Systems Won’t Change Unless People Do

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We try to humanise change work by centring feelings and emotions, lived experience, tension and joy and describing it as relational. And yet the change we hope to see is often wrapped up in the abstract, academic and de-humanised term ‘systems change’.

The system is broken; the system needs to change.

But ultimately, systems are designed, created, held accountable and challenged by people.

Changing a harmful system will probably need something technical to happen; a new process; some sort of redistribution or reprogramming. But this requires the people with the power to redistribute and reprogramme to understand that:

a)      they are part of a system in the first place

b)     the system is optimised for something that impacts negatively on other people

c)      while they might actually be part of a problem, they could also be part of a solution

d)     it’s necessary, or desirable, or fairer, or in their own interest to change something to be part of a solution. Winning hearts and minds and all that.

Advocating for change at a systems level can be hard because ultimately, it’s people with power that are impacted. Conclusions can be unpopular, particularly when unusual business might need to be supported over business as usual.

But this is the work that’s needed right now. When our conversations are fragmented and we’re increasingly answered by software; when we seem to prioritise and celebrate behaviours knowing that they harm people and planet.

The work is to make harmful systems real and less abstract – to name them, describe them, map out who is part of them.

And it’s the ‘who’ that’s important here – not to name-and-shame but because a shared understanding of a system’s impacts and shared vision for mitigating them can only come about between people. Yes, by centring feelings and emotions, lived experience, tension and joy and describing it as relational. Because systems won’t change until people do.