Support for capacity development is often framed in projects based on a very narrow understanding of the factors that influence the ability to of people, organisations and institutions to perform. There is a need to look at organisations and networks of organisations systemically embedded in and connected to a much wider context.

Before climbing over the fence into the systems field, it is useful to remove a couple of misconceptions that commonly get in the way. First, thinking systemically does not just involve creating box and line drawings – it’s got little to do with wiring diagrams. Second, it is not about holism. No one can think about everything, and even if they could it would be of little practical use. You simply cannot take everything into account. These two misunderstandings about systems ideas have cluttered up the entrance to the systems field unnecessarily. Which is not to say that wiring diagrams and the idea of ‘wholes’ are not used in systems thinking; rather, they are not a fundamental aspect of it. So if systems thinking is not about lines and boxes or holism, then what is it about, and how can it help us think about capacity?

A brief history of systems concepts

The systems field as we know it today developed around the time of the Second World War, as did many other currently influential concepts, such as organisational development, group dynamics and action research. The war posed some very tricky, seemingly intractable problems at the individual, team, organisational and institutional levels. The history of the field is rooted in efforts to address complicated and complex problems with limited time and information. Over the past 50 years the systems field has expanded from its relatively modest beginnings into a suite of 1000 or more methods and methodologies, but its core problem-solving orientation has remained.

During the 1960s and 1970s, the focus of the systems field was very much on inter-relationships. In many ways this was the wiring diagram stage of thinking systemically. By the mid-1970s it was clear that inter-relationships, while important, were not neutral concepts. The relative importance of particular inter-relationships depended on the different purposes you could ascribe to any single situation. Thus thinking systemically began to address the implications of applying different perspectives to the same situation.

By the mid-1980s, however, it was clear that these perspectives were also not neutral. Perspectives determined what was deemed to be relevant and what was not; they determined what was ‘in’ the system and what lay outside it. Whoever defined the dominant perspective controlled the system’s boundary. Thus the importance of studying boundaries and critiquing boundary decisions (and those who made them) became the third key element of a systems approach.

These three concepts help us understand systemic interventions and distinguish them from other approaches to dealing with complex situations. They underpin all the models, metaphors, methodologies and methods used in the systems field.

Inter-relationships

‘Inter-relationships’ is the most familiar systems concept, partly because it is also the oldest. How things are connected, and with what consequence, stems from the earliest thinking about systems – some say back as far as Heraclitus and other early philosophers. It is also the concept most strongly embedded in the popular imagination. When we talk about a filing system, or the health system, the image we have in our minds is of a set of objects and processes that are interconnected in some way. The popularity of system dynamics with its boxes and lines further cements the notion of interconnection as an important systems concept.

The study of inter-relationships is central to any systemic inquiry. In particular, systems approaches look at the following:

• dynamic aspects (where inter-relationships affect the behaviour of a situation over a period of time);
• nonlinear aspects (where the scale of an ‘effect’ is apparently unrelated to the scale of the ‘cause’; often but not always caused by ‘feedback’);
• the sensitivity of inter-relationships to context (where the same intervention in different areas has varying results, making it unreliable to translate a ‘best’ practice from one area to another); and
• massively entangled inter-relationships (distinguishing the behaviour of ‘simple’, ‘complicated’ and ‘complex’ inter-relationships).

The systems field draws on many methods that focus on inter-relationships, all of which address five main questions:

• What is the nature of the inter-relationships within a situation?
• What is the structure of these inter-relationships?What are the processes between them?
• What are the patterns that emerge from those processes, with what consequences for whom?
• Why does this matter? To whom? In what context?

System Dynamics is a method that seeks to explore the consequences of nonlinear relationships and delay (see also the article in this issue by Sam Joseph). It is usually, although not always, used in conjunction with computer simulations. Results chains and process models often assume cause and effect relationships that are relatively sequential: A leads to B leads to C. For example, ‘capacity’ building could reflect the following dynamics: training (A) leads to increased knowledge (B), which leads to employment (C).

System Dynamics, in contrast, acknowledges that A and B may feed off each other and that C may cause A to reduce. So training (A) might increase knowledge (B) and this knowledge may increase the demand for further training (A), which leads to greater knowledge (B). Or, knowledge (B) may lead to people gaining employment in the field (C), which might reduce their ability to engage in the further training (A) that they need because they are now out in the field. This may be further complicated if there are response delays between each component. Thus, while the capacity of the situation may be initially enhanced (more training, knowledge, employment), over time the capacity of the situation reduces.

Perspectives

A systemic approach involves more than studying how boxes and lines fit together or how information networks operate. Just looking at the ‘bigger picture’ or exploring interconnections does not make an inquiry ‘systemic’. What makes it systemic is how you look at the picture, big or small, and explore interconnections. When people observe inter-relationships they ‘see’ and interpret them in different ways.

