Complexity Mindsets and Equity

 


Dave Snowden gave the Annual Mike Jackson Lecture at Hull University on March 23, 2023.  His talk
was titled, “Systems Thinking: Making Sense of the World in Order to Act in It.”  Very early on in the lecture Snowden foregrounded the notion of complexity with a succession of defining statements summarized here:
    • When we are working in complex systems we never know enough to make a perfect decision
    • Hindsight doesn’t lead to foresight in complex systems – what has come before is not the best predictor of what will come next
    • Our task is to work with “the evolutionary potential of the present”  
Indeed, much of Snowden’s career has focused on sense-making in complex systems.  His Cynefin framework is an example of a widely used tool to facilitate understanding and decision making in varied contexts, helping decision makers to distinguish those conditions in their systems that can be predictably changed from other conditions that are beyond the realm of predictable change.

The EU Field Guide, jointly authored with Snowden, goes further to provide guidance for groups managing complexity in crisis.  Using the Cynefin framework as a foundation, the Field Guide describes management stages to assess, adapt, repurpose, and transcend a crisis.

Few of us are working in the context of a newly arising specific crisis.  Rather, the complex crises of the organizations in which we work manifest in persistent inequities and resound with questions we ask ourselves regularly. How is it that hard working, well intended people labor year after year in organizations (education, health, economic) that repeatedly yield undesirable and unfair outcomes?  How is it possible that we set out to promote justice and goodness in our organizations but end up reproducing the same old inequities?

In the context of persistent inequities - persistent injustice, really - we can work with the defining statements offered by Snowden and summarized above to name principles for cultivating complexity mindsets for justice in our organizations.
  • We won't be able to make a perfect centralized decision to drive more equitable outcomes – so instead, we will distribute decision making across a network of people whose awareness and action can contribute to more equitable organizational behaviors and outcomes
  • What our network of people learned in the past will not be the best guide for decision making for equity going forward – so instead, as a distributed network we will take on new ways of making sense of our situation and identifying the malleable aspects of our situations that can promote equitable processes and outcomes
  • We can’t rely on the identification of future metrics to drive equitable processes and outcomes – so instead, we will engage our distributed network in thinking about the things we can do today that reflect more equitable action, let’s identify our next best step toward equity that we can make today


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