Category: Change

NOTE:  For recordings of the series, search the blog for the webinar title.

The series looks at current work on the topic of transformation and large systems change (LSC) from various perspectives.  The goal is to support development of the LSC field by creating conversation amongst practitioners and knowledge developers about theories/strategies and methods/tools.

We will hear from a lead presenter with an emphasis on discussion with those attending.  Participation is free and open to others working in the field, as a community service organized by the GOLDEN Ecosystems Labs with GIZ providing technical support. To obtain the web link and participate, register by sending an email to webinar@goldenforsustainability.org.  For more information contact Labs Lead Steward Steve Waddell:  swaddell@networkingaction.net

Time:  10am ET/ 3pm UK/ 4pm CET (1 hour)  Download the series description or continue reading.

1) Wednesday, january 29: System Dynamics Mapping of Systemic Change Processes

Presenter:  Joe Hsueh, Co-Founder – Academy for System Change & Ecosystems Labs Steward, and  Partner – SecondMuse

Joe has applied a system dynamics approach across a wide range of change issues.  Drawing from these experiences, he has developed a system dynamics map that describes generic systemic change processes in terms of key activities in each phase and how they reinforce each other to catalyze, sustain and scale change.  This has led to numerous insights for change practitioners.

2) Wednesday, February 26: The Many Sources Of Transformation and Large Systems Change Knowledge

Presenter:  Steve Waddell, Principal, NetworkingAction and Ecosystems Labs Lead Steward

Steve 2011 Steve is working with a World Bank project to create a framework for describing this knowledge.  He is drawing from four streams of practice and study arising from four historic focii:  (1) business and sustainable enterprise, (2) peace and conflict resolution, (3) natural environment, and (4) social-economic development.  He hopes the webinar participants will add to the framework and theories and tools.

3) Thursday, March 27: Cultivating system change – a practitioners companion

NOTE:  The day has been changed to (Thursday), and times are different for US/Canada because of daylight savings irregularities:  8am PT/ 11am ET/ 3pm UK/ 4pm CET (1 hour)

Presenter:  Anna Birney, Head of System Innovation Lab, Forum for the Future and Ecosystems Labs Steward

Anna has just completed a new book by this titled Cultivating system change – a practitioners companion, that builds on her impressive experience as a practitioner and grows out of her dissertation.  She will share her insights.

4) Wednesday, April 23: The Social Lab Revolution: A New Approach to Solving our Most Complex Challenges

Presenter:  Zaid Hassan, Co-Founder – Reos Partners

Zaid presents insights from his new book by this name.  Zaid builds on a decade of experience—as well as drawing from cutting-edge research in complexity science, networking theory, and sociology—to explain the core principles and daily functioning of social labs, using examples of pioneering labs from around the world.

5) Wednesday, May 21: Developing Large Systems Change Leadership

Presenter:  Klaus Althoff, Senior Programme Manager, Climate Leadership Plus – Leadership for Global Responsibility of Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ)

Integrating the work of numerous large change experts, in particular Otto Scharmer, Klaus is leading a programme to develop individuals’ capacity to be transformational leaders to address climate change.  He will share GIZ’s leadership development approach and lessons from its use.  Leadership for Global Responsibility is value-oriented, competency-based and rooted in a commitment to global well-being. It fosters responsible leadership with a self-reflective attitude and the ability to take ambitious and innovative action.

Part 1 described global energy as a change system with five subsystems.  The question was then asked: “What makes a (sub) system successful?” and “What must it do well, in order to realize its change goal?” Academically, these questions lead to questions about “functions” or “activities” that are necessary for systems and networks to be effective. A review of answers to these questions led to development of Table 1, where seven activities are identified.

Visioning: Sustainable Energy for All (SE4All) is playing a pre-eminent system-wide role in this. It is creating a much broader vision than the climate change one associated with the Kyoto Process by including issues of access. It is creating coherence amongst intergovernmental organizations: the World Bank, for example, has categorically adopted the SE4All goals as its own. However, every change initiative has its own particular focus that is the basis for its work and is critical for it to mobilize action. The Electricity Governance Initiative, for example, holds a vision of an electricity sector that is transparent, inclusive and has accountable decision-making. Issues of effectiveness of the change system raise the question about whether the individual visions are sufficiently aligned with the broad change system one and the individual subsystem ones.

