3 Managing change with STiP in your own context

All readers just checking that ‘readers’ is th best word to use here?are likely to have encountered a situation which they felt required some form of systemic change. Such situations may range from family dynamics to workplace situations or international issues like responding effectively to a pandemic, seeking joint action on climate change or trying to break through the barriers of organisational design and entrenched cultures. There are also different perspectives on who or what is involved and the multiple causes and effects identified. Hence the nature of an intervention that would affect either situation in a positive way is not obvious.

Working out how to affect these situations for the better is by no means straightforward because there is much that is not known. To determine whether a particular action or interaction is likely to bring about improvement, the systemic nature of the issues of concern need to be understood and intervention or joint inquiry negotiated with others.

Herein lies the case for managing in these situations drawing on multiple, partial perspectives.

One of the major risks associated with the management of systemic change, and one that often results in systemic failure, happens when professionals, politicians or other decision makers unquestioningly assume that their own perspective is the one that any logical, reasonable and impartial person would adopt. This can also happen to you, even when you make an effort to approach a situation without preconceptions, unless you make a deliberate effort to identify your own perspective and those of others.

A related problem is that of thinking that the tools and frameworks you bring to the situation are the ones that must be used to change it – engineers may seek to fix a complex social problem with a clever software solution, marketers may assume that people would do the right thing if they had the right information, and managers may try to fix a situation by setting ambitious targets and key performance indicators – those may or may not be the right tools for the job, but , as Maslow famously said, ‘If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail’. STiP is not simply a matter of having a set of tools and practices, and this short course will introduce you to the importance of becoming a reflexive system practitioner.

The following animation is an introduction to the OU module TB872 for which this course is a ‘taster’. The animation explains the PFMS heuristic. Heuristics, or heuristic techniques, are designed to explore a situation. They are informal strategies or approaches to problem solving [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)]  or self-discovery which employ a practical mode of procedure.

The heuristic shows a practitioner engaging with situation S through the combined use of a framework of ideas F and a method, M. It comprises a person (ii) thinking about a real-world situation in which a person or practitioner P (i) – who may be the same as the person who is thinking – engages with a situation S.

You came to this course with your own frameworks of ideas that you have developed over your history (depicted as the learning cycle in the practitioner’s head). This is the tradition of understanding out of which you think and act (Ison, 2017). This framework of ideas F might be explicit (for example Systems) or implicit simply because you have not really thought about them.

S could be any situation of concern to you. How we choose to frame and understand situations is critical to the type of practice that happens. You may find it useful to go back to Section 1 of this short course, What do we talk about when we talk about systems, to reflect about the importance of framing a situation in STiP.

Technique, tools, method and/or methodology (M) are usually inextricably wound up in what we do and ‘method”’and ‘methodology’ are sometimes used interchangeably. However, it is not advisable to do so. You need to reflect on how they are incorporated into your overall practice dynamic. Method means a way of proceeding, commonly any special procedure or way of doing things. From this the adjective methodic or methodical, arises, meaning something done according to a method.

There is often confusion between method and methodology. Methodology means the logic of method or the philosophy or theory that informs selection and implementation of method. In STiP, this meaning of methodology needs to be extended to mean something that has to be experienced where the key experience is that of the degree of coherence, or congruence, between espoused theory and practice. You can also ask yourself the question, ‘Was my performance effective?’, remembering that an effective performance, arises through a relational dynamic.