16 – The Systems Thinking Principle

[00:00:00] Lily: Hello, and welcome to the IDEMS Principle. I’m Lily Clements, an Impact Activation Fellow, and I’m here with David Stern, a founding director of IDEMS.

Hi, David.

[00:00:15] David: Hi Lily, I’m looking forward to another discussion about principles. Which one have we gone?

[00:00:20] Lily: We’ve gone for systems thinking today.

[00:00:22] David: Oh good. Yes, this is a, this is quite common in a number of different areas is the sort of term that people use, and very uncommon in other areas.

[00:00:31] Lily: I think I’m from one of those areas where it’s less common. So how about you start with the overall kind of description on what systems thinking is?

[00:00:42] David: Okay. Remember that we’re, I’m framing it from the IDEMS principle perspective. This is not the general systems thinking.

[00:00:49] Lily: Okay.

[00:00:49] David: From IDEMS’ perspective, Systems Thinking “affects how the company tackles problems. It encourages building an understanding of how any company activity relates to and fits into the bigger picture”.

[00:01:04] Lily: Okay. So do you have an example that you can give to help put this in context?

[00:01:09] David: I think there’s two elements to this and I think our principle is very clear that this is taken at the company level and related to our activities as a company. But maybe first of all, we should just explain systems thinking at the more global level and the term as other people understand it.

And really in terms of academic research, it’s the juxtaposition of sort of systems thinking with component research. So the easiest example of this that I know of is coming from agriculture, for example, where in your component research you might study breeding and you might be looking at improved varieties and that would be good component research to develop a new variety which might have more yield or whatever it is.

Whereas systems thinking would be saying okay, a farmer is growing a multitude of crops, they’re growing a whole set of different crops, maybe they have animals, maybe they don’t, what is the farming system it’s fitting into? Or maybe it relates to the market that they can access, what’s the food system it’s fitting into?

And the whole point is that instead of looking at just the individual components, you can be studying and doing your research, looking at how it fits in with other areas.

[00:02:27] Lily: Sorry but what is like a farming system or a food system. You say food system, I think of the kind of yeah, cow eats grass, that kind of…

[00:02:35] David: Absolutely, but it goes beyond that. It’s farmer takes crops to market, somebody buys them, somebody does this, actually, that’s part of the food system as well. Is the food that’s being grown intended for local consumption or is it going into the cities or is it going abroad?

[00:02:52] Lily: Okay, and so then by looking at that system, so we’ve got these different components and then looking at that overall system and how it fits into it can show that these components are not independent of each other?

[00:03:03] David: Absolutely. Much more than that. So let’s take it down a notch, down to the farm level. So if you look at a farming system, this might be all the different crops the farmer grows. This might be whether the farmer has animals or not, is it better to have monocrop farms? Or is it better to have diverse farms? These are questions that people are asking and the answer to that question is very easy if your situation is clear and well defined. But our food systems mean that it’s not. So the food system affects the farming system choices.

[00:03:36] Lily: I see.

[00:03:37] David: So for example, if you look at actually optimising individual sort of farms, smallholder farmer agriculture is a big area where we do a lot of work. Then actually trying to imagine what the best local farm would be is one thing, but it’s totally changed by well, you suddenly have demand for a particular crop, which has high value, and which therefore means that it changes what you should be doing or what you can do or where you would gain benefit if you took that approach as a farmer.

So what markets you have access to totally changes, that’s part of the food system and that totally changes the priorities at the level of a farming system. And people who study farming systems in isolation from the contextual market systems, you can’t get the right results because it all depends on what markets are available there.

You get at every level of this complexity, there are reasons why the systems approach changes the perspectives of what you should be thinking about, what you should be working on. And so if you think about then, coming back to our formulation of this principle, we’re not talking about systems thinking in terms of research.

There’s good reasons why some researchers believe systems thinking research is really essential and should be given much more weight over individual component, if you want, research at an academic level. And there’s also very good reasons why the systems that are set up in place within academia tend to favour component research to systems research because they’re very discipline focused and systems research often cuts across disciplines rather than living within them. And it deals with complexity in ways which journals struggle to deal with and so on. So there’s all sorts of reasons why the academic system as a system struggles to deal with systems thinking. That’s a whole nother story which I don’t want to dig into because we’ve been very clear in the way we framed this as being how the company tackles projects and how any company activity relates to and fits into a bigger picture.

So the point is that we’ve been very deliberate in not delving into that area. For us, the Systems Thinking principle, although we are making choices of systems thinking over component thinking in terms of our research mindset we value and we encourage component research where it’s needed. I’ve got a wonderful example of a colleague in Western Kenya who was doing sorghum research and doing it at a sort of systems thinking level, but then found there was an issue of aluminium toxicity, which just needed component research, where he needed to look at the varieties that he was creating in the lab with respect to how aluminium toxicity in the soils affected the root structures.

