What if the most valuable thing in ‘whole system’ work is not seeing the whole system at all?

What if the most valuable thing in ‘whole system’ work is not seeing the whole system at all? Join the conversation on LinkedIn. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/antlerboy_what-can-systemschange-learn-to-become-activity-7449611283399741441-juC3?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAACuq-oBecVFDW6PCf3lkoG-peMeuLBeoho

What if the most valuable thing in ‘whole system’ work is not seeing the whole system at all?

I liked Sandra Janoff’s post on ‘systems experiencing’, which I think is replying to a comment I made. There is something deeply right in it. The move from abstract systems thinking to people experiencing the wider reality through one another’s eyes isn’t a minor tweak. It’s great work, and what she and Michael Donnelly are dedicated to.

And I strongly agree with the instinct behind Future Search-get the right mix of people together, create enough time, structure, and intent, and people can stop arguing at each other and start working on something shared. Objectifying an understanding of ‘the system’, in this context, is a magical move.

Future Search has long described this as ‘getting the whole system in the room’. But there is a catch.

The ‘whole elephant’ is rarely waiting to be revealed. And even when you have a perfect cross-section of ‘the system’ in the room, what appears is still not ‘the system itself’. It is an encounter. A constructed visibility. A living, provisional, useful reality.

Systems work can go wrong in a predictable way. A move from ‘everything is connected’ to ‘ah, now we can see the whole’. Then from ‘we can see the whole’ to ‘this map is the thing itself’. And if we’re not careful, to trying to make the world behave like the map. Attached is a piece I wrote on this – apprendix to a piece from Roar Bjonnes, accessible via https://stream.syscoi.com/2024/11/07/understanding-systems-to-change-the-world-bjonnes-2024-systems-change-alliance-with-appendix-what-can-systems-thinking-and-change-learn-to-become-taylor-2024/

That’s one of the reasons I keep worrying this bone in my own work.

Systems are real enough to hurt you, but they are also ways of making sense. The map isn’t the territory. The elephant is not always available. And seeing more doesn’t abolish the reality of the parts – the pressures, asymmetries, exclusions, incentives and different worlds people actually inhabit. Future Search folks know this. Bring the whole system into the room where possible. But let’s not romanticise it.

The miracle isn’t that the whole becomes visible. The miracle is that a group of people with different histories, incentives and fragments of truth, can experience enough of one another’s reality to act with more intelligence, more honesty and more responsibility than before.

And that’s a huge part of the value of Future Search, I think. Not a revelation of totality, but in the powerful and often neglected achievement of creating the context, commitment, legitimacy, space and time for that encounter to happen at all. That is no small thing. In public service terms, it’s enormous. Getting those people in the room, for long enough, with permission to think and speak properly, is already a serious intervention.

Maybe that’s the stronger claim – not ‘we saw the whole’. But ‘we became capable of seeing more, together, and of being changed by that’.

It’s not the elephant, it’s the space.

That leaves me with the question I think matters most for #systemschange: how do we design encounters that increase collective intelligence without tricking ourselves that legibility is the same as truth?