Implementation Tips & Tricks: The Power of Individual Behavior in Complex Challenges and Complex Systems
By Lucinda J. Garthwaite, Founding Director, Institute for Liberatory Innovation
Complex challenges, we’re often told, require complex solutions. I think that assumption misses a critical point.
All systems are in essence complex, made of parts interacting with each other and the surrounding environment. And all systems — whether nature- or human-made, made of widgets, trees, or people — respond to changes in relationships between their parts.
Organizations are systems made up of human relationships and artifacts — things people create to get work done. All of that interacts with the world around the organization, and the worlds around the people in it. In even the smallest of organizations, that’s enough moving parts to make any head spin.
Using leverage points in a complex system
There’s hubris, arguably, in imagining an intervention that matches that complexity. Enter leverage points. Systems scientist Donella Meadows’ now classic definition of leverage points is, “places within a complex system where a small shift in one thing can produce big changes in everything.”
Leverage points are generally described as places to intervene in a system. Like a gardener, discovering a stone most obstructing well-tilled soil, who digs around the stone, learns its shape, and leans on a sturdy bar to move it, the systems practitioner applies the weight of their analysis and skill to make shifts that promise big changes throughout the organization.
This implementation of complex systems thinking is most often in the form of an intervention, that is, doing something to the system. Indeed, implementation scholars often define systems intervention in terms of acting on barriers, policies, procedures and regulations. [1]
These two assumptions, that responses to complex systemic challenges must be complex, and that they must take the form of interventions, leaves out the most accessible leverage point of all: our own individual behavior.
When relationships change, so do systems. The path to changed relationships is changed individual behavior. That means that no matter what position one holds in a system, there is something to do to change it. Admittedly, the size of the ripple one makes on the pond will depend on degrees of institutional and personal power, but ripples always change something, and change always leads to more change. And importantly, it’s often the people with the most institutional power who do the acting on, ignoring the impact of their own behavior.
My research interest is in ever-increasing thriving and ever-decreasing violence in all its myriad forms, organizationally and socially. What I’ve come to learn in that endeavor intersects with wisdom both old and emerging, affirming principles like curiosity, humility, accountability, compassion and non-violence. Personal behaviors aligned with such principles include careful attention, earnest questions, deep apology, expressions of care, and, importantly, keeping in check fears, ideologies and self-righteousness that lead to violence.
This is not intervention and it is not complex. It is a simple practice, which like all practice requires failure to succeed. Taken up earnestly with intention, personal practice may well be the most critical implementation of complex systems there this.
[1] See for example, this module from the National Implementation Research Network, at the University of North Carolina.
Lucinda Garthwaite is an experienced organizational leader, strategist, educator, writer and consultant, and the Founding Director of the Institute for Liberatory Innovation, dedicated to learning and action for a more equitable and non-violent future.
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