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.

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:

1. Focuses on processes more than structures or outcomes as a way of managing;
2. Defines systems on the basis of interrelationships between people, groups, structures and ideas and the behavior, events and outcomes they produce;
3. Emphasizes emergence as the way human systems change on the basis of countless interactions amongst a huge number of elements;
4. 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 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:

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.

Systems Thinking and Networks

“Systems thinking” and system dynamics are similar to CAS, but start with the collective whole rather than the individual/organization.  They were popularized by Peter Senge with his 1990 classic The Fifth Discipline. Other key concepts are:

• “feedback loops”:  the processes that an action (input) sets in motion that re-enforce and/or undermine the action; and
• “unintended consequences”: a feedback loop to undermines the original intention.

System dynamics guru Jay Forrester pointed out in a classic 1971 paper Counterintuitive Behavior Of Social Systems that “The human mind is not adapted to interpreting how social systems behave.  We think simplistically and linearly.”

These comments followed analysis of four programs to address inner city problems. “All of these were shown to lie between neutral and highly detrimental regardless of the criteria used for judgment,” he found.  “The investigation showed how depressed areas in cities arise from excess low-income housing rather than from a commonly presumed housing shortage.”

Jay points to “Three counterintuitive behaviors of social systems (that) are especially dangerous”:

• Social systems are inherently insensitive to most policy changes that people choose in an effort to alter the behavior of systems.  Policy support results from human intuition that develops from exposure to simple systems.
• Social systems seem to have a few sensitive influence points through which behavior can be changed. These high-influence points are not where most people expect.
• Social systems exhibit a conflict between short-term and long-term consequences of a policy change. A policy that produces improvement in the short run is usually one that degrades a system in the long run.

Networks, particularly global, multi-stakeholder change ones, are CAS beasts. Their core strategy is one that assumes a CAS approach is required.  If these networks are to integrate this systems wisdom, they must be expert at such things as identifying and working with “high-influence points”.   The Capacity, Change and Performance report summarizes some of the CAS implications in a marvelous Table shown below. (click on Table to enlarge.)