Practicing “systems leadership” is the new vogue in community development and the philanthropic world. Numerous books and articles have been written about this, but the most prominent comes from Peter Senge. I don’t have anything against this idea or the people that have popularized it. It’s important stuff and it seems true that when community leaders rise above their own individual and organizational interests to look at their whole community as a system, they can find success.
Being a system leader or practicing systems leadership is still a new concept, set of skills, and occupation. Can a normal person do this or do you need some superhuman mix of extroversion, tenacity, smarts, savvy, and wealth. It can seem like trying to be Batman, but instead of making Gotham better by removing bad guys, your mission is to get all the different non-profits, firms, and government to do things together. Fighting the joker seems easier.
Human factors and ergonomics (HFE) have a history of examining human work from the perspective of human capability. So, what would a HFE profession say would be a challenge with this type of work? What hazards exist? Where will human performance limitations, limit what’s possible? Contrary to the meme of the day humans can’t do anything they put their mind to. Especially, when those things involve complex, dynamic, and collaborative things. Evolution hasn’t provided us with the cognitive processing abilities to understand nuanced third order feedback loops on the fly. We struggle to think in 4 dimensions, much less 100’s (Stogratz, 2019). As Stogratz suggests, it’s not hopeless that we will never find a way to get past these challenges. We can use science to discover deeper insights which can guide new technologies. We can use computers to do what they do best. Still, we are left the uncomfortable truth that those things may not exist today and that being a system leader is something that must be done with some urgency. Until the secrets of social science are unlocked with math and computers, we will need to plod along with just our human selves and our human abilities.
That doesn’t mean there is no chance to make this work easier to do. There has been years of research about community development to build upon. Social policy is a hotly debated academic pursuit, so there isn’t a vacuum of ideas about what might be done. What’s missing is asking whether the hot new social approach is something that a human can do. It’s easy to invent complicated social programs and collaborations on paper. It is difficult to invent a simple social program or system leadership system that regular people can do and do with fidelity. Even simple tasks like forming a steering committee to decide whether we should use this social program in this place, are built upon a foundation of complicated social interactions, relationships, communication skills, persuasion skills, and many more.
HFE researcher would look at this system leadership work and wonder. Who are the workers? What are the tasks they must accomplish? What does their task environment look like? How do they currently do the tasks they need to do? Where is there wasted time, energy, and effort? Where are the limits of human performance vis a vis the tasks? Where would we expect people to struggle and what is the cause of their struggle?
Yes. Some of the challenges involved in doing this work are driven my intractable nature of working with social systems. That shouldn’t be an excuse to find improvements. Only a portion of the challenges to doing this work stem from the nature of the problem. The way we form teams, the way we lead teams, our ability to understanding a complex system and understand the way our work effects that system, our ability to bridge differences, all are rich sources of challenges.
Each of these challenges has been examined in the HFE context and the results of those studies can be used to improve this work.
Community Bricolage 