When Is Systemic Change Not Systemic?

Hello everyone,

I was reminded of a question I have addressed repeatedly since I started writing, teaching, and speaking about systemic change back in 1984: "When is systemic change not systemic"?

There are many often conflicting definitions of systemic change. The definitional confusion still confuses practitioners and policymakers today and I see this confusion appearing in publications on school improvement; for example,

• When I read articles about examples of systemic change and the articles are about high school reform, I cringe.
• When I read articles about systemic change and they are all about building-level change, I cringe.
• When I read articles that claim that curriculum improvement, introducing new instructional technology, or creating a new management information system are examples of systemic change, I cringe.

All of the above changes can be part of a systemic change initiative, but, by themselves, they are not examples of systemic change.

The "system" is the intact school district. In fact, a school district is one of the few organizations in the world that is actually often called a system (as in, "school system"). The school system is all the programs, buildings, activities, people, etc. that must be aligned and coordinated to deliver educational services to students. If you draw a circle around all those elements everything inside the circle is the system to be improved and everything outside the circle, including state departments of education, comprises the system's external environment (this notion comes from Fred and Merrelyn Emery, early pioneers of the systems approach to improving organizations as systems).

Russell Ackoff (another early pioneer of systemic change) tells us that it is pure folly to try to improve parts of a system (as in focusing improvement only on a school building or a level of schooling like high school reform). He says that not only won't the entire system improve by focusing on the parts, but it is likely that the piecemeal focus will actually cause the system's performance to deterioriate.

Systemic change must also follow three paths: Path 1--improve the system's relationship with its external environment; Path 2--improve the system's core and supporting work; and Path 3--improve the system's internal social infrastructure. If efforts labeled systemic change do not follow those three paths, those changes are not systemic.

So, to answer my opening question, "When is systemic change not systemic"?, the answer is , "When it focuses on anything less than the whole-system."

What Systemic Transformational Change Means to Me

Dear Colleagues,

The Association for Educational Communication and Technology (AECT) recently launched the FutureMinds: Transforming American School Systems initiative (http://www.futureminds.us/). Dr. Charles Reigeluth of Indiana University and I are the co-directors of that initiative. The vision for FutureMinds is to develop the capacity of state departments of education to create and sustain transformational change within entire school systems in their states.

I'd like to share a few thoughts with you about what systemic transformational change means to me.

Systemic transformational change creates a substantially different organizational reality in a school system. Creating and sustaining that new reality is not an easy task because within each school district there are multiple realities encased in the mindsets of the educators working in those districts; not to mention in the mindsets of key external stakeholders who think they know what’s best for a school system.

The existing multiple realities need to be blended into a shared reality of a desirable future for a school system. But it is insufficient simply to create a unified and shared vision of a desirable future. The literature on transformational change repeatedly reinforces the need for people in organizations to change the way they think and act (i.e., to change their paradigms or mindsets) with regard to three change paths:

• Path 1--their system’s relationships with its external environment,
• Path 2--their system's core and supporting work processes, and
• Path 3--their system's internal social infrastructure (which includes organization culture, organization design, job descriptions, reward system, etc.).
  

The way that educators currently think and act along those three paths represents their current mindsets or paradigms. If educators want to create and sustain transformational change, then they need to shift the way they think and act with regard to how they relate to their environment (Path 1), how they do their work (Path 2), and the quality of their system's social infrastructure (Path 3). Thus, three paradigm shifts are required.

But there is a fourth paradigm shift that’s required--there is a need for educators to change the way they think and act with regard to creating and sustaining change. Their dominant, controlling paradigm for change is what we call piecemeal.

So, now we are faced with the challenge of helping educators shift from four existing paradigms to four new paradigms for creating and sustaining systemic transformational change along three change paths:

• Paradigm Shift 1: shift from a reactive stance in response to the environment to a proactive stance (Path 1: improve the system's relationship with its external environment).
• Paradigm Shift 2: shift from the Industrial-Age paradigm of schooling to an Information-Age paradigm; and, include the supporting work processes in a school system within this shift (Path 2: improve the system's core and supporting work processes).
• Paradigm Shift 3: shift from a command and control organization design to a participatory organization design (Path 3: improve the system's internal social infrastructure; which requires changes to organization culture, communication practices, job descriptions, reward systems, and other elements of the social infrastructure).
• Paradigm Shift 4: shift from a piecemeal approach to change to a systemic transformational change approach (by moving along the three change paths to create unparalleled opportunities to improve student, faculty and staff, and whole-system learning that are substantially different than what is currently being done in the system).
  

Our first challenge in our efforts to stimulate and support four paradigm shifts is to convince educators that these shifts are needed. Telling them that they are needed will not be enough. They have heard these kinds of calls for change before. We need compelling data that not only point out the need for change, but also shine a bright flood light on the opportunities that systemic transformational change provides. “Need data” push people toward change. “Opportunity data” draw people toward change. Both kinds of data are critical for motivating people to make their mindsets malleable and therefore capable of changing.


In addition to the need and opportunity data, we will need to use an integrated set of communication strategies that have been documented as effective in promoting transformational change (see Nevis, Lancourt, & Vassallo, 1996).

These communication strategies are:

1. Persuasive communication (the rah rah, let’s get going communication)
2. Participation (involving people in setting a course to a desirable future)
3. Expectancy (communicating to people our expectation that they can succeed in systemic transformational change)
4. Role modeling (providing educators with real life examples of school systems and other organizations that have transformed or are transforming)
5. Structural rearrangement (helping change leaders make key changes to the organization design of their school systems)
6. Extrinsic rewards (helping change leaders re-tool their districts’ reward systems to reinforce desirable behaviors that unequivocally support their transformation journey)
7. Coercion (communicating to change leaders that all examples of successful transformation have been shown to start with the use of positive coercion applied by senior leaders in the system).
   

Reference


Nevis, E. C., Lancourt, J. L., & Vassallo, H. G. (1996). Intentional revolutions: A seven-point strategy for transforming organizations. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

I hope all this makes sense.