It’s often said that people who live in cultures that are steeped in individualism struggle to wrap their minds around systems. Individualist cultures see both the source and the solution to problems in the actions of individual people who are said to be rational, who know and understand their thinking and their desires, and who have the power and self determination to make changes, if they choose. Systems thinking is frequently derided as “too big” and “too emotionally overwhelming” because when there’s a problem there isn’t an individual to blame or supplicate or lock up.
Those who argue that it is overwhelming to think in systems usually speak about the “system” as a totality, a “thing” that we must be able to see in its entire complexity and range, if we are to transform it. We have to know in advance exactly how to tackle its every element.
In actuality, systems thinking is a highly nimble, optimistic, iterative method of problem solving, because it’s not the totality of the system, but rather the fact that systems are networks that is the key to thinking about change. Thinking of problems like population extinction, or white supremacy, or sexual violence as systems inaugurates a space of immense possibility, because a change made to one part of a networked system will inevitably impact the rest.
The beauty of systems thinking is that it shows us that any change to one part of the system will impact other nodes. But how that impact will occur, when it will occur, cannot be predicted. So the call to know how to change or “fix” an entire system is not only cognitively and emotionally overwhelming, it's actually impossible.
We cannot master the system, or dominate it back, the way it dominates us. But we can learn a nodal point, we can isolate a 30%, and in impacting that 30% we can be a catalyst for systemic change.
This is not to say that those ripple effects will be uniformly positive. We cannot know or anticipate the result of that 30% intervention. But we can track the energy flows in the feedback loop, and we can notice the ways what we think we know will come back to us, changed, by its interaction with the system itself. We can work together, in coalitions, in organizations, in spontaneous conversations in coffee shops, to overcome our fear of enormous challenges; we can accept our grief and our longing for change by locating ourselves within our own networks and systems, and by reminding ourselves that we don’t have to know the entire solution to make a tremendous impact: we just have to start with a small but significant change.
