The struggle to have both a good personal life and a good career arises from a dominant societal image of the ideal worker as “career-primary,” the person who is able and willing to put work first, and for whom work time is infinitely expandable. This view translates into work practices that include dawn meetings; planning sessions that run into the evening, often ending with the suggestion to “continue this over dinner”; and training programs requiring long absences from home. Commitment is measured by what one manager proudly declared as his definition of a star engineer: “someone who doesn’t know enough to go home at night.” At lower levels in the organization, the belief in the dominance of work translates into tight controls over worker time and flexibility.

In situations where “ideal workers” are assumed to be those whose first allegiance is to the job, people with career aspirations go to great lengths to keep personal issues from intruding into work. Some people give false reasons for leaving work early: They feel that attending a community board or civic meeting is not likely to brand them as uncommitted, while taking a child for a physical might. Some secretly take children on business trips. Others leave their computers on while picking up children from sporting events, hoping that colleagues passing by will think they are in a meeting.

When Individuals Try to Change

BUSINESS CASE FOR RELINKING WORK AND FAMILY

As management’s support of family-sensitive work practices rises, employees experience less work-family conflict, leading to greater worker satisfaction and better quality of work.

Some workers, because of their positions, their financial resources, or their perceived value as employees, are themselves able, at times, to forge satisfactory links between work and family. The rest simmer with discontent. In all cases, energy and loyalty are diverted unnecessarily from the organization (see “Can Your Company Benefit from Relinking?”). Because people feel powerless to deal with these concerns on their own, relevant work-related issues cannot be discussed at the collective level, where real systemic change might yield significant business and personal results.

When individuals change, but the system remains the same, there may be unexpected negative consequences for both. For example, one team leader arranged a four-day schedule to cut down on a long commute and to spend more time with her children. Not only did this arrangement serve her needs, but because the team leader rotated group members to take her place on the fifth day, she developed their self-management skills. By all measures, including productivity and satisfaction, the group was thriving. But the arrangement did not last long. In the end, the manager was stripped of her supervisory duties and moved to the bottom category of performance. Management regarded the team leader’s efforts as a negative reflection of her future potential and management capability. Similarly, a full-time sales technician who negotiated earlier hours was forced to give up the arrangement because her managers were unwilling to adjust their daily demands to conform to the schedule they had approved. From the beginning, the managers imposed so many “exceptions” that the employee was putting in extra hours and was unable to pick up

her child at school much of the time — the reason she wanted the earlier hours in the first place. In the end, she reverted to her old schedule and became very disillusioned.

In this context, it is not surprising that managers typically view requests for flexibility as risky to grant. Even though they may sympathize and want to grant such requests, especially when it comes to their most valued employees, they worry about the potential negative consequences of allowing such arrangements. Not only do they worry that productivity might suffer, but they fear that, in negotiating and monitoring these special arrangements, they might have an increased workload. As a result, managers often end up sending negative signals indicating that the use of flexible, family-friendly benefits is a problem for them and for the company as a whole.

The important point is that it is problematic when work-family issues are viewed as individual concerns to be addressed only through flexible work practices, sensitive managers, and individual accommodations. This approach often fails the individuals involved, and it may lead to negative career repercussions. More important, by viewing these issues as problems, companies miss opportunities for creative change. For example, management could have perceived the unusual arrangement of the team leader with the four-day schedule as a chance to embrace this innovative work practice and to rethink the criteria for effective management. Similarly, the revised schedule of the sales technician could have been an opportunity to rethink the way time is used in the organization.

Consider, also, the following example: two workers, one in sales and one in management, requested a job-sharing arrangement that would have allowed each of them to spend more time with their families. In an extensive proposal, they outlined how they would meet business needs under the new arrangement. As an added benefit, they also suggested a way to revamp the management development process so that a sales representative, working under the guidance of a sales manager, took on limited management duties. Such an apprenticeship model promised to be a significant improvement over the existing practice of “throwing sales people into management” with little training. Nevertheless, the company rejected the proposal because it was seen as stemming from a private concern (a desire for more personal time) rather than a work concern (a wish to increase the organization’s effectiveness), and the opportunity was missed.

Thus, despite the potential benefits to the company, making the link between work and employees’ personal lives in today’s business environment is, to say the least, not easy. Significant organizational barriers — for example, assumptions about what makes a good worker, how productivity is achieved, and how rewards are distributed — militate against such linkage. Work-family benefits are often designed and administered by the human resource function but implemented by line managers. Associating strategic initiatives with line managers and work-family concerns with human resources reinforces perceptions that business issues are separate, conceptually and functionally, from individuals’ personal lives.

Putting Work-Family Issues on the Table

Putting work-family concerns on the table as legitimate issues for discussion in the workplace turns out to be liberating. By talking about such issues, people realize that they are not alone in struggling to meet work and family/ personal demands. Such discussions help people see that the problems are not solely of their own making, but stem from the way work is done today. The process of transforming personal issues to the collective level engages people’s interest and leads to more creative ways of thinking. It also provides a strategic business opportunity that, if exploited correctly, can lead to improved bottom-line results (see “Business Case for Relinking Work and Family” on p. 1).

For example, at one site we documented the work practices of “integrated” individuals — people who link the two spheres of their life in the way they work. We found that integrated individuals draw not only on skills, competencies, and behaviors typical of the public, work sphere, such as rationality, linear thinking, assertiveness, and competition, but also on those associated with the private, personal sphere, such as collaboration, sharing, empathy, and nurturing. Their work practices include working behind the scenes to smooth difficulties between people that might disrupt the project, going out of their way to pass on key information to other groups, taking the time from their individual work to teach someone a new way of doing something, building on rather than attacking others’ ideas in meetings, and routinely affirming and acknowledging the contributions of others. We showed the value-added nature of this work—the way it prevented problems, enhanced organizational learning, and encouraged collaboration. Offering a new vision of the ideal worker as an integrated individual, someone who brings skills to the job from both spheres of life, helps the organization recognize the importance of hiring and retaining such individuals.

Where appropriate, we also pointed out to management the dissonance between policy and practice. For example, at an administrative site, despite the presence of a wide range of work-family policies, managers limited their use to very minor changes in daily work times. Employees dealt with the situation by “jiggling the system” on an ad hoc, individual basis to achieve the flexibility they needed, often by using sick days or vacation time. Thus, for instance, a man whose mother was chronically ill had to take a combination of sick days and vacation days to be with her. The costs to the site for this companywide behavior were considerable in terms of unplanned absences, lack of coverage, turnover, and backlash against people who took the time they needed. It also created employee mistrust of an organization that claimed it had benefits but made using them so difficult that the result was lower morale and widespread cynicism.

By bringing family to bear on work, we also focused attention on the process by which work is accomplished (see “How Long Hours Become the Norm”). In one sales environment, for example, we found that a sales team habitually worked around the clock to complete proposals for prospective customers. In the morning, the workers were rewarded with cheers from managers and coworkers, complimenting them on their commitment and willingness to get the job done. In response to our interventions, one manager recognized that this behavior reflected poor work habits and made it tough on these people’s family lives. Not only were their families suffering, but it took several days for these workers to recover, during which time they were less productive.