Organizing: The change system requires organizing of effort and stakeholders in ways that provide coherent aggregation of voice into appropriate scale. The change initiatives themselves represent system organizing for their participants. This is obviously true for the change initiatives in the global arena:  each has brought numerous organizations together to play the particular function. The trade associations for renewables such as the Global Solar Alliance play a key role in organizing voice and effort of their emerging industry. The Climate Action Network is playing an important role in creating a global voice for NGOs.  However, organizing is also a significant challenge for change initiatives within an organization such as a utility. The consumer subsystem is probably the most under-organized, even though it has a critical role in the arising “pro-sumer” world.

Resourcing: Provision of financial and personnel resources is something that is foundational for any of the change initiatives to be able to play their roles. For the study population of global networks, resources typically are provided by organizations participating in change initiatives; in some cases particular for NGOs and research work this is supplement by government or foundation funding. The development banks, like the African Development Bank, are big funders in the policy and service provider subsystems. Climateworks is a collaboration of foundations funding change globally.

Learning: This is an absolutely critical function to address complex change challenges, which requires new ways of thinking about issues and taking action. Mindsets and capacities are key issues at the individual, organizational and system levels. The change initiatives are generally involved in more mundane but also critical learning challenges about development and exchange of knowledge arising from prototyping. For example, REN21 provides a pre-eminent multi-stakeholder network for collective knowledge products. The World Energy Council is a multi-stakeholder network that focuses on creating events, exchanges and publications to realize an affordable, stable and environmentally sensitive energy system for the greatest benefit of all. The UNEP with developing country governments, and ICLEI Local Governments for Sustainability, also provide critical capacity development for their respective stakeholders.

Measuring: Many different measures are needed for each of the subsystems. Policy making requires a different array of measures, such as those developed by the UNFCCC on national level carbon emissions. Both the policy and consumption subsystems depend on standards-setting measures such as those produced by Collaborative Labeling & Appliance Standards Program (CLASP);  the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) develops measures for companies’ and cities’ carbon emissions to influence investors in the finance subsystem and the consumption subsystem.

Advocating: A change subsystem can simply be a subsystem without a change dynamic, if there is no pressure and energy for change. The Principles for Responsible Investment and the Global Investor Coalition on Climate Change and its members such as CERES’ Investors Network are good examples of advocating within the finance community.

Prototyping: This could be considered part of the learning function, but it is so critical to change that it is separated out as its own function. It is usually associated with new technologies, such as is being done with the MIT Energy Initiative. However, actually testing new ways of organizing, new policies, new financial products, and ideas to influence consumption are important as well.  The Renewable Energy Energy Efficiency Partnership (REEEP) focuses on prototyping both new technologies and financing approaches.

Putting together the change system as five subsystems and functions produced a Change System Matrix that became the focus of a 1.5 day meeting for leaders of change in the energy arena where they identified strategic actions to strengthen efforts to integrate sustainability into electricity production.  This will be the topic of the next blog.

This is the second of two blogs on this topic.  To see the first go here;  to see the third go here.

Part 1 introduced the concept of change system and five subsystems through a project on the global change system for electricity;  Part 2 described the seven functions necessary for these systems to be effective.  In this blog, these are integrated into a tool called the Systemic Change Matrix (SCM) that supports specific identification of high leverage interventions to strengthen the effectiveness of change initiatives and systems. Putting these pieces together in the SCM was  the focus of a 1.5 day meeting with people who were with global electricity change initiatives and the Project Team. Individuals are or recently were working with IRENA, the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), ICLEI Local Governments for Sustainability, the Electricity Governance Initiative and Acea (the City of Rome electric utility).  That experience supported the proposition that the SCM is both sufficiently comprehensive and comprehensible with a modest amount of effort, and spurred operational insights and proposals for action.

Following description of the change system for electricity in terms of five subsystems and seven activities (functions) required for them to be effective, meeting participants were asked how the programs of change initiatives they were familiar with would fit in the matrix. The participants filled in the cells that resulted in an SCM with cells where several change initiatives were active, and some where there was little or no activity. Of course this was incomplete and is also being done through the project research. However, this was done at the meeting to engage participants with their own knowledge and test the SCM’s usefulness. It raised questions for participants about overall coherence and convergence. In particular, it raised questions about gaps in necessary activity and the quality of initiatives’ strategic focus. It also raised questions about overlaps, redundancies and coordination within cells, while recognizing that most cells required action by several change initiatives. For example, measurement in policy requires various measures to inform policy makers. But is there a comprehensive set of measures and are they sufficiently standardized? How do those working in the cells interact?

