The Change Alliance

Blog by Steve Waddell - May 25 2010

Networks are more productively approached as living systems, rather than as engineered and built structures. But what does this really mean, and what are the implications? Some of this is described in a wonderful report I read last week titled Capacity, Change and Performance. This report came to my attention through The Change Alliance and Jan Ubels at SNV. and Marianne Hughes, Executive Director of the Interaction Institute for Social Change. We were discussing the barriers to realizing the potential for multi-stakeholder change strategies, and Marianne commented:

The report nicely summarizes four key points about a complex adaptive system (CAS) perspective. CAS begins with individuals or organizations guided by some higher inner principles. CAS:

Focuses on processes more than structures or outcomes as a way of managing; Defines systems on the basis of interrelationships between people, groups, structures and ideas and the behavior, events and outcomes they produce;    Emphasizes emergence as the way human systems change on the basis of countless interactions amongst a huge number of elements;                     Brings out in-built tendencies towards self-organization that drive the emergence of order, direction and capacity from within the system itself.

The importance of the CAS perspective came up in a conversation last week with Jim Woodhill, Director of the Centre for Development Innovation." A great obstacle is our capacity to see system relationships, capacities to see and move through processes of real innovation with multi-stakeholders coming together, transcending differences."

Jim added: How to understand systemic interactions…having that capacity to see this. And how that connects to a spiritual dimension…about people’s emotions, cognition, how people see the world, the wider institutional environment…science has cut 3/4 of that out of the picture in the way it tries to tackle problems.