The manager told his team that their behavior demonstrated an inability to plan. He also began to share his perceptions with other managers. As a result, the sales team began to recognize and reward new work habits such as planning ahead and anticipating problems rather than waiting until they were crises.

We have found that changes in work practices can be brought about by looking at work through a work-family lens, linking what is learned from that process to a salient business need, and pushing for change at each step of the process (see “The Synergy of Linking Work and Family”). We begin to make the systemic link between work practice and work-family integration by engaging three lines of questioning:

• How does work get done around here?
• What are the employees’ personal stories of work-family integration?
• What is it about the way work gets done around here that makes it difficult (or easy) to integrate work and personal life so that neither one suffers? Ultimately, however, success also depends on the existence of two specific conditions:
• a safe environment that minimizes individual risk, freeing employees to take part in the change; and
• room in the process for engaging people’s resistance — in other words, addressing their objections, concerns, and underlying feelings with a view toward creating options that were not previously envisioned.<;i>

Creating Safety and Engaging Resistance

By giving people permission to talk about their feelings and their personal dilemmas in the context of redesigning work, a surprising level of energy, creativity, and innovative thinking gets released. But raising these issues may not be easy for those who fear they will be branded as less committed or undependable if they acknowledge such difficulties. At the same time, managers who are used to viewing gains for the family as productivity losses for the business may fear they will bear all the risks of innovation.

Therefore, collaboration and sharing the risks across the organization are important aspects of the process. In concrete terms, this means getting some sign from senior managers that they are willing to suspend, if only temporarily, some of the standard operating procedures that the work groups have identified as barriers both to work-family integration and to productivity. Such a signal from upper management also helps people believe that cultural change is possible and provides higher-level support to individual managers seeking to bring about change. The point is that employees need concrete evidence that they are truly able to control some of the conditions that affect their own productivity. And managers need assurance that they will not be penalized for experimenting in this fashion.

The process of relinking work to family creates resistance because it touches core beliefs about society, success, gender roles, and the place of work and family in our lives. We found, however, that such resistance almost always points to something important that needs to be acknowledged and addressed collaboratively.

Engaging with this type of resistance means listening to and learning from people’s objections, incorporating their concerns and new ideas, and working together to establish a dual agenda. To be effective, the process cannot be shortchanged. It requires trust, openness, and a willingness to learn from others.

Challenges

The next challenge is how to sustain these efforts over the long term and to diffuse them beyond the local sites. Lasting organizational change requires mutual learning by individuals, by the group, and by the system as a whole. It is important to continue to keep the double agenda on the table, ensuring that benefits from the change process continue to accrue to employees and their families as well as to the organization. If not, the individual energy unleashed will dissipate — triggering anger and mistrust within the organization.

What’s more, if local changes are to be sustained and if lessons from them are to be diffused, the work needs to be legitimized so that operational successes become widely known. Given the tendency to marginalize and individualize work-family issues, the overt support of senior management is essential here. Such support reinforces “work-family” as a business issue that is owned by the corporation as a whole.

Lasting change also requires an infrastructure, a process for carrying the lessons learned and the methodology used to other parts of the organization. In one organization, that process took the form of an operations steering committee working hand-in-hand with the research team to carry on the work in other parts of the corporation.

Our experience also suggests that multiple points of diffusion must exist. We sought opportunities, for instance, to present our work as part of special events as well as operational reviews and to look for internal allies among line managers, people involved in organizational change, and so on. Diffusion is also a challenge because, as people reflect on how the various operational pilots meet business needs, they tend to want to pass on to other teams only the results that yielded the productivity gains, rather than information about the process itself. This tendency shortchanges the process and seriously undermines the chances for replicating its success and sustainability.

Conclusion

As corporations continue to restructure and reinvent themselves, linking such change efforts to employees’ personal concerns greatly enhances their chances for success. Such relinking energizes employees to participate fully in the process because there are personal benefits to be gained. It also uncovers hidden or ignored assumptions about work practices and organizational cultures that can undermine the changes envisioned.

But relinking work and family is not something that can be accomplished simply by wishing it were so or by pointing out the negative consequences of separation. It is something that touches the very core of our beliefs about society, success, and gender. And it implies rethinking the place of families and communities and a new look at how we can nurture and strengthen these vital building blocks of our society.

The assumed separation of the domestic and nondomestic spheres breeds inequality, since present practices, structures, and policies — at all levels of society — favor the economic sphere above all others. As a result, employment concerns are assumed to take precedence over other concerns; achievement in the employment sector is assumed to be the major source of self-esteem and the measure of personal success. And, since employment skills are most highly valued and compensated, they dominate government, educational, and organizational policy

In the end, the goal of relinking work and family life is not simple and it is not just about being “whole.” It is about shifting to a more equitable society in which family and community are valued as much as paid work is valued, and where men and women have equal opportunity to achieve in both spheres. Such change is possible and provides real benefits not only to individuals and their families, but also to business and society.

Suggested Further Reading

Bailyn, L., Breaking the Mold: Women, Men and Time in the New Corporate World. Free Press, 1993.

Hochschild, A., The Second Shift: Working Parents and the Revolution at Home. Avon Books, 1997.

Perlow, L., Finding Time: How Corporations, Individuals, and Families Can Benefit from New Work Practices. Cornell University Press, 1997.

Schor, J., The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure. Basic Books, 1993.

This article is excerpted from Relinking Life and Work: Toward a Better Future (Pegasus Communications, 1998), which is an edited version of a report originally published by the Ford Foundation.

Rhona Rapoport is co-director of the Institute of Family and Environmental Research in London, England. Lotte Bailyn is the T Wilson (1953) Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Deborah Kolb is professor of management at the Simmons Graduate School of Management and director of the Simmons Institute on Gender and Organizations. Joyce K. Fletcher is professor of management at the Simmons Graduate School of Management. Contributing authors include Dana E. Friedman, Barbara Miller, Susan Eaton, and Maureen Harvey.

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Likewise, in a time when the global system is spiraling toward unprecedented change, those of us who want to make a difference must jump into a rabbit’s hole in order to understand and change our reality. The other option is to remain standing at the edge, looking down, and endlessly treating the symptoms of much deeper problems, both out of sight and out of control.

Changing the Paradigm

The late Donella Meadows, a renowned systems thinker, converted the metaphor of the hole into systems language in her essay, “Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in the System” (Sustainability Institute paper, 1999). She described 12 leverage points for effecting change, found deeper and deeper in a system, each with greater power than the last. At the top of this rabbit’s hole, we use linear thinking to tinker with parameters, numbers, and constants, such as taxes and subsidies, as mechanisms of social change. But as we descend deeper into the hole, we reach other, harder-to-see but more powerful leverage points, such as managing feedback processes, information flows, rules, and goals. At the bottom of the hole, in the darkness, lurks the ultimate payoff — a system’s paradigms. Meadows wrote, “People who manage to intervene in systems at the level of paradigm hit a leverage point that totally transforms systems.”

In a time when the global system is spiraling toward unprecedented change, those of us who want to make a difference must jump into a rabbit’s hole in order to understand and change our reality.