Table 3: The Systemic Change matrix (SCM)

Participants easily grasped the concept of a change system and identified questions about how their own change initiatives’ actions could be strengthened by thinking in terms of their roles in a change system.  They also identified the need to develop a willingness amongst change initiatives to interact differently to realize this benefit. Discussion pointed out that the subsystems boundaries are changing with respect to the distinctions between consumers and service providers with the rise of “prosumers“. The change system focus brought up the overarching issue of the traditional production system being resistant to change for a variety of reasons, and that resilience and adaptive capacity are key qualities that the change subsystems must encourage the production system to develop. It also raised questions about how the systems change approach can deal with the issues of power in its many forms. Discussion also pointed to the importance of including changing mindsets in the learning function (added to the earlier Learning Function description). An additional question is about the role of stakeholders in each cell – are the complement and number of stakeholders necessary for the cell to be effectively developed sufficiently engaged?

These questions about generation of coherence and convergence lead to discussion about the next actions of the Lab. Some categories for action emerged that could be also combined in various ways:

• By geography: Regional, national and subnational jurisdictions can be the basis for applying the analysis to improve change efforts. Given the national level is critical for electricity system change, it appears a particularly appropriate level to focus on.
• By subsystems: Looking across the functions of a subsystem could help deepen success of a particular subsystem.
• By change initiative: Participants saw value in applying the SCM to their own activities to sharpen their own strategy and priorities.
• By change project or technology: Issues surrounding a particular activity such as a cross-boundary transmission line or adoption of a decentralized energy grid could benefit from the SCM approach.
• By cell(s) within the SCM: There could be value in taking on a particular function within or across one or more subsystems. For example, who is doing measuring in the public policy and finance subsystems? Collectively are the measuring activities comprehensive? Are their issues of integration and comparability?

Action in one or more of these categories will be advanced as an action research experiment designed to further refine the change systems approach and realize change. This will be done with 5-6 people from change initiatives become Stewards to guide the development of this project and further action by the Energy Ecosystem Lab more broadly.

Anyone working on big change issues should have an eye to mega system changes. Five of these are laid out as the basis for optimistic directions – the megatrends to ride and amplify – in Thinking the Twenty-First Century: Ideas for the new political economy. The author, Malcolm McIntosh, is a good colleague and a person who has had an unusual window on the dawning of the 21^st century globally through: convening conversations with the UN Global Compact;

the last five years as the Founding Director of the APCSE Asia Pacific Centre for Sustainable Enterprise, Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia – he is now back living in the UK; Founding Editor of the Journal of Corporate Citizenship; and previous careers in business and for BBC television. His years in journalism with the BBC are reflected in the easy and personal read of the book. He expected posthumous publication due to medical predictions of death – erroneous, thankfully – which gives the book an intense reflective quality drawing from many great thinkers. The book, Malcolm explains is the product of a former “miserabilist”, now reborn an optimist.

Mega System Change 1: Globality. The earth presented in 1968 images from the moon is both a metaphor and a force for a change to Earth awareness. Out of our fractured identities of ethnicity, religion, race, work, nation, community, is a growing sense of shared interest in the cosmic speck of our planet. In this world, Malcolm claims that “megadata is the new governance”. Information and technology are increasingly the ties that bind on a planetary scale. Malcolm asserts that the systems change megatrend challenge is to speak and act from a whole Earth perspective. This is the heart of the sustainability revolution and a sixth technological revolution of clean tech, biotech, and nanotech. Realizing our highest potential involves answering two questions:

• What does it mean to be human now, that we know what we know about ourselves?
• What is our relationship with the planet now that we know about the state of the planet?

Mega System Change 2: Rebalancing science and awe. Science is presented as what we know and what we know we don’t know. Awe is mystery…the unknown unknown. Martin Rees is cited: “What’s important and interesting is the pattern and structure – the emergent complexity…the Grand Design has no relevance to most of the things that humans value…perhaps our brains don’t have enough conceptual grasp.” It is reminiscent of Gregory Bateson’s call for re-enchantment of the world and his ecology of mind; Jung’s collective consciousness; and Capra’s hidden connections. Cold hard facts associated with a narrow definition of science are of course important, but they are not separate from, nor should they be thought to dominate, the magical possibilities that arise from awe. Our civilization (of emerging globality) is not to be simply designed to an end such as GDP, but towards nurturing unknown possibilities that transcend traditional perspectives on “what’s possible”. Charles Darwin is cited: “It is not the strongest species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change.”