And that was an element of really important component research, which was so important as part of the set of things needed to work in the system.

[00:06:44] Lily: And generally you can expect if we are doing systems thinking in general, you, think that or hope that those components have been tackled elsewhere by people that are…

[00:06:54] David: Absolutely. 150 years ago no one was doing systems thinking research. Why? Because we didn’t understand the components. So if you don’t understand the components, you don’t have a chance of understanding the system. You can only really understand systems when you have a pretty good idea, a pretty good understanding of the individual components.

Because otherwise there’s too much variability, which is just introduced into your thinking, because you don’t understand what’s going on. So the only reason that we as a society can engage in systems thinking sort of research now is because so many of the components that build up our systems are pretty well understood.

And really what isn’t understood is how they fit together. And that’s where the sort of systems thinking research has taken off in many different ways. As I say, this is research. I want to get it back to the company level.

[00:07:43] Lily: Yes, sorry..

[00:07:44] David: That’s okay. No, this is good. Maybe there’s another example that I’d like to bring up, which really does this in terms of the importance of systems thinking when you are taking action as part of your activities, maybe interventions. And it’s a fantastic project which has been I guess the flagship of the Gates Foundation and Gates’ sort of impact on the world is the attempts to eradicate polio. And it is incredible and incredibly positive what has been achieved. It is almost there, there is a need to get it over the line, because until it’s totally eradicated, it’ll not be eradicated.

[00:08:31] Lily: It can still grow exponentially, like with COVID.

[00:08:35] David: Absolutely. Yes. It’s not quite like with COVID, but yes, it can have exponential growth in certain forms, and therefore it could become a bigger and bigger problem in the future, if it is not fully eradicated. And it’s almost there is my understanding that they’re just pushing it over the line, and my understanding is Africa is now polio free, whereas there’s Afghanistan and I think a few other countries that have pockets where it is still occurring.

[00:09:04] Lily: Incredible.

[00:09:05] David: But, one of the learnings that came out of this was that the big effort to eradicate polio led to many, maybe many is too much, led to some really nasty unintended consequences. And the two that sort of really jumped to mind was I think there was an element where the polio vaccines being got out at scale, in the way they were, actually meant they took up space from other vaccines, which meant that there were other vaccines that weren’t being given, and therefore certain diseases became more prevalent.

I think measles was one of them, where it became more prevalent because the polio vaccine was taking precedence over the measles vaccine, or something like that. I’m not sure exactly where this was, but in these low resource environments space was limited, so the space to store the vaccines was limited, and just the volume of polio vaccines that was coming through meant that there was a price to pay in terms of stocking other vaccines.

And the second thing of course was the actually manpower, manpower in many of these contexts was very limited and the amount of money and the amount of effort that was put onto polio led to a sort of brain drain, if you want, from other areas of the healthcare system where they no longer had nurses or doctors available to do the other pieces of work which were, I’m not going to say more important or less because I’m not in public health, I can’t make that judgment, but the point was that because of the focus, the single minded focus on polio, it led to these unintended consequences because people hadn’t thought about the system as a whole, they were just focusing on the polio component.

[00:10:54] Lily: There are only so many doctors and nurses that can administer…

[00:10:58] David: Yeah, that can administer the vaccines, and remember that these are environments where healthcare professionals are a limited resource. It’s not like in developed contexts, where if you don’t have enough healthcare professionals trained, you just import them from elsewhere, because your salaries are high enough that you can always do that.

And you see this in the NHS. The NHS has been extremely, good at bringing in talent from elsewhere when there haven’t been enough people locally trained. And that is not possible in a lot of these low resource environments. The talent that leaves, the talent that’s not there, is not replaceable.

So these elements of the system, that’s what we mean by systems thinking. You need to understand the system. If you’re in a system where actually if you take people out there were more people ready to go in, that’s very different from a system where when you take people out they’re not replaced. And then things don’t get done. Understanding those elements is part of what systems thinking forces you to do to actually understand what the implications of your work are.

Now, am I saying that there shouldn’t have been this huge push and this amazing work done to eradicate polio? No. But I am saying that if a systems thinking approach was taken, it might be that the same amount of money could have been spent better and actually had better outcomes by taking the systems thinking approach, by actually achieving the same results in a different way, which was fitting within the systems.

I think there were alternatives and I think there’s recognition of this, I’m not alone in thinking this. This has become one of the general critiques and one of the advancements for systems thinking. In many ways, in many contexts, these concrete case studies where a systems approach to interventions, to activities, I think could be really important.

[00:12:58] Lily: Yeah, I think I’ve heard something related to this, actually, the polio example. It might have been during COVID with fridges and freezers, that there weren’t enough kind of storage.

