps not explicitly allowing its process to reveal any Systems insight.

This doesn’t mean the analysis by reductionism is completely abandoned. The first assignment of the SP course, USA Plastic Pollution in Thailand had us present our system challenge through a Complexity Spectrum, consisting of selecting within spectrums of polar choices.

• Level of Understanding: Well understood vs Not Understood
• Engagement: Consensus vs Diversity of Opinion
• Environment: Stable vs Dynamic
• Environment: Self-contained vs Interconnected
• Goals: Small Scale vs Broad Change
• Goals: Short-term vs Sustainable

Although any relational mapping with Kumu was delayed, using a different mapping program, Plectica allowed for the creation of a map which reflected the Complexity Spectrum’s hierarchical nature and that provided spaces for each of the members of the team to provide their individual input. It fitted rather well with the course assignment proving in this instance, more helpful than Kumu.

The latest “Jerusalem Vision” project didn’t repeat this Complexity Spectrum but we still had an analytical perspective brought to the team through our team leader Yoel Ben-Avraham who has a background as a Systems Analyst. With the latest Jerusalem Vision project, we used RealTime Board as suggested by our team leader Yoel. It had some features similar to Plectica and despite being spread across the globe, we were able to witness the movement of the different factors we had gathered into common themes while collaborating together in real time.

Factors and themes, as well as forces, enablers, and inhibitors, are among specialized terms Systems Practice introduces to help define their group-oriented approach to Systems Thinking. Before, however, getting into that the course first had us establish some common visions of the challenge we were about to address.

Modeling the Last Mile to Feed the Homeless part 2

This is the second blog post concerning the Financial Modeling for the Social Sector course from Philanthropy University powered by the Berkeley Hass School of Business and there still isn’t anything yet about the financial model itself. We are still defining the boundaries, elements and relationships of the systems with which we are dealing. We still need to better understand this larger environment in which we hope to implement our financially viable and sustainable enterprise to help address the needs of the homeless.

It has been shown that one of the most financially effective and sustainable remedies to address homelessness is providing homes rather than continually providing services which while necessary in the short run do not make a significant enough of an impact to bring about needed change in the long run. Salt Lake City six years ago started a project to provide housing for every homeless person, Austin Tx did something similar, also a study coming out of Calhoun County, Michigan asserted, “The most ironic obstacle to implementing the fundamental solution was the community’s very success in providing temporary shelters and supports.”

However, while building homes may be one of the best remedies for homelessness, lack of a home is not, I will propose, the primary etiology of the detrimental afflictions of homelessness and those afflictions are acute in nature. 

I am going to suggest that it is a lack of community, separation from deeply structured community, from that social relationship network that can be defined as civil society. In exploring those relationships, I came up with a rough cut term, community-less-ness. A weakness of this argument is that the reality of such a social structure can be taken for granted by most of us. In numerous cases, we can make decisions to bypass such relationships but remain, even if only subconsciously, confident that they will be available if we need them. This includes those community relationships that we forge through our economic transactions. This is again a model which does not encompass the truth of homelessness and is wrong, but it could provide what could be considered an important insight.

It becomes all the more evident in the manner in which we use the problems with our food wastage as a means of addressing the feeding of the needy and the homeless.

Food pantries mainly store non-perishable items for access by needy individuals or families either for free or at very low cost. Food trucks mainly distribute perishable or soon to perish items to food banks and shelters  making food preparation an important component. Feeding the needy though is very different from feeding the homeless, especially those in camps or on the streets.

As said before, although the Portland food distribution system is available to the homeless, it is not necessarily accessible by them. The local pantries will gladly bend over backwards for a person with no address.

“But that homeless person has to figure out a way to get the groceries back to camp or shelter and the street person is limited to what he can carry on a daily basis. It is very limited what kind of healthy ‘walking food’ the pantries carry”. - Jo

Another shortcoming with homeless food distribution then besides a lack of choices is an inability to keep food fresh once it is distributed because it is given in quantities too large to be used in a timely enough manner. 

Currently, as Jo explains, “They don't have much choice in food so they end up with five loaves of bread that go bad before they can use it.”

