4 Transforming your capabilities for managing change with STiP

Critical Social Learning Systems and Communities of Practice are only two of the multiple traditions of systems thinking. There is not a formula or dogma regarding when to use one tradition or another, but different traditions may be more suitable than others for different situations and tend to encourage certain framings. Generally, a CSLS encourages collaboration to seek systemic improvements to some messy complex situation that multiple stakeholders regard as critically problematic.

CSLS challenges participants to critically examine social structures, power dynamics, and inequalities. Meanwhile, communities of practice are set up by groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly. CoPs provide a nurturing environment for collaborative learning and reflective dialogue, with members challenging each other's perspectives, and co-creating new understandings through their interactions.

Figure 3 Choosing a path between traditions – CSLS and CoPs

CSLS and CoPs, like many other learning systems associated with STiP, share an orientation towards collective inquiry. A systems practitioner rarely develops their practice alone, instead building on the ideas of others and working with others. In order to start thinking about how you manage change with others in your situation of concern we can once again use the PFMS framework. This framework was introduced in Week 1 of this course, but your perspective about your own PFMS has (hopefully) been transformed after your engagement with STiP concepts such as Learning Systems, CSLS and CoPs. This re-engagement with the PFMS framework also illustrates iteration as a central principle of STiP.

Systemic practice is characterised by iteration – a form of repetition. Iteration involves taking the output of a process and using it as an input for the same process. Applied to learning about practice, this means that you repeat a process of learning on top of the result of prior learning processes, and this deepens your learning. As it deepens it becomes appropriate to add more elements because these now make sense – they have something to adhere to. In practical terms this means going over the same sorts of processes but each time entering the material with the understanding you had achieved in your previous look, and hence seeing it with new eyes.

This final section introduces another short iteration around your inquiry process aimed at strengthening your STiP.

As discussed earlier, preparing a systems map encourages moving from the systematic to the systemic. However, creating a systems map may not be sufficient to trigger a shift in thinking from the systematic to the systemic so that you can hold both in creative tension through systems practice.

Firstly, it’s not the tools that you use but how you use them that lead you to systems thinking in practice. A shift to fully-fledged systems thinking in practice would also need careful consideration of where boundaries might most appropriately be placed. You would need to consider each element in relation to others in the context of a system of interest as a whole. In other words systems literacy – your ability to follow the rules of using systems maps – must be underpinned by your systemic sensibility – your capacity to think and act relationally.

Recollect the image of the woman depicted in the animation in Activity 2 in Week 1 of this course, who was interested in the pond as a source of fish. In that particular example an assumption, or articulation, of purpose – to be a source of fish – carries with it the implication that the pond must contain the necessary ingredients, processes, and possibly be supplied with necessary resources, to produce the fish. If it is on the wrong side of a chemical plant, too shaded or too small to contain sufficient variety of life it may not function as she wishes. Therefore her identification of the pond as a ‘system to provide fish’ implies certain necessities that the pond must provide if she is going to receive any fish.

In situations such as this there are no right answers, someone else might see the pond as ‘a system to provide bathing facilities’ for example. The pond perhaps can be both but the choice of purpose is that of someone (a person or group) and it follows that the requirements to maintain each of these systems of interest are not the same, and may clash. Importantly, such clashes may happen inadvertently and people may work at cross-purposes when they have different ideas about what the system is meant to achieve and about the most suitable means for achieving the intended outcomes. Checkland coined his PQR ‘formula’ to make such assumptions explicit and facilitate agreement and reflection on the nature of a system. Checkland’s advice is to formulate a description of a system of interest in the form:

A system to do (what, P), by (hows, Q) because of (why, R), referred to as a PQR statement in the tradition of Soft Systems Methods. (As an interesting aside, this was originally called the ‘XYZ’ formula, but it was quickly renamed as it became clear that this tended to result in confusion because of the similar sounds of ‘Y’ and ‘why’. More background on that can be gleaned from pages 164–5 in Ison (2017))

In Activity 4 you are going to consider what might be in the box, if you were to consider this course as a system. An answer to this activity could be typically drawn as a diagram, with:

• inputs flowing into a set of processes or activities identified as a rough ring – a process boundary which distinguishes the system of interest from the environment of your system, and
• outputs flowing out from the set of processes.