A lot of my work involves community engagement programmes, partnership processes or other initiatives where many of different agencies or interests have to collaborate towards some common goals if anything much is to be achieved. There's lots of stakeholders in the system... but all to often the more powerful agencies (and their consultants) act is if they could play God and just move everyone around. So surveys are done, analyses carried out, recommendations made, reports written ... and surprise, little changes. I suggest instead taking a "systems approach" - without really knowing as much as I should what that means. I can usually cover by proposing a game or simulation that helps people play through the options.
Because I recently met Michael Gilbert I was particularly alert to his latest Non Profit Online News and delighted to find a particularly useful reference. Michael wrote: "Whenever I lecture about a systems approach to communication strategy and organizational change, people want more resources. Often, I point them to some fairly esoteric stuff. But I was recently reminded of Donella Meadows' 1997 work on Places to Intervene in a System, and I recommend it to anyone trying to find leverage points for change in a networked world. It's essential reading for funders, consultants and nonprofit leaders."
Donella offers a nine-point check list of ways to intervene in a system
9. Numbers (subsidies, taxes, standards).
8. Material stocks and flows.
7. Regulating negative feedback loops.
6. Driving positive feedback loops.
5. Information flows.
4. The rules of the system (incentives, punishment, constraints).
3. The power of self-organization.
2. The goals of the system.
1. The mindset or paradigm out of which the goals, rules, feedback structure arise.
... and adds a further one
0. The power to transcend paradigms.
She writes: "Sorry, but to be truthful and complete, I have to add this kicker.
"The highest leverage of all is to keep oneself unattached in the arena of paradigms, to realize that NO paradigm is "true," that even the one that sweetly shapes one's comfortable worldview is a tremendously limited understanding of an immense and amazing universe.
"It is to "get" at a gut level the paradigm that there are paradigms, and to see that that itself is a paradigm, and to regard that whole realization as devastatingly funny. It is to let go into Not Knowing."
That sounds like the reality of "life is messy". The problem is how to sell it to clients who want "answers".
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