There is then the issue of transporting the food as most of that food has to be refrigerated and/or cooked.

Jo can plan on hitting each pantry at least once a month, whether they call her or not as they always find groceries for her to take. On any given day one can determine the hours of operation for a given pantry. When Jo put together a list of all the local food outlets, she was thinking that the homeless could use a copy for themselves. That way they would know such things as that there are two pantries that one can only frequent every ninety days. To help out with this, I created an online map of Jo’s Portland Food Network.

The need for multiple pick ups comes from going to all Harvest Shares and Community Baskets and stopping at multiple pantries when the pantries call with food for not less than 50 people. That food goes to waste if they can't figure out a way to distribute elsewhere. 

There is also an entity called Gleaners which provides mostly fruit and vegetables that are not fit for resale as they will have some sort of blemish or a shipment did not arrive in time making Gleaners the beneficiary. That is then free food if one works several hours as a volunteer to help sort the food. 

“I usually bring several homeless to the Gleaners to volunteer and then we fill up my van,” - Jo.

This Financial Model with Jo seeks to further expand food delivery to the camps and street people. In keeping with the philosophy of an ABCD approach, the homeless are part of the solution.

Street people might be nearby for a meal and then not in the area for the next three days or more. They know where the soup kitchens are and usually get one meal a day there. 

Homeless campers usually don't get to soup kitchens unless they are very close. Homeless camps have no refrigeration, and limited cooking facilities. Local churches deliver hot food most of which is nutritious a couple times a week. Some people volunteer to cook a meal for 25 or 30 in their own homes and then deliver them. While it is amazing how many churches walk into a camp and hand out food, it is not consistent. They go to only the camps and not to find people on the streets.

Groceries could include canned goods as they can be stored in camps but street homeless do not want to carry it around. The street homeless like to have "walking food,” stuff like health bars, and fruit roll ups and bags of tiny carrots to put in their pockets to carry around. 

One idea then was to provide carry around food such as a protein bar and raisins as a fruit, maybe a package of healthy chips. The homeless also don't get vitamins.

Jo wanted more than a nutritious meal served at one time, thinking of the meal and also some walking food for later. 

“My thinking is anyone who came up to the window to be served, got a high energy protein bar. A soup with vegetables and fiber in it. (we now have a littering issue with that soup bowl. I wonder if the soups could be served in an edible bread bowl) The bar they can take with them and eat at another time.” 

That way they would at least eating one meal a day other than at the soup kitchens or churches delivering meals, which would be more than they are eating now.  - Jo

There are two other possible sources to acquire food within the Oregon Food system.  SNAP or the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program can be seen as a first line of defense in fighting hunger serving 20% of Oregonians, at an average benefit of about $130 per month. Oregon tops nation in food stamps at 20% of its population, compared say to California at 9.7% of its population.  Food stamp usage Is high in Oregon because more eligible Oregonian use the program compared to other states due to large extended efforts to sign people up and in part because of the time Oregon has had taken to recover from the recession. Under the SNAP/Food Stamp Program homelessness have rights but they still need to verify their identity. 

The other possibility is Farmers Markets, many of which accept SNAP benefits as a means of payment. They then use funds to match SNAP clients' purchasing power, dollar-for-dollar, up to $10. This means that SNAP participants could get $20 worth of produce and unprepared foods at a farmers market by spending $10 in benefits. The Double Up Food Bucks program works with participating Farmers' Markets throughout Oregon in matching SNAP benefits up to the $10 at their markets.  This, however, is more helpful to those who are needy but still structurally within the community both economically and socially than it is for the homeless.

Next Part 3

Learning to Apply a Systems Practice to the Wicked Problem of Homelessness

This is the beginning of another online course sponsored by Acumen and another course in collaboration with Jo Foraker with whom I worked with on the Modeling the Last Mile to Feed the Homeless series. In that course, the focus was on financial modeling but systems thinking modeling was always included underneath near the surface. Again, only a flavor of the course is going to be provided here and not the course itself. Instead, the focus, as before, will be more on how the course connects with new community paradigms.