People participate in projects for many different reasons. Think of your own involvement in the capacity development field. How many different ways of seeing your involvement are there, and how do they affect the kinds of decisions you make? What you may regard as a situation that successfully generates and sustains locally resourced economic initiatives, may be seen by someone else as completely ignoring women’s social needs. These different interpretations and motivations, and the behaviours that flow from them, may have little or nothing to do with the formal goals or objectives of a programme. It may have indeed been primarily about economic development. Yet the expectations of some key players that the programme would also have social development aspects will affect how they behave, how the programme performs and, ultimately, the results.

Thus we cannot comprehend the behaviour of a programme without identifying and understanding a wide range of perspectives. Perspectives help to explain and predict unanticipated behaviours because they give us a window into motivations. They also draw attention to consequences unplanned and unintended. Towering above this is the need to acknowledge that people make programmes work, not some imagined ‘logic’ such as a logframe dreamed up by funding agencies.

The implications of the introduction of ‘perspectives’ as a core systems concept were profound. First, they highlight the notion that a situation can be ‘seen’ in different ways, and that this will affect how the system is understood. Furthermore, not only do different stakeholders bring different perspectives to bear on a situation, but each one (indeed each individual) will bring several perspectives, not all of which will be compatible. For instance, I have never held a single unified view on any project I’ve been involved in. How I handle a situation – whether to give money to a person on the street – will be the result of a complex set of internal arguments and trade-offs that can change in the time it takes for me to reach into my pocket. Yet the theories of management that dominate the international development world tend to force us to pick one and pretend that it’s the one that should motivate everyone. And then we wonder why things don’t work out quite as we planned. In terms of capacity the key question that flows from this discussion is not whether there is capacity within a situation, but how that capacity is perceived (i.e. capacity to do what for whom?) and how those perceptions interact.

Second, perspectives draw the focus away from the ‘system’ as it supposedly exists in ‘real life’ (as in the filing system) and allows us to consider alternative ways of understanding the situation – what it might be like, could be like or even should be like. Or how different people imagine how it might be like. This opens up the systems world, because not only can you draw conclusions based on a study of the world as it is, but you can also compare alternative perceptions of what people think it is with what actually is, or with different perceptions of what is or what might be. The similarities and differences between what is and what might be create puzzles and contractions. When handled successfully, these ‘tensions’ can achieve deeper learning than just seeing things through one set of eyes and possibilities. It can also generate better insights into the real-life behaviour of a programme. That’s because people usually behave on the basis of their perceptions of what is or what might be, rather than some official line imposed by someone else.

The systems field draws on a number of approaches for exposing and exploring perspectives, including asking:

• What are the different ways in which this situation can be understood?
• How will these different understandings affect how people judge the success of an endeavour?
• How will they affect behaviour, and thus the behaviour of the system, especially when things go wrong from their perspective? With what result and significance?

Soft Systems is a methodology that first forces you to consider alternative perspectives (such as development as ‘aid’, as ‘patronage’, as a ‘tool of foreign policy’, or as ‘empowerment’). It then asks a series of questions that help you work out the structure, function and logical consequences of each perspective. You then compare and contrast this ‘logic’ with ‘real life’. Unlike most ‘logic’ modelling approaches, the idea is not to make ‘real life’ more like the logic, but to gain insight from the similarities and differences across several perspectives that help you improve the current situation.

Activity Systems is an approach based on the recognition that while people can agree on a set of shared activities they are often directed towards different purposes. You and I may jointly organise a micro-loan scheme, but you are seeking to develop the social independence of women and I am seeking to raise the overall income of the village. Much of the time that difference won’t matter, but Activity Systems enables you to predict the kind of circumstances in which they will matter. Activity Systems approaches also provide ways of helping people engage constructively in resolving the tensions that arise when circumstances expose the fact that people are engaged in the same activities but to different ends. So, in the earlier example, if something happened that made the economic and social goals appear to be in conflict, then activity systems provides a way to see if there are innovative ways of reframing or reforming the activities to allow both goals to be satisfied.

Boundaries

Boundaries have always been an important systems concept. They drive how we ‘frame’ situations. A boundary differentiates between who or what is ‘in’ and who or what is ‘out’, what is deemed relevant and irrelevant, what is important and what is not, what is worthwhile and what is not, who benefits and who is disadvantaged. Every endeavour has to make a choice between what it includes and what it excludes, what is deemed relevant and what is not, which perspectives are honoured and which are marginalised.