In her writing over the years, Meadows regularly sought to undermine many conventional paradigms, including:

• One cause produces one effect.
• Improvements come through better technology, not better humanity.
• Economics is the measure of feasibility.
• Possession of things is the source of happiness.
• The rational powers of human beings are superior to their intuitive or moral powers.
• We know what we are doing.
• Growth at any cost is good.

But these paradigms aren’t separate and unique, littering the bottom of the hole like autumn leaves lying on the ground. They fit together into a larger, cohesive structure. Some call this structure “mythology” or “cosmology.” Others call it “worldview.” Although we popularly equate the word “worldview” with “mindset,” scholars define it as a story that answers the big questions of existence: Who are we? What is our significance? What are the laws of the universe? How was the universe created?

At the root of every system, every set of paradigms, beats a story so deep that most people are born into it and then die without ever knowing that a different way of viewing the world might exist. Our worldview operates like a cosmic screenplay that we enact each moment of our lives, guiding our actions and, ultimately, creating our reality. When we don’t realize it exists, our worldview manipulates us like a disembodied puppeteer, guiding our actions and thoughts.

Daniel Quinn traced the origins of civilization’s current worldview in his famed book, Ishmael. He writes that, 10,000 years ago, one culture among thousands that populated the earth took up intensive agriculture. As a result of food surpluses, its population exploded, requiring more land to accommodate its new numbers. With more land, its population grew again and annexed still more land. Quinn calls these people “Takers.” Their culture spread across the planet, assimilating other cultures, taking land, and converting wild lands to agricultural fields.

To justify this unprecedented activity, the Takers separated humanity, nature, and spirituality. In the new paradigm, nature was merely a resource, not a source of sacredness. Productivity became the measure of progress. The Takers believed there was just one right way to live and crushed all those who lived differently. These deep beliefs survived the rise and fall of many civilizations. Now every country in the world and 99.9 percent of the human population participates in this system. The few remaining indigenous cultures (, “Leavers,” according to Quinn) exist on the margins of civilization, often exiled in poverty and isolation.

Critics often rebut the assertion that there is just one dominant worldview, citing the many distinct cultures and worldviews that coexist today — East and West, for example. But, in the grand scheme of Takers and Leavers, the difference between most cultures that participate in the global economy is minor, a question of degree rather than of basic view of the cosmos. To see a truly different paradigm requires studying an indigenous culture, looking back 10,000 years to the birth of civilization, or looking forward to the new spiritual stories that are trying to supplant the dominant mindset.

Most social and environmental change programs deal only with symptoms: erosion mitigation, alternative energies, poverty reduction, and pollution control. They never reach the level of changing the underlying paradigm. At best, these efforts can only slow the degradation. As Quinn says, “Vision is the flowing river. Programs are sticks set in the riverbed to impede the flow.” Only a change of vision, a new story, can redirect the flow away from catastrophe and toward sustainability.

An Emotional Shift

Thus, systems thinkers must go after worldviews. Many social change advocates generate data and arguments about why we need to alter our global behavior to avoid terrible consequences. But as Thomas Kuhn wrote in his classic Structure of Scientific Revolutions (from which Meadows adopted the term “paradigm”), when scientists ultimately change from one paradigm to another, they don’t do so because they have proven the new one to be true; they do so because they experience an emotional shift or awakening. Stories can reach these deeper affective levels and, as such, are an intrinsic part of every systemic change process. Changing people’s stories re-orders their relationships with others and the world around them, and thus the system structure in which they live.

Some people have targeted our shared worldview head-on, identifying the assumptions that anchor people’s cosmic story. Physicists Albert Einstein and David Bohm did it; philosopher Ken Wilber and many in the spiritual evolution camp do it. But suddenly seeking to alter a worldview can provoke a maelstrom of resistance. Meadows took on the challenge willingly, illuminating hundreds of murky, deep-seated social beliefs. And she memorably experienced the force of resistance after she, Dennis Meadows, Jorgen Randers, and William Behrens published their world-shaking book, Limits to Growth, in 1972. Donella wrote, “We could not understand the intensity of the reaction our book provoked. It seemed to us far out of proportion to our simple statement that the earth is finite and cannot support exponential physical growth for very long. We wouldn’t have guessed that that idea could generate so much surprise, emotion, complication, and denial.”

As most systems thinkers know, treating symptoms at the mouth of the rabbit’s hole usually generates policy resistance because it leads to unintended and unforeseen consequences. Working at the bottom, too, provokes a different kind of visceral reaction, one that Meadows herself learned could actually be seen as a positive sign. No one can change their view of the universe without significant experiential shaking. Resistance may indicate the labored thinking of changing views.

We don’t yet understand what it takes to change the worldview of the earth’s population. Very likely, when enough individuals set off on their own change journeys, their numbers will reach a certain threshold or tipping point, allowing the rest of us to make the transition more quickly. Wilber says this positive feedback loop creates a structure — a field — that drives exponential change. He calls it a “Kosmic habit”:, “And the more people [that] have that [spiritual] experience, the more it becomes a Kosmic habit available to other human beings.”

I took up non-fiction writing at Dartmouth College, where I studied environmental journalism under Professor Meadows, and have been in the field for the past 15 years. Now I write fiction as well, so I can illustrate system dynamics in action. By doing so, I hope to help people see their worldview from the outside and envision a different future through the less-threatening medium of stories.

In the process, I’ve come to believe that, as systems thinkers, we must grit our teeth and jump down the rabbit’s hole, no matter the risk. The farther we fall, the more impact we are likely to have. As Meadows wrote, “It is in the space of mastery over paradigms that people throw off addictions, live in constant joy, bring down empires, get locked up or burned at the stake or crucified or shot, and have impacts that last for millennia.”

Jon Kohl is a writer and consultant working to combine systems thinking, spiritual evolution, and global change in his projects, prose, and fiction. For more information about his work or to contact him, visit www.jonkohl.com.

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Nevertheless, despite the progress illustrated by these and other cases, the forces of unsustainable growth and resource exploitation have continued to compound. So the release of Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update (Chelsea Green, 2004) by Donella Meadows, Jorgen Randers, and Dennis Meadows comes at an important time. For newcomers to the systems approach, the 30-Year Update presents the logic of overshoot and collapse and emphasizes the urgent need for sustainability without dwelling too much on the mechanics of the methodology (see “Key Terms”). At the same time, those already inclined to see things from a systems perspective not only have their mental models reinforced and refined, but also have a series of cogent examples to draw upon when spreading the gospel of sustainable development.

Systems and Growth

Three themes emerge in the book: background on systems and the mechanics of growth; the introduction of a formal computer model, known as World3, and some of the scenarios that it produces; and implications and recommendations (see “The World3 Model” on p. 9). Throughout the volume, but particularly in the first three chapters, the authors explain the basic laws of system structure and behavior with a lucidity that comes from decades devoted to the dissemination of these concepts.

