What is Systemic Change? (A Beginner’s Guide in 3 videos)

So here at GASLIT, we’re talking a lot about the need to change systems. But what does that even mean? 

My favorite illustration is the upstream/downstream parable that most of us in public health hear early in our training: 

For those who prefer to read it, the story goes like this: A couple is fishing on a riverbank and all afternoon, they see people struggling in the current and rescue them one by one. Finally, they go upstream and discover an unprotected overlook where people have been falling in. They realize that if they could post some warning signs and put up a protective barrier, they could prevent everyone from falling in, instead of trying to rescue folks one at a time after they’re already drowning. Warning signs and protective barriers are just two examples of the kind of systems changes we focus on in the public health field. For a Kindergartener-ready interactive version of illustrating this story, check out my experience at my daughter’s elementary school career fair. 

By changing the system - instead of changing or treating the individual - we are more likely to address the root cause of the problem and come up with a solution that is effective and sustainable. 

So now we know what changing the system looks like. But how do we go about really understanding a system and identifying what needs to change about it? Often, when we start to think about how to change a system, we focus on the one piece of it we interact with or know about. This is a huge mistake. For more on why, let’s visit another favorite parable of mine (this one is a familiar one for those who’ve learned about systems thinking): 

For those who prefer to read it, the story goes like this: Six blind/blindfolded individuals encounter an elephant for the first time. Each person feels only one part of the elephant and comes to a conclusion about what they are encountering based on that (the one feeling the tail says it’s like a rope, the one feeling the tusk says it’s like a spear, the one feeling the ear says it’s like a fan, the one feeling the trunk says it’s like a snake, and so on). It leads to a lot of misconceptions and no single person who has the full and accurate picture. 

Systems thinking and systems change requires us to broaden our perspective. We have to work together across individuals, organizations, and sectors to get to a better shared understanding of all the intersecting parts of a system - and thus, a better understanding of where and how to intervene to improve the system. 

We also need to deepen our perspective to take in the entirety of a system - not just the tip of the iceberg. Which brings me to my next favorite systems thinking illustration, this one more a metaphor than a parable:

For those who prefer to read it, the basic idea is this: The problems we see in our communities are like the tip of an iceberg - they give us incomplete information, because 90% of an iceberg is below the surface of the water. The iceberg model organizes an issue into four levels: at the surface is the event or presenting problem that you can obviously see, under the surface are first underlying trends or patterns, then structures or forces contributing to the patterns, and finally at the deepest level, the mental models (beliefs, values, stereotypes, biases, and -isms, many of them subconscious)  that maintain the system structures.

When we dive deeper to see the whole iceberg, we get beyond reacting to events and symptoms and can get more proactive about addressing deeper root causes as well as gaining empathy and understanding for the perspectives of others in ways that might help us work across differences to improve our communities. 

With a better sense of how to think at a systems level, we’re still left with the question of how do we actually MAKE systems change - in our own work, in building community power, in reducing corporate power? That’s what we’re hoping to unpack here at GASLIT. For some initial examples, see our recent posts about how a community coalition in Pittsburgh fought to keep their water system public and how organizations and people across the country came together to change systems in ways that drove cigarette smoking rates way down in the U.S. 

If you’re trying to figure out how to apply systems thinking in your own work, you can find some very practical tips and guidance in the places the videos above are drawn from. The upstream video is drawn from a TEDx talk I gave a few years ago, and the elephant parable and iceberg model videos are from a systems thinking training I helped develop in partnership with the Rocky Mountain Public Health Training Center, which folks can access for free here. 

Individual-level solutions aren’t the answer to our public health and other problems, but individually, we can each begin to make the mindset shifts from individual-level thinking to systems-level thinking. That’s what we need to build community power and pursue systems-level solutions that actually work. Our health, our planet, and our future hang in the balance. Let’s do this.