Stories and Systemic Inquiries – TB872 Part 02 Week 06

Tutor-Marked Assignment 01

The last couple of weeks have been a bit hectic as it was time for submission of my first assignment for the TB872 Managing Change with Systems Thinking in Practice module, towards the MSc Systems Thinking in Practice degree I hope to complete. I passed the module with a decent Pass grade at 67%. With a 15% weighting towards the entire module score, that adds ten points to the fifty needed to pass the module. My tutor’s feedback was that my understanding of concepts was good, but diagrams were not easy to understand (too much information as I tried to be thorough, need to have more concise versions for assignments) and I could have included more references to the module itself or other supporting materials.

I think there is an expectation to follow certain traditions—using specific ‘Systems’ language and using specific diagram styles that I personally feel may not be the most appropriate for communicating information in the most effective way. As a graphic designer this kills me, but in future I will try to spend less time trying to be creative with my diagrams (at least on this module). Although a level of creativity is required for top marks on this module, that doesn’t matter if I will be marked down for diagrams that don’t look how assessors expect them to.

I was distracted (perhaps procrastinating) with the visual presentation of the work, and I had to redo the whole layout in Word after I realised that the document would not be accepted in PDF or Apple Pages format. Using Word predictably caused layout problems which is why I generally avoid it. Images were not easily viewable by my tutor (although I included larger images in the appendix, and links to full size images that could be downloaded or viewed in a browser). Backup PDF files, and images attached separately were not accepted on the assignment upload website page. I will have a more minimal style in my next assignment, and make it easier for the reader to flow through each question if possible.

During the process of preparing my assignment, I already knew that there were things I could do differently. For example, after dozens of times re-reading my writing, I lost all sense of whether I had written a good answer or not. Brain fog and executive dysfunction, especially under stress, were not helping the situation. Going forward, it might be helpful to do a more detailed breakdown when I am writing an outline. I did have checklists prepared for what to include in my assignment, and a brief outline, but it was not as thorough as it could have been. I could try to give stronger arguments and explanations for my reasoning, and aim to have supporting evidence for every point, although this is challenging with strict word counts.

Disability Support Needs Assessment

After submitting, I had a good idea of where I could improve and where I might need help. This was useful as I finally had my long-awaited needs assessment for disability support that I asked for because of the chronic anxiety and depression that I deal with. I conveyed my difficulties with processing a large amount of information, struggling to focus and remember things, and how these symptoms are worsened under stress. I know that I can learn, analyse ideas and write my own, but it takes me so much longer because I have to go over things many times. I have to have multiple ways of accessing information in case one method works better than another on different days—I have notes digitally and in print; videos and audio saves with transcriptions; sometimes I have to change the colour and contrast of my screen for my brain to even process the letters in a portion of text, let alone the meanings.

The needs assessment was conducted by a person from Study Tech who was friendly and efficient, explaining things quickly but frequently checking in on whether I understood and was alright with continuing. They recommended apps that they thought would help with managing all the information, assist with reading and processing text, and planning work effectively. I was also given demonstrations of the apps that they would provide for free for the duration of my studies, and offered a budget for purchases of ink and paper, as well as access to mentoring and support for using the apps. They put together a very thorough report for Student Finance England to approve, and I should hear back with confirmation within a couple of weeks. I didn’t expect to be offered this much, and I was grateful to have suggestions for tools to manage information and workload that put me on a more level playing field with other students. The recommendations are personalised, and if you don’t have a laptop or printer, for example, you may be entitled to support with those and other accessibility tools. I highly recommend applying for disability support with your university if you have diagnoses that affect your learning or day-to-day functioning as a student.

TB872 Part 02 – what has changed?

Part 02 of the TB872 module is intended to improve our systems practice while setting up a systemic inquiry to manage change in our situation of concern. At eight weeks, this part of the module is twice as long as the first, and the second tutor-marked assignment after those eight weeks will be worth 25% of the total module score. The stakes are higher, and the work we do in Part 02 will directly support our work in Part 03.

The first assignment seemed to be designed partially as a way to assess our understanding of the module content so far, and partly to synthesise our learning by relating Part 01 (out of 3) to the final End-of Module assessment (EMA) that we will need to prepare for. The EMA will require us to design a learning system for managing change with STiP in a situation of concern. For that I will have to identify an appropriate situation that would benefit from systemic change with systems thinking techniques, and develop the skills to manage that change in a way that enables continuous learning and development.