Though usually considered “best practice,” it is not common to come across computer modelers who clearly communicate the purpose of their model and its associated boundaries; that is, the question the model was intended to address and those for which it loses its ability to provide meaningful insight. So it is a treat (for modeling geeks, anyway) to have the authors devote several pages to just these concerns in the course of their introduction to the World3 model. The central question they mean to address is: Faced with the possibility of global collapse, what actions can we take that will make a difference and lead to a sustainable future? It is clear that this is a model whose primary purpose is to help us think, not to provide the answer. In the course of laying out their model’s purpose, the authors make one of the best cases for “modeling for learning” that I have come across.

The authors introduce a variety of potential actions into the World3 model, at first, one-by-one, then in logically consistent groups. Each run, or scenario, provides insight into how that potential action or group of actions might affect the course of future events. In this way, Meadows, Randers, and Meadows are able to prioritize potential actions in order to come up with the set that offers the greatest opportunity for avoiding the worst consequences of collapse.

Recommendations for Action

In the end, World3 does provide an answer. Of the various assumptions tested and given the boundary conditions of the model, we can still make a transition to a sustainable global society if people around the world immediately take the following actions:

1. Stabilize the population
2. Stabilize industrial output per person
3. Add technologies to:
   • Abate pollution
   • Conserve resources
   • Increase land yield
   • Protect agricultural land

The bad news is that we have already begun to experience symptoms of overshoot—water tables are dropping rapidly in some areas and incidents of coral bleaching have risen but two of the most urgent signals. The good news is that, as the authors’ account of the ozone story demonstrates, once the global community sees the clear need for change, change can come about quickly.

According to the authors, people respond to signals that a system has overshot its limit in one of three ways:

1. Deny, disguise, or confuse the signal that the system is sending
2. Relax the limits through technological or economic action
3. Change the system structure Certain elements of society are

stuck in response 1, regardless of the growing mountain of evidence calling for action. We see this mindset in the refusal by some politicians to acknowledge the science behind global warming. Others place their faith solely in the market and/or technology, even though the price would be extremely high if the market system and new technologies fail to save the day. The only truly effective response is to change the system structure, the sooner the better.

This was the core message of the original Limits to Growth. And while that message became a part of society’s broad environmental consciousness, the warning went largely unheeded. The result is that the party’s nearly over, and we need to figure out how to minimize the hangover.

Restructuring Society

Because structure determines behavior, the highest-leverage approach to these problems is to change the underlying structures that have created them, such as farming techniques, forest management policy, end-user attitudes toward consumption, recycling, and reuse, and legislation regulating pollution. So how do we go about restructuring the global system? The authors share the tools they have found to be useful: rational analysis, data gathering, systems thinking, computer modeling, and clear communication.

Notice that these tools really have more to do with making the case for change than they do with enacting change that has been agreed upon. That is, they are exceptionally useful for helping lawmakers understand the need for change and explaining to corporate decision makers the logic behind a shift. These tools can even guide the overall implementation of a change effort. But once the case has been made, the day-to-day activities can look somewhat like business as usual: rewriting laws, redesigning products and processes, reorganizing departments, and so forth. The difference is that the guidance offered by these tools means the change is less like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic and more like fixing the hole in the ship.

The 30-Year Update is compelling: We have already overshot the planet’s carrying capacity on numerous vital resources. Whether humanity is successful in avoiding the most disastrous effects of collapse will be determined in part by the actions taken by people across our society and planet. Unfortunately, politicians and other leaders often seem to be linear and “black-and-white” thinkers. Navigating the turbulence ahead will require decision making that appreciates non-linearities and shades of grey. The 30-Year Update will bring some to the sustainability camp. But more important, it will inspire others—those with the necessary perspective—to take action. There’s no time to waste.

Gregory Hennessy is honored to have worked with Dennis Meadows on several occasions and to have met the late Dana Meadows once.

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The Rebuilding Process

In 1996, Schena was assigned to run Caterpillar’s Brazilian operation, located in the troubled city of Piracicaba. Up until that time, the division’s performance had been less than stellar, and Schena determined to breathe life into the organization by motivating employees to rebuild the business themselves (see R1 in “Limits on Skilled Workers”). This approach and the resulting employee engagement not only helped turn the company around, but in 1999 earned the facility a notable operational excellence certification and the country’s most prestigious quality award. Today, Caterpillar Brazil continues to be number one in the company in terms of financial returns and employee satisfaction.

However, at a certain point, Chris and his management team began to recognize that the state of the larger community could threaten the organization’s ongoing success. The urban area surrounding the factory suffered from high crime and a failing educational system. It soon became clear that the lack of skilled workers could halt the division’s upward trajectory (see B2).

LIMITS ON SKILLED WORKERS

As employees became engaged in rebuilding the division, they created high levels of success (R1). With the rise in success came the need to hire more workers. Because of problems in the surrounding community, management anticipated that, at a certain point, the availability of skilled workers would begin to decline (B2). To overcome this limit, Cat Brazil invested in programs to boost the skills of the local population and make the city appealing to workers from elsewhere.

Overcoming the Limit

To overcome this potential limit, Cat Brazil embarked on worker education and health programs, among other initiatives. In addition, the organization launched a project known as Piracicaba 2010. This effort brought together local officials, entrepreneurs, CEOs, and other community and media leaders to develop a vision and strategy to attract talented people to the city. The goal was to make Piracicaba a model of sustainable development and an excellent place to live.

Caterpillar Brazil offered its resources and strategic planning capability to jump-start the effort, and many employees enthusiastically volunteered their own time toward the effort. Within six months, the initiative was mature enough for the team to hold a town meeting to expand community participation., “By getting citizens to talk to each other regularly in the pursuit of a common goal rather than their own smaller agenda,” says Chris, “the community was able to work together to make the environment more attractive and safer. In fact, now the city not only attracts more professionals but more businesses as well.” A couple of years ago, the Brazilian government selected Piracicaba 2010 as a pilot program for the country to exemplify what needs to be done to regenerate its cities. Since 2002, Brazil’s government has granted funding to run the program, and similar projects have sprung up throughout the country.

Removing Barriers

Sustaining success means more than pushing on an organization’s growth engine; it also involves removing barriers that might impede that growth. As the Caterpillar Brazil story illustrates, the process of removing those hurdles can open up new possibilities both within and beyond the organization’s boundaries, creating an ongoing cycle of growth.

Janice Molloy is managing editor of The Systems Thinker. Kali Saposnick is publications editor at Pegasus Communications.

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“[T]he emerging world requires a new foreign policy agenda, and fresh faces to execute that agenda. The trouble is, the same old ‘experts’ are still running foreign policy and most of them only dimly understand the world they preside over. Indeed, few people today, in or out of Government, have the background and skills to grasp, let alone direct, the new agenda.”

Reform will not do it; transformations are required, two kinds. First, a transformation of the way nations and international institutions handle global affairs, and second, a transformation in the way systems thinkers collectively conduct the systems movement. The second must come first if we hope to have any effect on the global mess.

Doing the Wrong Thing Right

Reformations and transformations are not the same thing. Reformations are concerned with changing the means systems employ to pursue their objectives. Transformations involve changes in the objectives they pursue. Peter Drucker put this distinction dramatically when he said there is a difference between doing things right (the intent of reformations) and doing the right thing (the intent of transformations). The righter we do the wrong thing, the wronger we become. When we make a mistake doing the wrong thing and correct it, we become wronger. When we make a mistake doing the right thing and correct it, we become righter. Therefore, it is better to do the right thing wrong than the wrong thing right.