This course is more directly on Systems Practice and is being taught by Rob Ricigliano of Omidyar Group’s Systems & Complexity Team. It appears that it will seek a more pragmatic or on-the-ground application of systems thinking than did the previously taken systems thinking certification course. One new aspect will be how to launch a team. This course will also be using the often featured Kumu relational mapping tool. Here is a perspective on Kumu by Rob Ricigliano.

The course focuses on solving what it calls groundhog day, whack-a-mole and opposite day problems, a little imagination will paint a picture. Another more operationally viable term is "wicked problem". The trouble for those trying to communicate this reality to others is that this reality can be confusing, frustrating and messy. The course sees systems thinking as a necessary mindset in addressing this reality by providing clarity and insights into points of leverage within such systems at which the greatest impact with modest force is possible. It makes it possible to enhance an organization’s adaptability to changing environments. Making it more aware of causal ripple effects, those instances of cause and effect which are separate in time and space from the more ostensibly obvious events within our immediate reality. 

Homelessness is seen as a wicked problem, a complex problem involving large scale system inputs and outcomes having very close, personal and detrimental impact on those afflicted by it. It will arguably require then a wide perspective to find viable solutions. 

In particular with the issue of homelessness in which communities have spent a large amount of money on shelters in many large cities yet did not reduce the overall number of people living on the streets within those cities. 

The course explores why. With the homeless shelter question, the suggested answer is “Shelters were never meant to provide a path to sustainable living.” Beyond that, no one program can address all of the underlying challenges facing our communities. They are all interconnected and interwoven. It is a complex perspective on reality as opposed to an imposed complicated top-down perspective. 

One positive example cited by the course and in the past by this blog, is the Calhoun County, Michigan study which used systems thinking to address homelessness. They looked at the “whole system” under which the incentive for funders and providers had been to provide quick fixes, addressing the immediate problem, rather than sustained change. They used systems thinking to determine where they could effectively intervene with higher level approaches such as housing first. This worked even when unemployment in the area was rising.

1. Setting goals
2. Good Systems Analysis
3. Finding Opportunities for Leverage
4. Preparing to Learn and Adapt Effectively

The course considers how to do a systems analysis through a dynamic systems map of key forces affecting the system under study. How to identify opportunities for impact or leverage points within that system to create the desired change. How do we get started on the process of learning and adapting so that if we manage to do that very well in the context of the complex system (meaning constantly shifting) we are working in we are able to adapt?

1. Mindset for how the world works and how to create change.
2. A set of tools and processes as to how to actually design and implement actions for change.

Rob then goes into what they mean by a system or what makes a system, differentiating it from more tangible physical systems such as an automobile or the healthcare system. Complex social systems produce results or consequences such as homelessness or other social ills to use his examples. This type of system is made up of complex forces that affect each other and more importantly for one’s efforts the issue with which you are concerned. For example, the “things” that produce homelessness are likely diverse but not isolated, they are interrelated in a manner that I would deem organic and intrinsic. These relationships between the things or factors contributing to homelessness can interact in unpredictable ways. 

So a system has discrete and diverse components or elements that are interdependent and interact in complex ways that dynamically change over time. This makes predictability more difficult, not impossible but the ability is far more constrained as one needs to constantly reassess one's systems analysis and the time frame for an accurate prediction can be shortened. 

The Omidyar Group’s take on systems thinking consists of three key components. It is a mindset. A way of thinking about how the world works and how to work with that messy world to promote desired outcomes. It is a set of tools to do analysis and develop a strategy. It is a particular set of processes which demands collective intelligence and sense-making resulting in collective action. This requires certain specific processes, such as participatory deliberations and dialogue.

The course recognizes that there are certain problems that are not solvable by directly addressing the apparent symptoms of the problem. With homelessness, it was the notion that we build shelters but that didn't actually solve the problem. It may have gotten certain people off of the streets but they were replaced and increased by more people. It can be necessary to look at the entire system to determine what it is about the system that is producing that and other negative outcomes. The conundrum is that certain acute challenges cannot be ignored until a complete and permanent solution to the chronic problem is found.

