Systems are everywhere. Or rather, systems are everything. There's a considerable misconception that to systematize something means to take a mess and turn it into something orderly—a 'system.' But this misses something crucial.
The 'mess' you're trying to systematize is already part of the input or output of another system (or systems). It might be part of a learning system, an identity formation system, or a family system. One of the reasons our efforts to 'systematize' fail is that we neglect the vast network of systems all around us.
In this edition of 3 Ideas, we’ll examine that vast network of systems through Georgina Voss's Systems Ultra: Making Sense of Technology in a Complex World.
"At their core," explains Voss, "systems are about the relationships between things, and then the relationships between those relationships." She also notes that trying to make sense of systems is a uniquely challenging problem because all of those relationships are hard to describe in words. In attempting to overcome this challenge, we rely on metaphors, which inevitably inject an additional system of meanings, values, and power dynamics into the mix.
Voss's project aims to "[tie] together the strange and specific and often spectacular and sublime ways in which systemic forms punctuate our lives, but also to be attuned to the metaphors and allegories which shape these experiences." In the process, Voss provides much-needed context for how we think about systems on a macro and micro level, a political and personal level, and an entrepreneurial and social level.
1. To buck the system, you have to see the system
Voss writes:
Throughout its history, the idea of systems has become expert at peeling apart the relations from the context, replicating and reinforcing the power structures that sustain it. This is why a systems literacy is particularly vital when challenging tradition and working towards dismantling social inequity.
Change is difficult for many reasons—but chief among them is any change we want to make is embedded in a system.
We're not just changing a habit, telling a new brand story, or adopting a new project management routine. We're attempting to reorganize or redirect a powerful system, which is likely part of other powerful systems.
While Voss focuses on social injustice in the passage above, I want to stick with the more micro-entrepreneurial level for a moment. Consider one of the changes I just mentioned: telling a new brand story. A brand is a collection of memories, experiences, and impressions. That collection is a system widely distributed among anyone who has come in contact with the brand in the past. Telling a new brand story might be the first step in influencing that system, but the change won't happen overnight. Or over a month. Or, very likely, even over a year.
The new story has to overwrite the old story.
People who interact with the brand must accumulate enough new memories, experiences, and impressions to overcome the cognitive inertia of the old story. It's a slow process, especially for anyone who has interacted with the brand at length.
Zooming out now, this whole process is magnified when we talk about social and political systems that stretch back decades or centuries. Racism is such an intractable problem because it persists in the tissue of systems we come into contact with daily: housing, transportation, financial institutions, hiring, education, and more. The same is true of misogyny, heteronormativity, anti-immigrant sentiment, and other pervasive forms of oppression.
How do you end a problem like racism when it's encoded into the very streets we travel on every day? How do we change hearts and minds when racism is baked into our collective social history and our family stories? I don't pose these questions because they're impossible to answer. I pose them because it's impossible to answer them if we don't ask them first. We can't ask them, as Voss argues, without systems literacy.
To circle back to the work and business context, systems literacy provides a path to truly operationalizing values. Systems literacy is the difference between saying, for instance, that you value a restful workplace and actually creating a restful workplace. It's the difference between saying you value an inclusive workplace or customer experience and actually building an inclusive workplace or customer experience.
Operationalizing values and resisting harmful ways of working and doing business require us to ask how we can change not only a particular policy or action but also how that policy or action fits into other systems.
2. Metaphors mean more than we think
"Systems can be more easily comprehended second-hand and indirectly; that is, as metaphor," explains Voss.
Voss offers the phrase 'a stitch in time saves nine' as an example. This phrase reminds us that it's more efficient to take your time and do something right than to rush and redo the work. That description still verges on the metaphorical because it describes how systems experience feedback delays, which amplify problems over time, leading to unnecessary hassle to solve them.
So systems exist both in concrete, diagrammable and traceable ways and in conceptual, metaphorical ways. If we only address the concrete aspects of a system, we'll miss how the system is interpreted and how that interpretation influences other systems. If we only address the conceptual component, we might miss the concrete details that materially impact people's lives, our businesses, and even the body politic.
Consider the oft-repeated imperative 'Pull yourself up by your bootstraps.' Metaphorically, this might feel reasonable; people are responsible for improving their lives and have the means to do so if they work hard. However, as soon as you consider the concrete components of the phrase's implication, the idea completely breaks down. It ignores the systems that have deprived whole communities of equality of education, upward mobility, and access to opportunity. Within our concrete systems, not everyone has bootstraps, let alone the ability to pull them up.
Metaphors are incredibly useful for communicating the broad strokes of a system. They can also show us which values we're highlighting and which we're disregarding.
Voss pays special attention to the way that metaphors contribute to stigma. Citing Erving Goffman's work, she considers how stigma can't exist without the social or institutional systems that deem it outside the 'norm.' She explains, "A characteristic [is] just a characteristic—it [is] society that judged it lesser and penalised [it] accordingly." Those with the power to shape norms via social and institutional systems have the power to stigmatize characteristics, identities, and ways of being in the world.
3. Blame travels downhill
When the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore collapsed on March 26, everyone wanted to know how something like this could happen: How does a massive container ship run into a major thruway?
Some politicians, pundits, and influencers had an answer: DEI. They pointed to Brandon Scott, the mayor of Baltimore, Wes Moore, governor of Maryland, and a commissioner for the Port of Baltimore—all Black leaders—and tried to pin the accident on diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts within the Maryland government.
Referencing Madeleine Claire Elish's research, Voss explains:
If the system works as planned, success gets attributed to the efficacy of technology; if it fails, human operators are blamed.
Further, the human operators who are blamed often have 'limited control' over the situation. Elish attributes this to what she calls the 'moral crumple zone.' Blame gets pinned on those who are deemed expendable. Certainly, governors, mayors, and port commissioners have more power than the average person—often a frontline worker—caught in the moral crumple zone. But they're also far downstream of the structural, commercial, and transportation systems that contributed to the disaster.
Instead of investigating the systems, some jumped to blame people they would prefer didn't hold power.
This reinforces the existing systems, likely leading to future accidents and disasters rather than preventing them. The same thing happens in the United States every time there is a school shooting. Those who prefer the status quo seek to blame kids, parents, security guards, and teachers rather than address the obvious problems with our legal system of gun ownership and our cultural system of glorifying violence.
Voss's project operates on a mass scale—the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse is an apt example of that scale. But this idea of pinning blame on agents with limited control can also be applied to our daily work lives.
Who do you blame when you're overwhelmed at work? When you can't make heads or tails of a project management system? When your content fails to garner the likes and shares it once did?
Many of us blame ourselves. We see ourselves inside the moral crumple zone—our own needs, values, and ways of being are expendable in the face of an imperfect system.
While finding ways to adapt may be an effective strategy for coping with imperfect systems, ultimately, it's not what leads to systemic change. We can't resist burdensome systems as long as we willingly and unthinkingly take the blame for systemic failings. When we blame ourselves, the system becomes harder to see. If we allow ourselves to identify as 'lazy,' 'disorganized,' or 'unproductive,' we miss the problems in the system as it's designed. We miss the system's power dynamics and how it incentivizes certain behaviors to accomplish particular aims.
That brings us right back to the first idea. If we want to change systems, we have to recognize them for what they are. We must be willing to feel out the relationships between one system and another.
I'll give the final word to Georgina Voss:
Harnessing all of this knowledge of how the system works, how it feels, where the stories about it have come from, how it breaks, are necessary, to mend and repair and maintain if we need to; but also to hack it and tear it down; to refuse its power, if we want to.
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