[00:13:08] David: So one of the things that I remembered when the different COVID vaccines were being developed, that one of the big elements, of course, was the different vaccines came with different refrigeration requirements.

[00:13:24] Lily: Yes.

[00:13:24] David: And so, there’s all sorts of different things that came out of that. But it meant that vaccines that were less effective were more impactful. Wonderful example. My understanding is that you had vaccines where the percentage of efficacy was lower, but because the refrigeration needs was lower, they could be reached by a much wider population, and they could be transported in different ways, and so on.

And so it’s this fantastic reason for, one of our other principles, Embracing Diversity, which is part of the Systems Thinking sort of things, that we’re not saying that the really highly effective vaccines weren’t great, but they were maybe less impactful than vaccines which had lower efficacy, but better refrigeration properties.

And, these diversity of vaccines that were created so rapidly in such an impressive way during COVID is exactly where the system’s thinking really becomes apparent to understand that it’s not that one vaccine was the best, it was that different vaccines served different roles.

[00:14:32] Lily: Yeah, depending on different contexts and environments.

[00:14:36] David: Exactly. Systems that they were fitting into meant certain vaccines, could fit into some systems better than others.

[00:14:44] Lily: Interesting.

[00:14:45] David: And so to me, understanding the system, so just think about this from a very simple perspective, there was this discussion about sending vaccines out to other countries because there was an excess I think in the UK at one point. If you don’t think about the systems you’re sending them into, you could send them a vaccine which doesn’t work, can’t work for them because they don’t have the technologies to keep it refrigerated, or whatever it might be, and so you could actually be doing more harm than good without thinking about the systems. That’s why systems thinking is so important.

[00:15:18] Lily: Yes, and it, so then it goes into this kind of thinking hard, thinking deeply, you’re having to consider all these different consequences, there’s not just your kind of single bullet solution.

[00:15:28] David: I mean, the opposite, as always, we try and take the opposite. The opposite of systems thinking is your component research, or your component approach. And let’s be clear here. I am not saying the component approach is bad. If it wasn’t for groups working on a very component based way, none of the vaccines would have worked. You need it, you needed each of those groups was following their component. They had different approaches, they had totally different ways of developing vaccines. All those were very component focused.

And part of the System’s Thinking is to say okay, great, we’re encouraging that, we’re embracing that diversity. We’re happy that there is that diversity of people working in those component approaches. We’re recognising that we don’t need to be the precise experts on this, because we’re trying to fit things into systems. And so we can be working with experts in transdisciplinary ways, that’s another one of our principles within this.

And I think the key point from our perspective is that if we think about ourselves going forward, as an organisation, we’re not the organisation to build the vaccine. Not just because we don’t have medical doctors at the moment in our staff and so on, but because that building of the vaccine is a component approach. We might be an organisation who could add value and help with the elements around using the vaccines, if you go back to that COVID example, that’s where the complexity comes in, that’s where you need the systems.

Our expertise and our approach is really built around systems thinking. And maybe what we need to be clear on is that it’s not just that component is good for something and systems is good for other things. As an organisation, as a small company, systems thinking is hard. We need to be absolutely clear. There’s a good reason why most small companies tend to not be systems thinking in approach. Because it means that instead of just taking a clear focus, so maybe another opposite to systems thinking, in a research perspective, the opposite might be component research, but from a business, a company perspective, the opposite might be clear focus. That’s essential to being able to scale quickly, to be able to know what your place is, find your niche and fill it.

I can think of different areas where we struggled because we’re trying to find ways to fit into and find the solutions for the system. But to fit into a system approach, lots of different things are needed across lots of different areas. Whereas if you just say I’m not going to worry about whether my vaccine’s going to get used or not. This is the vaccine that I have the skills to create. I’m going to build it. And then, the people who can use it should use it.

That’s a really positive approach. It’s not just vaccines. Software. We build software. Again, if we took that approach with software, we’d almost certainly have a lot more people using our software. But we’re not. We’re trying to build software that fits in and changes systems. And that’s, that takes a slower approach. Slows us down.

We hope that it’s slowing us down deliberately because if we’re able to fit what we do, our activities, into a bigger picture, then we’re hoping that, even though we’re small now, as we grow and as we do that, it means that our influence will be more impactful. It will be more stable and more sustainable.

These all relate to a number of our other principles. We have the principle of Embracing Diversity, which sort of falls under in some sense Systems Thinking, which again makes our life harder. But it’s what we need to do, we have to embrace diversity if we’re going to look at the system. Your example from COVID is that diversity of vaccines was really important because different vaccines serve different contexts well in different ways.

[00:19:36] Lily: So would you say that’s the main downside to the systems thinking approach for a company like IDEMS, that because it’s small, it has to spend a lot of its time on thinking about the systems, especially with that diversity. IDEMS is diverse, they work in lots of different areas. So surely that means there’s a lot of different systems now.