This is very significant because almost every problem confronting our society is a result of the fact that our public-policy makers are doing the wrong things and are trying to do them righter. Consider a few examples.

The United States has a higher percentage of its population in prison than any other country, and simultaneously has the highest crime rate. We have more people in prison than are attending college and universities, and it costs more per year to incarcerate them than to educate them. Something is fundamentally wrong.

Almost every problem confronting our society is a result of the fact that our public-policy makers are doing the wrong things and are trying to do them righter.

Most who are imprisoned are subsequently released. As criminologists have shown, those released have a higher probability of committing a crime when they come out than when they went in, and it is likely to be a more serious crime. Prison is a school for learning criminality, not a correctional institution.

In quality, the healthcare system of the United States is ranked 37th by the World Health Organization. We are the only developed country without universal coverage; about 42 million people in our country have no healthcare assured. Moreover, study after study has shown that much of the need for the care that is provided is created by the care that is given: excess surgery, incorrect diagnoses, wrong drugs prescribed or administered, unnecessary tests. The fact is that the so-called healthcare system can survive only as long as there are people who are sick or disabled. Therefore, whatever the intent of its servers, the system can only assure its survival by creating and preserving illness and disability. We have a self-maintaining sickness- and disability-care system, not a healthcare system.

The objectives that must be changed in transformations are not usually those that are proclaimed; rather they are the ones actually pursued. For example, most corporations proclaim maximization of shareholder value as their primary objective. Any objective observer of corporate behavior knows that this is an illusion. As a study conducted a while back at GE showed, the principal objective of corporations is to maximize the security, standard of living, and quality of life of those making the decisions. Recent disclosures at Enron and WorldCom, among others, made this abundantly clear.

A similar discrepancy between objective proclaimed and objective practiced can be observed in most organizations. For example, one could mistakenly believe that the principal objective of universities is to educate students. What a myth! The principal objective of a university is to provide job security and increase the standard of living and quality of life of those members of the faculty and administration who make the critical decisions. Teaching is a price faculty members must pay to share in the benefits provided. Like any price, they try to minimize it. Note that the more senior and politically powerful teaching members of the faculty are, the less teaching they do.

Transforming How We Think

Transformations not only require recognition of the difference between what is practiced and what is preached—a transformation called for years ago by Donald Schön in his book Beyond the Stable State (Random House, 1971)—it also requires a transformation in the way we think. Einstein put it powerfully and succinctly: “Without changing our patterns of thought, we will not be able to solve the problems we created with our current patterns of thought.”

I believe the pattern of thought that is required is systemic. It is difficult if at all possible to reduce the meaning of “systemic thinking” to a brief definition. Nevertheless, I try. Systemic thinking is holistic versus reductionistic thinking, synthetic versus analytic. Reductionistic and analytic thinking derive properties of wholes from the properties of their parts. Holistic and synthetic thinking derive properties of parts from properties of the whole that contains them.

The creation of the department of Homeland Security is a prime example of reductionistic and analytical thinking; the whole formed by the aggregation of existing parts. In contrast, when an architect designs a house, he first sketches the house as a whole and then puts rooms into it. The principal criterion he employs in evaluating a room is what effect it has on the whole. He is even willing to make a room worse if doing so will make the house better.

In general, those who make public policy and engage in public decision making do not understand that improvement in the performance of parts of a system taken separately may not, and usually does not, improve performance of the system as a whole. In fact, it may make system performance worse or even destroy it.

We have not effectively communicated such thoughts to public-policy and decision makers. What should we be communicating to them that would, if heeded, transform our global society into one that is just and equitable, one that would reduce if not eliminate the unequal distribution of wealth, quality of life, and opportunity?

In other words, what should we communicate and be doing that could promote development of the world and its parts by changing the way public policies and decisions are made?

Up to now, those of us in systems have had little or no effect on the global mess. Nevertheless, I believe there is a role that we could play in the dissolution of it. What and how might we contribute to its dissolution? I think we can contribute by making public-policy and decision makers aware of ideas and concepts that would enable them to think more creatively and effectively about the mess the world is in. Here I discuss only a few systemic ideas and processes that I wish they understood. There are many others, but I would settle for their grasping this much.

The ideas and concepts I identify here are familiar to most systems thinkers even if they would express them differently. I include them to call their attention to aspects of systems thinking that I believe they should communicate to public-policy and decision makers.

Development Versus Growth

I hope we can help public-policy and decision makers realize that development and growth are not the same thing. Neither presupposes the other. Rubbish heaps grow but do not develop. Einstein continued to develop long after he stopped growing. Some nations grow larger without developing, and others develop without growing.

Growth is an increase in size or number. Development is an increase in competence, the ability to satisfy one’s needs and desires and those of others. Growth is a matter of earning; development is a matter of learning. Standard of living is an index of national growth; quality of life is an index of its development. Development is not a matter of how much one has but how much one can do with whatever one has. This is why Robinson Crusoe is a better model of development than J. Pierpont Morgan.

The quality of life that an individual or group can achieve obviously depends on both their competence and their wealth. Of two societies with the same level of competence, the one with the most wealth can achieve the higher quality of life. But of two societies with the same resources, the one with the greater competence can achieve a higher quality of life.

Because development is a matter of learning, one cannot do it for another. The only kind of development possible is self-development. However, one can facilitate the development of another by encouraging and supporting their learning. Nations must stop acting as though they can solve other nations’ problems. Nations, like individuals, learn less from the successes of others than from their own mistakes.

One never learns from doing things right because, obviously, one already knows how to do them. What one derives from doing something right is confirmation of what one already knows. This has value, but it is not learning. One can only learn from mistakes, by identifying and correcting them. But all through school and in most places of employment, we are taught that making mistakes is a bad thing. Therefore, we try to hide or deny those we make. To the extent we succeed, we preclude learning.

Furthermore, there are two types of mistakes: errors of commission, doing something we should not have done; and errors of omission, not doing something we should have done. Examination of the failures or crises that organizations and institutions have experienced reveals that errors of omission are the more serious.

For example, in the latter part of the last century, IBM got into serious trouble because it failed to pay attention to the development of small computers, and Kodak got into its current trouble for failing to focus on the development of digital photography until others had successfully staked a claim to it. Our public and private accounting systems record only the less important type of mistake, errors of commission. Therefore, for executives who want to maximize their job security in a public or private organization that deprecates mistakes and ignores errors of omission, the best strategy is to do nothing or as little as possible. This is the root of the conservatism that permeates the world today.

This nation, I believe, has never had an administration as reluctant to acknowledge its errors as the one currently in office. Because of this, it has precluded the possibility of its learning.

Learning About Learning

We need to learn a great deal more about learning. Our schools at all levels are devoted more to teaching than to learning. For example, it is apparent to anyone who has taught others that the teacher learns more than the students do. Teaching is a much better way to learn than being taught. Schools are upside down. Students ought to be teaching and faculty members should be learning how to help others learn and how to motivate them to do so.