We will be engaging in a cycle of systemic inquiry that develops our STiP capabilities (Systemic Inquiry 1 / S1) and the process of managing change in a situation of concern (Systemic Inquiry 2 / S2). As we continue through the course, our learning from S1 and S2 will contribute to the development of each inquiry. This process can be seen as a learning system designed to develop STiP capability through praxis in specific situational applications. The ways we choose to manage change in our situation of concern must be demonstrated to be systemically desirable and culturally feasible, as well as informed by the ‘virtuous cycle of inquiry’ with S1 (Ison & Blackmore, 2014).

Part 02 began with reviewing the content from Part 01 and how our interpretations of concepts such as the Practitioner-Framework-Method-Situation (PFMS) heuristic had changed. At the start of the module, I believed that to be a Systems Practitioner, I would have to be managing systems professionally but this is not true. The module has taught me that everyone is a practitioner in different ways. The methods, frameworks of ideas and approaches we apply when managing situations in our lives are choices we make all the time, often subconsciously. By engaging purposefully with our systems of thinking and doing, we can make better informed decisions that are beneficial to the systems we are a part of.

I am now more conscious of my practice role in different situations, and the effect I have on the systems I observe. I acknowledge that it is something I can still work on, but also that constantly thinking about the systemic consequences of our actions is something that people avoid partly because it is exhausting and a challenge to our Egos. As a person that has spiralled extremely deeply into self-consciousness and self-blame for problematic situations due to anxiety and depression, I have to tread carefully.

I realise that the reflexive thinking, which is encouraged on this module, has the purpose of getting us to think about our ways of thinking so, technically, irrational thinking should be bypassed when logical processes of analysis are followed systematically. However, I think it is important to recognise why self-reflection can be challenging and may not always be a productive and beneficial process if we are not skilled in this type of thinking or are prone to coming to irrational conclusions, especially with thinking processes that challenge our identities or sense of Self.

Practicing with the PFMS heuristic

Looking at a case study (Ison and Straw, 2020, adapted for TB872) of how The Environmental Agency (EA) in England managed change using two different approaches, I could analyse how the approaches might affect practice in terms of PFMS. One approach is Decide-Announce-Defend (DAD), and the other is Engage-Deliberate-Decide (EDD). In this case study, the EA made a disastrous attempt at implementing change in Teignmough without consulting the local population. They had to reconsider their approach when dealing with a similar issue in nearby Shaldon where they were more successful. I start by identifying the setting in which the practice is situated:

After reading about the events in the case study, I reflect on my own experiences and I start to build a narrative for situations that I felt need effective STiP. I would encourage others to do so in my own systemic inquiries, as it seems like a useful way to gain understanding of interpretations of situations. Narrative can help us understand different perspectives through the stories, the way they are told, and their meaning to the storyteller and the listeners (Polkinghorne, 1988). Learning to listen with intention can be a way to develop systems thinking capability, so I hope that it is something I can practice alongside telling my own stories. Through storytelling, we can be critically reflexive by thinking about our interpretations of situations and the traditions of understanding that affect our thoughts and actions.

My stories for Systems Thinking in Practice

In my life, I have had a good amount of experience with doing voluntary work in my local community, including several years of youth work with a Youth Inclusion Project (YIP) in London, and more recently doing graphic design work for a community centre. I have found that there are many grassroots organisations that attempt to fill the gaps or pick up the slack of systemic failures, for example intervening to provide support for young people excluded from the Education system, or providing safe activity spaces and free services to marginalised communities.

As a member of the communities in which I worked, I felt strongly about the betterment of conditions for individuals and the community as a whole. Although these organisations, often non-profits, do amazing work that benefits their communities, their work does not resolve the underlying systemic issues that lead to the symptoms they are trying to address. I acknowledge that even those that have power to make systemic change, have limitations to the actions they can take (systemic desirability, cultural feasibility, ethical defensibility); even more so for the disempowered.