The feeding of the unsheltered, isolated homeless (even in homeless camps there is still isolation) is one such challenge. Those that can’t find occupancy in the shelters can also find themselves isolated from the community's food systems.  The direct approach to the problem, getting food and taking it to the camps is already known to be a tremendous logistical challenge. The question is how to create a system, an enterprise that works most effectively and efficiently in the existing larger systems and that can also, hopefully, begin to change that larger system to not only stop whatever activities it is doing to create the problems but to also directly work on the larger system issues to resolve them.

1. The nature of the environment one is working in.
2. The nature of the goal you have set for yourself.
3. One’s ability to implement this type of approach.

Rob then goes into three criteria for determining whether a systems approach should be applied. First is the nature of the environment one is working dynamic and constantly changing? Have supposedly obvious approaches been tried before and failed? Can change be overwhelming, not just for oneself but especially for those one is trying to assist? Even solutions that may work in one case don’t work in another. 

The second is the nature of the goal that one is striving to accomplish. This one is more problematic. Rob speaks of relief efforts to feed a specific group of people for a specific period of time or to house them so that they don’t die of exposure which can be seen as a relatively mechanical process. However, I don't believe the distinction is so apparent or that the Last Mile program truly fits into that configuration. The relationship between doing A to get B is not as deterministic in dealing with the unsheltered homeless as it can be with other forms of relief aid. 

Now it is true that finding ways to permanently house homeless individuals or better to prevent them from becoming homeless in the first place would be a higher point of leverage within the larger system. However, in focusing on the first approach of finding ways to permanently house the homeless, the status of those individuals in terms of health must also be considered and malnutrition and anemia will make helping them far more difficult. How all this will be addressed though will change from place to place. 

The third is what is happening with one’s self. Are you in an enabling environment, the ability, time and resources that allow you to step back and have the means and capability to think through the building of a strategy, say like taking this course then systems thinking is worth investing in. Rob warns, however, that it is not a magic solution. It does not make complex issues simple or worse yet if wrongly interpreted, simplistic. What it can do, from a new community paradigms perspective is make that complexity coherent. 

Advancing Racial Equity Through Collective Impact and Systems Thinking

This post is on the final piece of the fifth and final module of the Living Cities online Collective Impact course. It continues the examination of the combination of Collective Impact and Systems Thinking applied to Community Engagement and Equity considered under the NCP Collective Impact wiki-page over the last three blog posts. Such a combined approach though goes much further back than that.

The article, Leveraging Grantmaking: Understanding the Dynamics of Complex Social Systems, was provided as part of the Systems Thinking Certification course in response to a request for something more concrete related to system thinking as applied to New Community Paradigms. The first of two of the article's main key points being that non-obvious interrelationships among elements in a complex system often thwart people’s best intentions to sustainably improve system performance. The second being that complex, nonlinear problems that most foundations address can be solved most effectively by thinking systemically instead of linearly about these problems. It demonstrated how such programs can be made more successful when these lessons were heeded in the development of a ten year plan to address homelessness in Calhoun County, Michigan (population 100,000).

Systems thinking is supposed to be a means of addressing complexity. It is natural to look for something concrete to build an effort upon. We want pragmatic solutions without wasting too much time on theory. This, however, brings about a counterintuitive trap raised by J. W. Forrester.

Policy improvements in the short run often degrade a system in the long run while policies producing long-run improvements often initially degrade the system at the start. Because the short run is more visible and more compelling, calling for immediate attention its impact is not really more concrete, but more what I have elsewhere called entrenched, as Forrester explains.

“However, sequences of actions all aimed at short-run improvement can eventually burden a system with long-run depressants so severe that even heroic short-run measures no longer suffice. Many problems being faced today are the cumulative result of short-run measures taken in prior decades.”

With simple systems, causes are close to symptoms of a problem in both time and space. In complex systems or with wicked problems, causes are often far removed in both time and space from the symptoms, lying far back in time and arising from an entirely different part of the system from when and where the symptoms occur, easily misleading us into believing our actions to alleviate the symptoms to be concrete in nature.