A student once stopped me in the hall and asked, “Professor, when did you teach your first class?” That was easy: I answered, “September of 1941.”, “Wow!” he said., “You have been teaching for a very long time.” I agreed. Then he asked, “When was the last time you taught a course in a subject that existed when you were a student?” This question required some thought but finally I got it and answered, “September of 1951.” He said, “Do mean to say that everything you have taught for about 50 years you had to learn without having it taught to you?” I said, “Yes.”, “Wow,” he said again., “You must be a pretty good learner.” I modestly agreed. He continued, “What a pity you are not that good a teacher.”

He had it right: Faculty members know how to learn better than they know how to teach. Therefore, they should be acting as resources to students who are either engaged in teaching others, or learning on their own or with others cooperatively. One of the great gifts I received from West Churchman is that he let me go through graduate school teaching most of the courses I needed to take for graduation.

Democracy has to be learned. It cannot be imposed on others. It must be learned by experiencing it. It does not come to us naturally. All of us are brought up by adults who, even in permissive families, are authorities who control us or set limits within which we have freedom. In effect, we are raised in autocratic structures, however benevolent they may be. Therefore, in a sense autocracy is more natural than democracy.

Systems thinking produces radical and potentially revolutionary visions of public institutions.

I was once involved in a project in Mexico that taught me how democracy could be learned. A group of us from several Mexican universities and a government agency were able to make available to a very remote Indian village in the Sierra Madras Mountains a substantial sum of money the village could use for its development. It alone had to make the decisions as to how to use the money but it had to make these decisions democratically. The only power the team of which I was a part had was to veto any decisions that were not made democratically and that did not involve development. Town meetings were initiated in the square in the center of the village, and after a series of tries, the village members learned how to make decisions democratically. They also learned the difference between development and welfare.

How Do We Have to Change Ourselves?

“[M]an has been able to grow enthusiastic over his vision of . . . unconvincing enterprises. He has pit himself to work for the sake of an idea, seeking by magnificent exertions to arrive at the incredible. And in the end, he has arrived there. Beyond all doubt it is one of the vital sources of man’s power, to be thus able to kindle enthusiasm from the mere glimmer of something improbable, difficult, remote” (José Ortega y Gasset, Mission of the University, Norton, 1966).

Now, what might the systems community do about the deficiencies I have discussed? Clearly, we must learn how through communication to make public-policy and decision makers aware of these deficiencies and what to do about them. We are not doing so now. Most of our communication is addressed to each other, not to public-policy and decision makers. Our communication is based on our needs, not those of others. With the intent of changing this I have several proposals.

First, our principal professional organization, the International Federation for Systems Research, should publish a journal addressed to public policy and decision makers who can affect the global mess. Through expository articles and case studies, the journal should help them come to understand systems thinking and its use in their work. It should be distributed to them at no cost. The federation should cover the cost, if necessary by voluntary contributions of its members.

The journal, possibly called Systems Thinking in Public Affairs, should be supplemented by at least one conference per year held at a site at which a major multi-governmental institution is located. Public-policy and decision makers should be invited mostly to discuss their problems and listen to unconventional systemic approaches to them.

In addition, those of us who think of ourselves as system thinkers should contribute to those publications that are read by those in public life whom we want to affect. We should also try to make presentations at conferences they attend. Our professional societies should make it their responsibility to facilitate such participation by informing us of relevant opportunities and, where possible, by arranging jointly sponsored meetings.

Finally, we should engage in assisting development efforts of less developed countries, regions, communities, and neighborhoods. This does not mean imposing our solutions on them but assisting them in implementing their proposed solutions to their problems, even if they are wrong. They can develop more by making their own mistakes than by imitating our successes.

Systems thinking produces radical and potentially revolutionary visions of public institutions. Nothing short of such visions can transform the state of world affairs. I believe we have an obligation to the global society of which we are a part to make every possible effort to bring about a radical transformation of that society into one in which our children do not have to contend with the mess we have created and are exacerbating.

Russell L. Ackoff is Anheuser-Busch Professor Emeritus of Management Science at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business. He is an architect, city planner, doctor of philosophy, trailblazer in systems theory, best-selling author, distinguished professor, and head of his own management education and consulting firm. Two of his book.

This paper was originally presented at the 3rd International Conference on Systems Thinking in Management, May 19, 2004. The conference was cohosted by the Ackoff Center for the Advancement of Systems Approaches and the Association for Enterprise Integration.

The post Transforming the Systems Movement appeared first on The Systems Thinker.

But although such problems may seem intractable, there is a creative power underlying most conflicts that, if tapped, can energize a group, community, nation, or even the world, as people work collaboratively to improve their situation. By focusing not on the symptoms but on the roots of problems, people can transform deep conflicts into opportunities for participatory and systemic change. By envisioning a different future, they can change conflict from being a barrier to hope and a cause of hurt into a doorway to healing and fulfillment of mutual needs.

Beginning in early 2001, groups in Cincinnati began to successfully apply participatory tools for engaging conflict and transforming an intensely emotional debate about racial profiling into systemwide change. After a six month process of visioning and consensus-building, representatives from various stakeholder groups reached agreement on a five-point platform for change. This platform in turn served as the foundation for a collaborative settlement agreement that launched a new era in police-community relations in the city by marrying ongoing community participation with structural reforms. This model will be studied and replicated throughout the U. S. for years to come. We’ll describe what was learned during the process, what worked and what can be improved, and how you can adapt a similar approach to situations within your communities and organizations. We rely on a systems thinking approach to shed light on the process and describe the benefits of integrating simulation modeling into efforts to resolve seemingly impenetrable clashes.

The Cincinnati Collaborative

In 1999, Bomani Tyehimba, an African-American businessman from the west side of Cincinnati, claimed that two police officers had violated his civil rights by handcuffing him and unjustifiably pointing a gun at his head during a traffic stop. Then in November 2000, an African-American man suffocated while in police custody after being arrested in a gas station parking lot. These events led the Ohio chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union to join forces with the Cincinnati Black United Front and Bomani Tyehimba to file a class-action lawsuit against the Cincinnati Police Department. The suit alleged that the department had treated African-American citizens differently than other racial groups for more than 30 years. Through this action, the petitioners hoped that a judge would issue a court order or a consent decree that would force the Cincinnati police to change the way they conducted internal investigations and would mandate that they collect data about the handling of traffic stops and other incidents.

The federal judge assigned to the case, Susan Dlott, did not believe that traditional litigation was the answer to the problems of alleged racial profiling. In her view, court action would only further polarize the parties and would not solve the social issues underlying the police-community conflict. Through Judge Dlott’s efforts, all parties eventually agreed to set aside normal litigation and instead pursue an alternative path of collaborative problem solving and negotiation. In April 2001, Jay Rothman was retained as special master to the court to help mediate and guide the parties along this new path.

Jay began holding regular meetings with leaders from the three sides—police, city, and community. He first proposed to launch a problem-definition process, suggesting to the parties that without a common definition of the problem, they would have difficulties finding a common solution. However, the police leadership strongly resisted this approach. They argued that focusing on problems would only result in finger pointing—at them! Moreover, the police and city attorneys were unwilling to engage in an effort to define a problem—racial profiling—that they simply did not agree existed.