[00:19:54] David: Yes. And we’re working across huge numbers of systems in different ways and so on. Yes. So, I think systems thinking and that approach is, for a small company, we’re finding this is a principle which is really hard to fit in with the business models.

It’s very natural in some sense, because of who we employ and how we actually build our culture for us to engage with this, with our partners. But to actually build it into the company, as this principle asks us to do, for it to affect how we tackle problems, it can lead to us actually making decisions which may appear to be not in the interests of the company.

Let me give you a very simple example here.

[00:20:42] Lily: Yes. Yes.

[00:20:43] David: Let’s say you’re thinking about a product in a particular commercial environment and you have a choice between how your product changes the environment and how your product grows in the environment. Thinking about the system, you might want to think about actually impacting the system in a positive way, but maybe that means that your product doesn’t grow as much. If you were, if you are Amazon, one of the biggest companies in the world, and you want to think about the publishing systems, when they came in many ways, they were a positive disruptor. And now you hear authors saying, I would love not to publish with Amazon, but when I want to buy a book, I buy it on Amazon.

And there there’s this element of actual duality there that if Amazon was a social enterprise looking to positively disrupt the publishing system as much as possible, at this point in time, it may need to act against its own interests as a company to positively affect the system. Now, Amazon can’t do that. Legally, if the CEO of Amazon were to try and do that, his shareholders would sue him, because he’s acting against their interests, as the shareholders of Amazon. That is not a possibility.

But that’s the sort of challenges that we’re putting on ourselves. We are a social enterprise. We could do that. And we do that, even though we’re small, in certain ways, where we’re not trying to maximise our company benefit, we’re trying to maximise our impact, or maybe maximising the impact, we’re not even trying to do that, but we are prioritising the impact.

I think the reason I’ve been very careful with that language is maximising is really not our approach, that’s not a systems thinking approach really, because quite often if you try and maximise something that almost always causes problems in the system elsewhere. Whereas what you’re actually looking at is stability, you’re looking at sustainable, you’re looking at approaches which are good rather than necessarily optimal. There’s an interesting difference in, in that and systems thinking is important to getting towards that mindset.

[00:23:03] Lily: At the end of the day, IDEMS is an organisation and you want it to succeed. Is there worries about how it can succeed if you’re focusing on maximising impact instead of maximising, oops, not maximising, sorry.

[00:23:15] David: It’s not maximising. Absolutely. And this is exactly this aspect of good, it’s part of what IDEMS is. IDEMS is a fundamentally profitable organisation. If we are not profitable, it will fail. It’s clear. And so as an organisation, we have to be fundamentally profitable.

But having said that, there’s elements where although we’re fundamentally profitable, we’re not maximising profit. So our profitability is good enough, which means that we can also prioritise impact. Now we’re not maximising impact either, because if we did, we might not be fundamentally profitable.

And so it’s being able to have those compromises, that balance, which is so important. And that’s central to who we are. And it’s dealing with complexity. At the heart of it is being able to think in those ways where you have complex systems, comes back to systems thinking, and you’re working within them.

As long as we are profitable, as long as we’re able to grow in profitable ways, then we can continue to have impact and we can grow in these ways. Understanding how to manage all that and balance all that’s the challenge we face and it’s not an easy process. Making it simple is great in lots of different ways, but that’s against our systems thinking approach, that if we just take the simplicity and say, okay, we could grow really fast by doing this, then that would not be our correct approach.

We may have components within us that grow fast, but as an organisation, we want that balance. We want to embrace the diversity.

[00:24:54] Lily: Excellent. Excellent. Thank you very much. Is there anything that you wish to add before we finish?

[00:25:00] David: I guess the only thing I want to really say about Systems Thinking to finish this off is, I think, as a research process, I really wish more people engaged in systems thinking. I think for academic research, this is something where it’s become common in certain areas, but there are so many areas where when I engage with researchers, it is new to them, and I feel it’s something which should enter much more the academic research field for learning. But I understand why it is going to be really unusual for other social enterprises, any form of commercial organisation, to embrace this approach.

It is extremely demanding, and I wouldn’t recommend it to others. It just happens to suit and to be important for who we are.

[00:25:51] Lily: Sure, and that’s presumably then why you chose systems thinking over component thinking, is because it suits the company values and what you want to achieve.

[00:26:01] David: Absolutely. And this is the thing, this is exactly the point there, this relationship between principles and values. There is a value behind this, which means that we are choosing to prioritise this and to have this as a principle, even though it makes our life hard in many cases.

[00:26:19] Lily: Very good. Maybe we’ll have a whole set of values at some point, but no, thank you very much, David.

[00:26:23] David: Thank you.