Sensing the Water

 The Donella Meadows Project   is a website dedicated to archiving and disseminating the transformational work of Dana Meadows.  Meadows was a scholar, activist, leader, and prolific writer who changed the international conversation on systems thinking especially in the area of environmental sustainability.   Meadows coined the phrase Dancing with Systems  to convey her emerging understanding of how to participate in systems change based on a well developed systems mindset.  She contrasted a true systems mindset for fostering change and improvement with a more industrial mindset that seeks to predict and control environments.  As we take on new ways of thinking, relating, and investigating with a systems mindset we might mistakenly apply systems vocabulary to the surface of traditional methods and approaches that seek to control and predict.  We might make that mistake repeatedly as we seek to change our worldview.  It’s worth taking a l...

  In a previous blogpost  I described three mindsets for systems change work: systems mindsets, complexity mindsets, and humanistic mindsets.  Here’s more on complexity mindsets. In an article entitled Learning from Evidence in a Complex World  John Sterman described the fundamental unpredictability of complex systems - such as world economies, community infrastructures, and public health – and the rise of unintended consequences resulting from well-intended, well conceptualized policy interventions.  He noted that traffic congestion has increased in areas that have been redesigned to reduce traffic, bacteria have flourished and become resistant to antibiotics developed to combat their spread, forest fires have become more intense in areas experiencing forest fire suppression techniques, and levee and dam construction has led to increased housing development in flood plains which can no longer serve to eliminate excess water and consequently more and more damagi...

In 2005 the author, David Foster Wallace, gave a commencement speech at Kenyon University.  He titled his speech “This is Water” and opened with the story of two fish swimming along peacefully unaware when an older fish swam by and jolted them into reality by asking, “Morning, boys, how’s the water?” The fish were stunned by the question posed by their elder and wondered what was meant by water .   This stunned reaction and discomforting confusion was also present in the fish who featured in the story told by Kramer, Kania, and Senge and described on the blog page of  my website.   I’m beginning to detect a pattern – fish tend to encounter existential moments while swimming.   Foster Wallace goes on in the speech to reflect on the bizarre ordinariness of adult life, with its tedious and sometimes alienating routines, a life that leaves its participants believing that they can be certain of the reality around them.  Instead of succumbing to this m...

  What do we mean when we use the term systems change ?  In this essay we’ll explore some definitions of systems change currently in use among organizations fostering social change and identify three mindsets for systems change initiatives.   In their publication, The Water of Systems Change , Kania, Kramer, and Senge note that the term systems change is increasingly used as a motivating approach to achieving impact, especially in the context of complex problems.  They explain that the first step to approaching systems change is beginning to see the water around us, that is to name the people, the relationships, the processes, and the structures that hold our problems in place.  They provide a framework for examining The Six Conditions of Systems Change that includes structural, relational, and transformative aspects of shifting system conditions. Catalyst 2030 is a collaborative of social change agents working toward the United Nations Sustainable Develo...