Three different disciplines or areas of consideration involving multiple perspectives then are brought together. The entire series of posts collected under the NCP Collective Impact wiki-page has involved taking on a number of new perspectives, the most notable being the use of Kumu relationship mapping.

The ability to adopt different perspectives is not only important to relational mapping, it is important to systems thinking in general. It is also important to a system of both deliberative and participatory democracy. It is essential, I would assert, in questions of equity, particularly if those questions are asked in terms of community economic and empowerment equity requiring answers of the larger community.

Two approaches have been presented throughout the exploration of the Collective Impact course and especially during the review of this last module. Under the Living Cities narrative approach, Week 5: Working with Communities to Advance Racial Equity and Eliminate Disparities (map) is the narrative starting point for what is the Advancing Racial Equity sector map. Under the NCP Kumu mapping approach, it becomes the goal and heart of the larger more complex effort. There are two different pathways then but with both moving toward the same objectives.

Neither is that much better or worse than the other barring a few insightful advantages by Kumu mapping that have been previously mentioned. If the Kumu mapping approach has done anything noteworthy, it is breaking the inherently linear aspect of the narrative approach adopted by Living Cities. This is not a criticism. The Living Cities online course was undoubtedly intended as an introductory course. Such an approach though makes it more difficult to question debatable premises or go in new directions. In truth, a better combining of the Living Cities narrative approach and Kumu mapping visual approach than has been achieved by this initial effort would be the best outcome.

To reach this point and help this effort grow, we must return to the roots. This means taking on yet another new perspective. Over the course of this series the systems thinking iceberg model has been featured a number of times. The main feature being the majority of which is hidden. This current example appeals to more organic connections using a plant analogy while retaining the hidden from view or deeper aspect with the added potential to grow.

The Advancing Racial Equity sector map then becomes the part of the plant seen on the ground. It is defined or influenced though by elements beyond the boundaries of its readily apparent morphology. It was advised in past posts that it was not necessary to click on each (map) link in a post. This time the series of (map) links will build from the ground creating the supporting and sustaining root structure {do remember though to close unneeded tabs}.

Continuing with the plant analogy, there are twelve elements making up Advancing Racial Equity sector map, the fewest of all the sector maps, which total fifty-two elements altogether thus supporting the general idea of a root system.

Of the elements of the Advancing Racial Equity sector map, Week 5: Working with Communities to Advance Racial Equity and Eliminate Disparities (map) serves as a trunk or stem. Some elements after their connection to the stem, stand independently. Other elements to be shown will be separated, with hidden connections to be revealed later. Still, other elements will be shown to have deep and extended connections.

A short Vimeo video, How do you build in a consideration of racial inequities when working with community members? (map), highlighting the Living Cities Integration Initiative, (map) features Michelle Fure, Outreach Coordinator Metropolitan Council and Uma Viswanathan, former Director of Boards and Commissions Leadership Institute for Urban Habitat (map). It provides a quick perspective on applying a racial equity lens to working with community members through community engagement and collective impact.

The Collective Impact Forum blog post Bringing an Equity Lens to Collective Impact (map) by Sarah Marxer and Junious Williams, one of the presenters in Racial Equity and Community Engagement in Collective Impact webinar (map) goes even deeper applying an equity lens to the five Collective Impact elements.

The Race Matters Institute (map) and Racial Equity Impact Analysis (map), along with additional resources of the Kellogg Foundation’s Racial Equity Resource Guide (map) and Harvard Implicit Bias Test (map) provide an examination of more personal perspectives of stakeholders and community members.

Moving on to the more connected elements, there is again a recognized need for Using Data to Close Achievement Gap (map) which along with Racial Equity and Community Engagement in Collective Impact, (map) is connected with Working with communities to advance racial equity and eliminate disparities (map) through the sector map Working with Communities on Racial Equity as discussed in the last post, Addressing Community Equity through Collective Impact requires a Deep Systemic Perspective .

4 Insights into Collective Impact plus Community Engagement and Racial Equity (map) can be expanded upon as the central element and theme for the 4 Insights CI + CE and Racial Equity sector map discussed in People like systems change, they just don't like thinking about it (systems) all that much, linking to the Living Cities Integration Initiative (map) cited above.