By the mid-1980s, more explicit questions were being asked about how boundaries are set, who sets them and what the consequences are. It’s fine to map relationships and it may be fine to acknowledge that there will be different perspectives on those relationships, but those relationships and perspectives are not neutral – someone, somewhere, decides which are most important.

Boundaries are the sites where values get played out and disagreements are highlighted. A lot of power issues are wrapped up in boundaries; just as the person with the magic marker controls what goes on the whiteboard, the person whose perspective dominates a project decides the boundaries.

Capacity development in the international arena is full of boundary decisions – who gets what kind of resources for what purpose, and whose interests are marginalised (see the article Sandra Seeboldt in this issue).

Once it was acknowledged that thinking systemically about perspectives and interrelationships involved boundary choices, many in the systems field started taking a deliberate and often debated approach to boundary identification and selection.

Critical Systems Heuristics is one example of a method that poses a set of questions that help guide conversations about boundaries. It involves exploring four aspects:

• Entrenched values: Whose interests are being served and whose interests should be served?
• Command and control: Who controls what resources, and who should control what resources?
• Dogma: What expertise is required? Who do we trust as experts and what expertise should be required; what’s the risk of assuming this is all the expertise needed?
• Righteousness: Whose interests are being excluded, marginalised or harmed by the way we are framing the situation, and whose interests should be excluded, marginalised or harmed?

Although capacity development touches on all four aspects, capacity is especially bound up with notions of expertise – and Critical Systems Heuristics poses some very challenging notions about what assumptions are being made about expertise; what expertise is regarded as relevant (or irrelevant), and who should have that expertise.

Thinking systemically

Learning how to think systemically is a matter of capacity development. There is knowledge to be acquired, skills to be gained and opportunities to be sought to apply the knowledge and skills. Where do you start? Generally speaking the best choice is to start where you are right now. For instance, do the notions of focusing on inter-relationships, perspectives and boundaries help you improve your own understanding of capacity development? If they do, then start there. If that is insufficient, then dive a little deeper, pick a systems method or approach that seems promising for a particular issue you are engaged in. Try it out and see if it helps.

My own first steps into the systems world were through perspectives in general and Soft Systems Methodology in particular. I was a community development worker in London and perspectives were especially relevant to my work. Other methods and understandings developed over the years as I needed them. These days my focus is on boundaries because I work primarily in the evaluation field helping people make judgements of worth. Judgements of worth are boundary decisions because they essentially determine what is deemed ‘worthwhile’, or of some value or merit – and by implication what is not.

Based on my experiences over the years, the main lesson is to avoid learning systems approaches on your own. Apprentice yourself. Find someone with a sophisticated understanding of the systems field and a good knowledge of one or two methods. Learn that method with them and then branch out. Whatever approach you choose to learn and develop your ability to think systemically and use systems methods, it will be a fascinating, insightful and useful journey.

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This article is based on previous writings by the author and contributions from Gerald Midgley, Richard Hummelbrunner, Amy La Goy, Iraj Imam, Martin Reynolds and Glenda Eoyang. It has formed the basis of workshops, lectures and articles, most recently ‘Bucking the system’, The Broker 11, December 2008. [ View article ]

Further reading

• Checkland, P. and Poulter, J. (2006) Learning for Action. Wiley.
• Flood, R. Rethinking the Fifth Discipline: Learning within the Unknowable. www.ebookmall.com/ebook/132488-ebook.htm
• Flood, R. and Jackson, M. (1991) Creative Problem Solving. Wiley.
• Irwin, J.S. (2000) Business Dynamics. McGraw-Hill.
• Kurtz, C. F. and Snowden D. J. (2003) The New Dynamics of Strategy. Cognitive Edge: www.cognitive-edge.com
• Midgley, G. (2000) Systemic Intervention, Philosophy, Methodology and Practice. Kluwer/Plenum.
• Reynolds, M. (2008) Reframing expert support for development management. Journal of International Development, 20(6): 768–782.
• Williams, B. and Imam, I. (eds) (2007) Systems Concepts in Evaluation. EdgePress.

Links

• Soft Systems Methodology: www.bobwilliams.co.nz (see the section ‘systems stuff’ in the sidebar menu)
• Werner Ulrich, Critical Systems Heuristics: www.geocities.com
• Centre for Activity Theory and Developmental Work Research, University of Helsinki: www.edu.helsinki.fi
• System Dynamics: www.uni-klu.ac.at
• The Viable Systems Model (VSM) Guide: www.esrad.org.uk
• Soft Systems Methodology: www.bobwilliams.co.nz (Go to the section 'systems stuff' in the sidebar menu)
• Activity Systems: www.edu.helsinki.fi
• Cynefin: www.cognitive-edge.com-edge.com