In response to these concerns, the mediator suggested that the parties instead undertake a broad-based visioning process focused on improving police-community relations. The city and police department accepted this proposal because it seemed a constructive way for representatives from all parties to work collaboratively. The leaders of the Black United Front found this approach appealing largely because it was to be conducted within a framework that promised some form of judicial oversight during the process and after its conclusion.

Thus, only weeks before the city was engulfed in riots in April 2001 following the police shooting of a young African-American man, an ambitious collaborative process called the Cincinnati Police-Community Relations Collaborative—was launched. Jay appointed representatives from the Cincinnati Black United Front, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Cincinnati city and police administration, and the Cincinnati Fraternal Order of Police as his Advisory Group. As its first act, the group decided to invite participation from all citizens in the goal-setting/visioning process. Based on previous studies of tensions in police-community relations, they organized the population into eight stakeholding groups (African-American citizens, city employees, police and their families, white citizens, business/foundation/education leaders, religious and social-service leaders, youth, and other minorities). With considerable cooperation from the media, the Advisory Group invited everyone who lived or worked in Cincinnati or were from surrounding suburbs to answer a questionnaire and participate in feedback groups to envision a new future for police-community relations. Thirty-five hundred people responded, and some 700 of those respondents engaged in follow-up dialogue and agenda-setting.

A Broad-Based Process

The Cincinnati Collaborative used methodologies for engaging conflict (the ARIA Process) and for involving stakeholders in forming goals and action plans to shape the future (Action Evaluation). Citizens and oth ers were invited to answer a simple What, Why, How questionnaire, either online or in writing:

• What are your goals for future police-community relations in Cincinnati?
• Why are those goals important to you and what experiences, values, beliefs, and feelings influence your goals? and
• How do you think your goals can best be achieved?

After only a month of a “getting out the voice” campaign, the Collaborative sponsored the first of eight four hour feedback sessions, this one held by religious and social-service leaders at a local church. Following this first session, at a pace of one or two a month for the next six months, members of each stakeholder group were invited to meet with other members of their own group to dialogue about and reach consensus on a platform of principles. Participants in each feedback session selected representatives to work with representatives from the other groups to craft a platform of goals for improving police-community relations (see “Vision of the Future: A Collaborative Platform”). This intergroup platform then guided negotiators, who were the lawyers for the parties who had served all year on the mediator’s Advisory Group, as they worked to successfully craft a settlement agreement.

Judge Dlott ratified the agreement, which will be implemented over five years at a cost of $5 million. In addition to court oversight, the lasting power of the process is that it engaged people’s hearts and hopes.

People’s responses to the questionnaire—especially their “why” stories—captured their concerns about fairness and respecting differences, needs for safety, and expressions of support for the police. The discussions that they participated in were tremendously powerful. They enabled the citizens of Cincinnati to experience resonance with one another—to find commonalities between their own and others’ fears, hurts, hopes, and dreams (see “Participants’Voices”).

Many found this outlet to express themselves critical—up until that point, they felt that they were not being listened to and that their concerns were not being heard. As a young African-American woman said, “When we felt pain, no one from the city came to listen to us. We needed someone to comfort and listen to us.” Healing began as city leaders finally heard people’s ideas. The inclusive and participatory process has helped citizens feel a sense of ownership for the agreement and move from fear and mistrust to cooperation and joint problem solving. The ability and willingness to truly listen and hear others will continue to be critical as Cincinnati’s citizens and public officials begin to implement the changes that are outlined in the settlement agreement.

A Systems-Informed Solution

In Cincinnati, citizens, public officials, and the police force came to realize that the city needed to move away from enforcement-style policing and toward problem-oriented policing. These two styles represent two ends of a continuum. Enforcement-style policing focuses on the apprehension and prosecution of criminals. Public safety experts have begun to question the enforcement paradigm in recent years for a variety of reasons, not least of which is the struggle to deal with increasing tensions between police and minority communities. These minority groups often feel unfairly targeted by police enforcement activities.

Whether real or perceived, such allegations serve to highlight a problem with the enforcement paradigm, especially in modern American cities with poor, minority neighborhoods. Poverty is considered a leading indicator of crime; that is, the higher the poverty rate in a given area, the higher the crime rate will tend to be. Cincinnati’s Over-the-Rhine and West End neighborhoods are examples of areas with extreme poverty and also high crime rates. Unfortunately enforcement-style policing does not foster good relationships between police and community members in these kinds of communities, because residents often feel that the police aren’t concerned with what they perceive to be the most important issues, such as vandalism, weapons, and other quality-of-life issues. While most community members and police officers agree that violent criminals must be apprehended and prosecuted, they agree less on other policing priorities.

TWO POLICING STRATEGIES

The enforcement approach (the first outflow) seeks to reduce the stock of safety issues by enforcing the laws. Through the Cincinnati Collaborative, stakeholders emphasized more of a problem-solving approach to prevent crimes from occurring (and entering the stock of safety concerns) in the first place by mitigating underlying conditions.

In problem-oriented policing, officers seek to build a working relationship with the community to address quality-of-life issues. Problem oriented policing requires citizen input and involvement. By centering on solving problems with the entire community instead of on simply apprehending and punishing criminals, this model transforms police community relations and prevents crime from happening in the first place. It should not be surprising that a recommendation for problem oriented policing would result from a participatory process such as the one used in Cincinnati.

For community problems to be effectively identified, analyzed, and addressed, citizens and police officers must be able to trust, understand, and communicate with each other in a productive manner. The collaborative agreement signed on April 5, 2002, two days short of the anniversary of the riots, provides for specific mechanisms for police officers to collect the input and concerns of community members and to incorporate this data into their patrolling and policing activities. Through its emphasis on problem solving, the agreement encourages the police to foster working relationships with the residents they serve. In the spirit of mutual accountability, the agreement also spells out through its “community partnering plan” that citizens must be willing to work with police officers to address problems and create solutions. In this way, the police and citizens have formed a mutually beneficial, proactive partnership with the goal of creating safety, respect, and trust.

A Systems Thinking Analysis

Why has the collaborative process described above worked so well? Although we didn’t use system dynamics models in the Cincinnati case, we have done so retrospectively to shed light on how and why the approach was successful, what the implications are for the solution, and where implementation problems might occur. The purpose of these models is not to discover “the Truth” about what happened, or to accurately predict what will happen; rather, we’re trying to build the most useful theory—open to testing!—of why the process has gone the way it has, and to use that theory to think about possible futures.

We’ll start with the solution of implementing a problem-oriented policing strategy (see “Two Policing Strategies”). We can think of safety issues in a community as a “stock.” The stock of safety concerns continually grows as crimes occur and diminishes as they are resolved, usually through the arrest and prosecution of perpetrators. (For an introduction to the language of stocks and flows, go to www.pegasuscom/stockflow.html.) The enforcement approach (the first outflow in the diagram) seeks to reduce the stock of safety issues by enforcing the laws. Through the Cincinnati Collaborative, stakeholders agreed to address safety issues differently. They emphasized adopting more of a problem-solving approach. Such an approach attempts to prevent crimes from occurring (and entering the stock of safety concerns) in the first place by mitigating underlying conditions and focusing more generally on quality-of-life issues within neighborhoods.