Returning to the sector map Working with Communities on Racial Equity and moving an additional degree further or deeper, takes us to a closer and expanded look at What Makes Collective Impact a Powerful tool for Systems Change? (map) by adding in the sector map CoIlective Impact as Tool for Systems Change as discussed in Thinking about Deep Systems Change through Collective Impact with an extension to include Evidence-Based Decision Making and finally completing the fifty-two elements making up the module.

Systems Practice versus Thinking pt 1

Since January 31 of this year, I have been involved in a course titled Systems Practice but haven’t written about it since February 4.  For myself, there were three objectives in taking this course. One, come up with some useful insights for Jo Foraker's endeavors to create the Last Mile Food Truck as a sustainable system to provide nutritious food to the unsheltered homeless living in camps around Portland, Oregon featured in the blog series Modeling the Last Mile to Feed the Homeless parts 1 to 6.  Next, in doing so, to demonstrate the potential of systems thinking to assist in coming up with practical solutions. Third, to do so through real world interactions with nine other individuals, though still online, group process. It has to be admitted that there have been some challenges with all three. 

My involvement in the Last Mile Food Truck concept has been in existence through two other Philanthropy University / Acumen courses, Financial Modeling and Social Impact. Those courses demonstrated that what the Last Mile Food Truck project was attempting to accomplish, finding effective means of addressing homelessness, was far more complex than might first be assumed. 

The course seeks to answer three questions beyond the specifics of any particular challenge. One, how does the environment within which you work operate as a complex, dynamic system? The course helped with this by taking a distinct approach to systems thinking. Two, how will your strategy engage the system in order to have a highly leveraged impact? The course endeavored to assist here as well though that depends on the level of achieved leverage. Three, how will you test your assumptions and hypotheses so you can learn and adapt effectively was considered though not really addressed at least not by our efforts.

Something first needs to be established before proceeding further. I will have to declare here that systems practice both significantly informed the approach I contributed over time and induced me to substantially change it in ways during the course that I would not have if I had worked solely on my own. 

Second, this analysis will be abstract, looking at meta-issues related to homelessness. The decision to make the tangible effort to feed the unsheltered homeless or any act of social contribution is not based on how viable or sustainable a system to do so is. It is based on moral conviction which can be a driving force even under conditions of impact which are exceedingly limited or even diminishing. Any inability to establish a viable, sustainable system does not lessen the worthiness of the effort. There are, however, realities that have to be met to establish such systems. 

One suggested insight that arose from past explorations is that the human etiology of homelessness, especially chronic homelessness, could be defined as community-lessness, not a lack of physical shelter, as bad as that obviously is but the lack of truly viable community that arises from being in that situation. Qualitatively, in terms of psychological well-being, this is a far more detrimental situation compared to someone who is poor but still has a home and is still part of a community. Even if a community is destitute, it often has systems in place to help its members cope. Social support systems in this country may be created for the very low income but more for those who still fit within society’s framework. The homeless for the greater part do not, so programs need to be specially designed for them. The homeless instead need to adapt to the system as it exists, the system does not adapt to them and even upon adapting, the homeless still remain outside the system which is often more interested in control than it is in true integration.

The most viable long-term social community-based solution to homelessness may be the creation and provision of permanent housing, as the aforementioned study coming out of Calhoun County, Michigan indicated That though will take an extended amount of time and the homeless, in the meantime, need food for sustenance and nutrition to maintain health. Our current food systems, however, are not well designed to assist the homeless, especially those who are not in shelters.

This post and the next are meant to look more specifically at the process of systems practice and how it relates to systems thinking because I don't believe they are quite the same thing. It took awhile though to realize that the differences were due to systems practice's attempt to focus on group interactions in coming up with solutions. Despite having finally come in line with the systems practice way, there are still a few things I would like to see be done differently. 