Mega System Change 3: Co-existence, peace and feminization: The feminine – as in nurturing, caring, sharing and social cohesion – is growing. Perhaps the best indication is growing awareness of how much more of it is needed. Another indication is that although the first half of the 20^th century was among the bloodiest, in the second half the world was a peaceful as it has ever been in terms of deaths from wars. This shift is seen in the growing challenge to growth, having and doing, in favor of balance with being here, now.

Mega System Change 4: Re-organizing and the political economy: The economists, social scientists, social activists and environmentalists are increasingly seeing the importance of talking together, rather than past each other. Pressure is growing on the current model of capitalism for deep change in terms of management and governance to integrate feminisation. This will produce new answers for holding to account, for example, Black Rock investment company and its $14 trillion directly traded assets and $11 trillion traded overseas. The trend is being felt by growing recognition that we are reaching a breaking point in social contracts between markets, enterprise, freedom, accountability, good governance, the rule of law, mutuality and recognition of the intrinsic value of labor and the Earth.

Mega System Change 5: Quiet leadership: evolution, adaptation, learning: There is an emerging soft leadership represented by the explosive growth of multi-stakeholder fora. This responds to the need for “an understanding of complex interactions and connections involving systems, and systems within systems”. The rise of the concept of “sustainability” in its many forms is being accompanied by moving from linear planning models to ones of emergence grounded in evolution, adaptation and learning.

Malcolm presents his trends as the product of a reborn optimist. It is easy to cite evidence contrary to his views – is awe really growing or the demand for paying attention to “cold, hard facts” in very traditional linear terms? Is peace growing when terrorism is growing exponentially?   Is re-organizing happening, or is the financial system simply reasserting its order? Was 1950 to 1980 really a “golden age” for leadership, when you reflect on the status of race, women and gay people? And there is no doubt that there is much sharpening that would be valuable in the presentation of the trends which often veers towards mixing them together.

However, just as with scenario development, articulating the five trends provides guidance for large systems change efforts. Malcolm has specifically written from a system change perspective and is proposing that amplifying these five system changes in large system change work is of great value. Even if today the strength of the five is open for debate, the most valuable debate is about whether these are five key system changes that will take us to the highest aspired futures. In fact, the key uniting trend needed is to move to a systems understanding.

These five trends are wrapped up with a call to revive “political economy” and rebalancing politics and economy – echoing French academic Thomas Picketty who wrote Capital in the Twenty-First Century.   It is a battle over people, profits and planet to cite the WWF, and mechanisms for decision-making for the public good. “The new international political economy must be founded on systems thinking and incorporate the five issues raised in this book.”

Reflection on the blog from Malcolm:

I say in the book that these five systems changes are both nascent and ineluctable. They can be slowed down by the forces of inertia and reaction but not stopped. If they are slowed down too much humanity has no future on planet Earth beyond this century. But I am an optimist and argue that if we are genuinely ‘awe-full’ we can know that we cannot know everything and it is possible to envisage different futures . . .

As for Steve’s argument that the world is not as peaceful as I say, it is true that violence against women and children is increasing as men have fewer outlets for their aggression and learn, very slowly, to pacify and civilize their behavior. We do see more images of violence everyday but violence has not increased in the last half century but it is more readily, instantly and constantly available – or shoved in our faces – by social media and the 24 hour news frenzy. Two decades ago you could not have seen a beheading online, or a plane crash as it happened, or talked to a friend face to face on the other side of the world (as I did with Steve last week). Our ideas are being shaped by technology and our behaviors and institutions have not caught up.

Finally, it’s different where you are now – wherever you are now – because, despite the global hegemony of the news and images industries we do still have localism. Many countries have not had capital punishment for many years; many countries have equal rights for women, and in some countries it is women who are the entrepreneurs and the majority in parliament; most countries have gun control; half the world has clean water. We all speak different languages despite global media, and some people live good lives under totalitarian regimes, while some democracies are despicable when it comes to human rights and social mobility. Diversity reigns, but the drift is slowly, very slowly, I argue in my book in a direction that could, if we let it, save us from ourselves.