The key to making this process work is the active participation of community members in partnering with police to identify and reduce these underlying conditions. Unless residents work closely with the police and city staff, the problem-solving approach will be impossible to implement. So, let’s turn our attention to how community members become active participants. As you’ll see, the model suggests that the visioning process employed in Cincinnati was instrumental in beginning to develop such contributors.

During the intervention, some members of each stakeholder group were what we might call “Grudging Participants” (see “From Grudging toActive Participation”). In the initial meetings, Jay noticed the difference in commitment between individuals who were accepting of and those who were enthusiastic about participating. He wondered how to motivate everyone to take equal ownership for the process. In this case, an unfortunate turn of events actually spurred the participants to new levels of engagement the riots in early April 2001. They dramatically surfaced the problems in the city for all to witness and focused energy and attention on trying to address underlying causes. Optimally, however, groups seeking to emulate this collaborative process can launch their projects in a more proactive way before a crisis requires it!

By getting 3,500 people to discuss their dreams for the city—how it should work and feel—stake holders began building trust and creating a shared vision. Somewhat uncharacteristically, the media seemed to capture this positive outlook as well. This virtuous cycle led to higher levels of participation and commitment to a vision. The end result: There are now more and more active participants involved in the problem-solving approach to combating crime (see R1 and R2 in “From Grudging to Active Participation”). That’s the good news!

Looking Ahead

But, of course, there’s more. The initiative is only beginning. The community must identify and avoid potential barriers to success. To do so, the Cincinnati Collaborative must:

1. Build greater levels of trust (keeping participation high)
2. Avoid reverting to an enforcement approach (preventing a loss of trust)
3. Give them selves time and resources to show success with the problem solving approach (building more trust and shared vision)

Although a participatory process should automatically build trust, several factors threatened to prevent this from happening in Cincinnati. One of the African-American stakeholder groups, the Black United Front, was instrumental in filing the proposed suit against the city. A large part of their strategy was to keep pressure on the civic institutions through negative press and an ongoing economic boycott, even while the collaborative process was forging ahead. So while on the one hand the Black United Front was participating in the collaborative process, they were also continuing their more adversarial activities.

Also, it’s unclear whether the city’s involvement in the Collaborative was a strategic decision—to address social problems through an inclusive process—or merely tactical so it could avoid litigation. As the Black United Front continued to take confrontational actions, the city’s participation became increasingly lukewarm and inconsistent. In this negative cycle, each side was able to cite ample evidence to support its own assumptions about the other side’s antagonistic goals and motivations. The danger in this pattern of behavior is that, over the long run, it might undermine trust. If so, active participants might cease contributing. Let us hope that the momentum of the agreement itself will indeed prove the saying that “Failure is an orphan while success has a thousand parents.” If so, all sides will appropriately share credit for the agreement and work to ensure its fulfillment. Another issue is that, if the level of safety doesn’t increase to satisfy the community’s or police’s expectations, the police will tend to fall back on the more traditional enforcement approach—with the support of some residents. African-American citizens might experience such enforcement activities as racial profiling—something that would seriously reduce trust and perhaps convince many residents to stop participating in the collaborative process. This scenario could undermine or reverse any progress made!

FROM GRUDGING TO ACTIVE PARTICIPATION

The process of building shared vision together—along with the crisis spurred by the April 2001 riots—helped move grudging participants into the stock of active participants. The reinforcing loops (R1 and R2) create a virtuous cycle of increasing numbers of Active Participants.

Thus, in order to keep the current virtuous cycle going, the city must practice the problem solving approach intensively enough to show some improvements in important indicators of safety and quality of life. And leaders should widely publicize those successes. Doing so will keep stakeholders involved (because they’ll see the fruits of their efforts) and also bring others into the process.

What Systems Thinking Adds

Systems thinking isn’t just useful in doing an “after the process” analysis (as described above), but also as part of the development of an intervention. In any conflict that involves multiple stakeholder groups, because participants have different backgrounds and perspectives, they often have difficulty understanding each other. Building systems thinking maps (similar to those in this article) requires stakeholders to use a common language to refine a collective “mental model” of the important system behaviors they wish to address. To be successful, a systems thinking approach also must involve voices from all parts of the systems, giving participants the chance to hear other points of view.

This common language encourages stakeholders to answer the crucial questions: How does this system work and how is it producing the behavior that we see? We used this framework to develop the maps above to determine what convinces stakeholders to participate in the Collaborative and what might cause them to stop participating. Also, because the process of building and refining a collective map breaks down the “us versus them” barriers, participants generally come to trust each other more.

Further, if they desire, a group can convert their maps into computer models to run in public sessions or even over the Internet. Using these simulation models, interested parties can see if the agreed-to goals are achievable, and if so, what strategies would be necessary for achieving them. In this way, the models help participants reach agreement on appropriate goals and strategies and understand how the system will behave over time as the strategies are being implemented.

For example, we mentioned that in the Cincinnati case, the police might begin to feel pressure to revert to an enforcement approach—and that much of the pressure might come from the community! A model can simulate how this pressure might arise and show that if the police and community can ignore it and stick to the new policing strategy, then the pressure will subside as the new approach begins to show success. When people see this “worse before better” dynamic play out in a computer simulation, they are generally better able to wait it out in real life.

Suggestions for Similar Processes

For other organizations and communities experiencing conflict around a contentious issue, the Cincinnati experience holds tremendous promise. Here are some suggestions for how to implement (and improve on) the process employed there:

1. Identify stakeholder groups.
2. Work with both individual stakeholder groups and cross-stakeholder groups to identify What, Why, and How goals (consider employing or adapting the Action Evaluation Process described at www.aepro.org).
3. Use the systems thinking language of stocks and flows or causal loop diagrams to focus discussion and identify high-leverage goals.
4. Build simulation models to explore policies for achieving the goals (optional).
5. Assemble a cross-stakeholder group to refine the goals during an iterative process of exploring diagrams or models, reflecting, and engaging in dialogue.
6. Communicate the resulting goals to others in the stakeholder groups. Use public forums, workshops, and perhaps even the Internet to engage others in the process and make the goals a reality.

The conflict engagement process used in Cincinnati is already a dramatic improvement over the adversarial and legal approach traditionally taken in such situations. Many positive things have resulted, including the development of five goals that all stakeholders agree are worth trying to accomplish. The most important outcome is the commitment by citizens, public officials, and the police department to a community-based problem-solving approach.

By developing the goals together through a participatory framework, the stakeholders have created the foundation for a shared vision of what the community should be and how citizens and city officials should work together. From a systems perspective, this shared vision may be the most crucial component in ensuring the long-term success of the agreement. Only time will tell how the agreement will affect Cincinnati’s well being and if it will be the beginning of the deep healing process the city needs after many years of racial unrest. Systems thinking—as used in this article and as part of similar stakeholder processes—can help us understand how new behaviors will ultimately unfold and create positive and self-fulfilling prophesies.

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