I had some background in systems thinking but came with my cup perhaps too full. In some ways, I had been working backward until about more than halfway before coming in alignment with the course and with the team. I had a personal problem with the advertised use of Kumu mapping not occurring until after the third week. Personal, because I started using Kumu just a little before the beginning of the course which put me out of alignment with the course or perhaps more accurately with the others on the team.

Many people taking the course were more likely familiar with the usual linear reductionist approach to understanding which means breaking things up into smaller pieces for ostensibly better control. The challenge then is developing a means of helping them to cross over to a more holistic, systems thinking or in this case a systems practice perspective through a group process. I don’t believe, however, that there was a strong enough foundation in systems thinking provided at the beginning of the course and introducing Kumu at the very start could have helped with that.

Systems Practice introduced terms such as factors, forces, enablers, inhibitors, and themes as parts of their approach to systems thinking.  Unfortunately, these operational terms were not defined either adequately or precisely enough, at least in my view, often being exchanged with other terms generating some confusion and necessitating questions raised by one of our teammates. Those questions provided a substantial amount of information for what is written in this critique. The terms are all intended to result in the end in the creation of feedback loops (Causal Loop Diagrams) familiar to systems thinking but prior to that Systems Practice has a few unique steps of its own. It wasn't clear until later in the course but thanks to the questions asked by one of our teammates and others, we can start with defining what is a factor?

In Systems Practice a factor, according to Rob Ricigliano the course instructor, is "something, a person, an environmental condition, an attitude, an institution, a phenomenon, etc., that makes other things happen or has agency." What in terms of map display Kumu calls elements. That one thing or a factor changing another thing could also be thought of as a driver, which according to the course could be categorized as either enabling or inhibiting within the system under question.

The first step then in the Systems Practice mapping process is brainstorming as many factors as possible related to the system under review, based on a previously established mission focus through what the course calls the Guiding Star, Near Star and Framing Question created prior by the group. Skipping this earlier part, for now, this stage then is only a collection of factors at this point in the mapping, presumed to be part of a system but with no real understanding as of yet of the relationships, like cutting up a picture for pieces of a puzzle. To emphasize the point, a collection is not a system, it requires dynamic or purposeful assembly.

The course then has participants collect factors or drivers together into separate clusters as either enablers or inhibitors. It is necessary now to stop and insert the System Practice concepts of forces and themes. These served supposedly as an intertwining path or steps that resulted in confusion for me as to how they all relate to the overall Systems Practice process. 

Taking a step back with the benefit of some hindsight, they are part of the dynamic assembly mentioned above occurring after factor collection. We spoke before of factors being drivers as either enablers or inhibitors. Enablers and inhibitors can also be thought of as forces. In the process of separating enabling forces from inhibiting forces, it is also possible to subsequently combine such forces into various themes or collections of common ideas. 

So a collection of related enablers should become a cluster of enablers or an enabling theme and the same is done then with inhibitors. Similar, it would seem, to the practice of separating outside, edge puzzle pieces from inside pieces or sky pieces from the ground ones. 

It is presumed to be less confusing for a group if the clusters are made up of either all enablers or all inhibitors but it can result in getting clusters with the same names on both the inhibitor side and the enabler side such as enabling factors that drive the cost of living down alongside inhibitors that drive that same cost of living up. It will then end up being suggested doing two different types of loops based on a particular thematic cluster, one on the dynamics that drive the cost of living down and then one on the dynamics that drive the cost of living up. 

Another reason for separating forces into two groups of enablers and inhibitors is to ensure that the group is putting sufficient attention not only on those that make things worse but also on those factors that make things better before merging them into loops. The tendency had been for groups doing the mapping to focus on what was not working, what was making things worse, giving too little attention to the things that stabilized the system or could even make things better. It is hoped that focusing on enablers and inhibitors separately gets groups to put significant attention looking for those "forces" or phenomena that aren't thought about in the first place, particularly on the enabler side of the equation. I believe that this also should have been made more explicit earlier in the course. 

So the group has various collections of factors organized into different themes bringing up the image of a puzzle party, though a closer analogy would be if instead of puzzle pieces each person brought their own photos of their particular perspective to create one common collage. Now it is a matter of putting them all together.