As a young person volunteering as a Youth Worker and Teaching Assistant for an inner city YIP, my objective when starting was to gain experience and try to make a difference where I could. On the scale I was working, I could make a difference to a few people’s lives by supporting them day-to-day. I was vaguely aware of some of the issues that caused young people to face exclusion but my job did not give me opportunity to make systemic changes, nor was I experienced or knowledgable enough to do so. I undertook relevant but relatively superficial training, so I still lacked frameworks of ideas, and had no conception of methods of expanding the boundaries of my influence to act systemically in a purposeful way.

Almost twenty years later, I have greater confidence in myself as a Practitioner because of my experiences and education over that time. I am able to reflect on my previous work and see where I could have benefited from specific resources and approaches. This indicates that just by living life, reflecting on and learning from my experiences, I unknowingly developed my STiP capabilities. I wonder how my choices and action might have been different if I was taught to think systemically in a purposeful way when I was younger, but I imagine I would still be limited by my lack of references for alternative ways of thinking and doing things. I may still have been somewhat impressionable, and less confident in thinking critically, making balanced decisions, being innovative and challenging norms for the sake of managing change systemically. It is possible that I am underestimating the late-teens version of myself that made the decision to volunteer as a way to ‘make a difference’ in places where systemic failure was the most visible to me, and participated in training to develop my frameworks and methods of doing a better job.

In my more recent work with a local community centre, I focused on their work as the basis of a project proposal for a course I was doing at the time—Design Thinking for The Greater Good: Innovation in the Social Sector, one of my first introductions to systems thinking and inspiration for me to learn more. While developing the proposal for how I could potentially help the organisation increase their reach and meet the needs of the community, I was encouraged by the course material to consider the many different stakeholders and what their different needs might be, and to decide on a system boundary for the situation I want to focus on. The Engage-Deliberate-Decide (EDD) approach was emphasised on this course, expounding the importance of research and iterative design for systematically creating solutions for the issues identified and tested by the stakeholders directly affected.

Whilst developing my project proposal, I wanted to be respectful and considerate of the experienced and knowledgable people working at the community centre that were already doing effective outreach and engagement. Due to my own experience of some of the issues and limitations faced by similar organisations, I hoped that my ideas could simply be a contribution if not a conversation-starter for possible future development. I felt myself to be a part of the ‘situation’ as well as a ‘practitioner’ in this case because I was a member of the community that this organisation was working for, and I was also providing services to the organisation. This was an interesting dynamic, and although I did not yet have insight to recognise my ‘practice’ outside of professional settings, it gave me some conceptualisation of how practices overlap and traditions of understanding inform our engagement with situations regardless of our identification as a professional or service-user in a situation, because in this case I was both at the same time.

In this situation, consciously reflecting on my role within the boundaries of a system of interest while being open to the expansion of those boundaries from the perspectives of others, gave me a surprisingly liberating and empowering feeling—I could acknowledge my sphere of influence, parts of my practice and the situation that I could manage, and those that I could not. I also acknowledged the many other stakeholders that had their own traditions of understanding, skills and knowledge that they would be motivated to contribute because of their own roles in the system. There was the opportunity for collective learning, collective action for systemically beneficial change. Carefully considering the various factors affecting the situation would allow me to identify strengths and weaknesses in the system of interest, as well as those in my own practice and that of others. Acting collectively to address issues identified by the collective allows us to combine our different skills and understandings to effect greater change, which can potentially have wider consequences for systemic change outside of our shared situation of concern.

It is in situations such as these that I could see myself taking purposeful action to manage change using STiP—in a situation that directly affects me and my community, where the issues and potential solutions are unclear or complex, current management and practices are ineffective, or there is a sense of systemic failure and the opportunity for change.

References

Ison, R. and Blackmore, C. (2014) ‘Designing and Developing a Reflexive Learning System for Managing Systemic Change’, Systems, 2. Available at: https://doi.org/10.3390/systems2020119.

Ison, R. and Straw, E. (2020) The Hidden Power of Systems Thinking: Governance in a Climate Emergency. Available at: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781351026901.

Ison, R. et al (2020) ‘Part 2: A systemic inquiry into systems thinking in practice’ TB872: Managing change with systems thinking in practice. Available at: https://learn2.open.ac.uk/mod/oucontent/view.php?id=2303521.

Polkinghorne, D. (1988) Narrative knowing and the human sciences. United States: State University of New York Press.