This article was originally posted by Marcus Jenal on the systemic-insight.com website in December 2013. I co-authored this paper with Marcus. It is an output of the theme of applying complexity theories to economic development.
For the last 3 years we at Mesopartner have been purposefully experimenting with complexity and systems theories in our practice. Not only did we change our company logo and strapline based on our new learning, we started to dismantle and question almost every aspect of our instruments, tools and theories.
This was a steep learning curve for us and for our key customers who agreed that we could embark on these serendipitous journeys together. While we still believe in bottom up development, we are wondering about how to achieve developmental change within the typical timelines and resource constraints that development projects often face.
One of the results of this process is this website (http://systemic-insight.com), where we want to share our thoughts and invite our followers to contribute to the discussions we have.
A new Mesopartner working paper now provides a theoretical grounding for the work we have done in the last three years and will continue to do. We consider some definitions, ponder the implications and try to formulate some responses to some of the key challenges that systems and complexity theories confront us with in our field of bottom up economic development.
We see this paper as an input into a broader discussion with our close collaborators, our close clients, and the broader network that we form part of. We ask you to send us your thoughts and add your comments to this and future posts.
We thank the colleagues that have already commented on the paper. Many of the suggestions are already incorporated into this version. Your contributions are greatly appreciated. Shawn and Marcus
When working with development organizations in the mesolevel we often find that their programmes are very generic. The same can be said of the findings of many diagnosis. The result is that firms do not really use the services of these organizations, because the value add and the impact of the services are not really clear.
For me there should always be a movement from the generic (e.g. the foundry sector is not competitive) towards the specific (e.g. the foundry industry is not competitive because it lacks capacity to do good front end engineering and design). After we have developed a sense of some specific issues that are affecting the performance of firms, there are two things we have to do.
Firstly, we want to try and figure out if there is something that we can do at a more systemic level to try and influence the specific issues. With systemic I mean that instead of addressing a particular issue repeatedly at various firms, see if there are other ways to achieve the same outcome. An example would be instead of only offering a design service to firms, make sure that the university curricula includes sufficient content dealing with design. Of course, we should always strive to have multiple interventions to address a particular issue.
Secondly, we should verify whether our specific findings are unique to the firms we have diagnosed or engaged with. For instance, and food initiative run by a university might find that the private sector is affected by a lack of a particular kind of testing lab. Then instead of designing a solution just for a limited number of producers, the university should check whether similar firms in other industries (related and not even related) are facing the same constraints. It may just be possible to design a solution that is useful to a much broader target group, making the solution more sustainable and more relevant to the private sector.
From my experience of working within many different value chains is that there are many issues that are treated as being unique (or specific) to a particular value chain that are in fact affecting many different kinds of enterprises. The South African Industrial Policy framework for instance is designed around many different sub-sectors, with many different interventions implemented by different organizations and programmes that are actually not unique to a particular sub-sector. This is expensive and also not really systemic, these interventions are not permanently changing the meso level in South Africa or the service offerings of meso organizations such as universities and other development programmes. The South African manufacturing sector is struggling with low volume, outdated designs and rapidly increasing costs across the board. I imagine that it should be possible to based on the insights from the different sub sectors to design much better programmes that are cross cutting over many different sub sectors, and that from the start are designed to improve the service offerings from meso organizations to firms.
Originally published on 26 August 2013, edited and republished on 23 July 2019
I am taking a risk with this post, but I am sure my regular readers will bear with me as I think out loud. I have been fortunate in the past few months to have been able to focus my praxis almost completely on the topic of complexity and systems thinking in development, with a particular emphasis on innovation systems and the technological evolution of industries and regions. Shifting from advocating for a different approach to actually assisting with the shift has been a really exciting venture.
Disclaimer: These are my own opinions and do not reflect Mesopartner’s views.
Systems and complexity thinking is now central to Mesopartner’s, work (see our Systemic-Insight theme page). Not surprisingly, my main customers for working on systems and complexity are not those involved with development programmes per se, but meso level institutions tasked with supporting industries and sub-sectors to innovate, grow, compete and increase employment. It is no secret to most of you that I am very disillusioned with aid and development cooperation at the moment.
When you dive into the literature on complex adaptive systems and how they tend to function naturally, you cannot help but wonder whether aid and development cooperation is in a very systematic way trying to fight the very things that make economic systems so amazing. There are several universal phenomena about complex systems that seem to be ignored (I will highlight just a few that I found personally the most challenging to deal with in my work):
In complex systems, resources are allocated (or taken up) by those best able to make sense of the situation, using a combination of knowledge, resources and past experience. Marcus Jenal reminded me that people also exercise power and use their influence to take up these resources. It is a reinforcing loop referred to by systems thinkers such as Donnella Meadows as “strength to the strong”. It is even mentioned in the Bible and in other spiritual and philosophical texts. This presents us with the first dilemma as we can often sense that the way resources are distributed is not fair or just, and that many agents in the system will resist any attempt at redistribution.
Even when systems become unstable, they do tend to find a kind of equilibrium range. This means that systems will by their very nature resist our interventions as they strive towards some natural range.
When a system remains in a suboptimal state (in our judgement it is not delivering what we think it should deliver), we can almost be certain that somebody somewhere is using their power or influence to keep the system in a suboptimal state to extract rents from the situation. It is unnatural for systems to remain “broken” over an extended period without someone influential in the system benefitting from it.
Related to the previous point, the ability of an external agent to assess whether a system is broken is debatable and not questioned often enough. Even if the actors in the system believe it is broken, the system might just be behaving in a very natural way. Examples can be found in finance (who wants to lend money to potential losers when they can guarantee returns rather by lending to potential winners) or in agriculture (brokers overcome scale and uncertainty by aggregating volumes, and in return for their risk they earn good profits). There is a second dimension to this: if we ask the actors in the system what is bothering them, they will in most cases shift the blame for their decision or indecision somewhere else.
What is good for the system is not always good for the agents in the system and the other way around. An example is that strategies to promote exports or employment growth might actually have a negative effect on many small enterprises while having a positive effect on medium and large-sized enterprises. Or strengthening smaller enterprises might have a negative effect on the current account (through increased imports) while at the same increasing jobs in the service sector.
One of the weakest points of influence in a system is the actor, while one of the strongest leverage points is the purpose (often not articulated formally) and the rules (social institutions) of the system. Although it is much harder to change, the purpose of the system is the most important leverage point, followed by rules and the nature and frequency of interrelations. Yet most development programmes target particular actors, ignoring the implicit or unexpressed meta-purpose of the system. Furthermore, most measurement systems measure outputs at the level of the actor, instead of monitoring behaviour in the system. Behaviour (informed by social rules) is a better (yet harder to quantify) measure as it tells us something about the purpose, the meta culture and actors’ attitude towards his or her own health and the health of the systems. This is also a characteristic that I find personally challenging, as it takes time to change the purpose and the rules of the system. In many cases, people simply cannot even explain the purpose of their systems or the rules they follow, which are instinctively based on their values. Changing the purpose of a system requires people to change their priorities, their values, the way to judge success (or failure) and the way they perceive their role in a system or society.
There is a relationship between the actors and their artifacts (equipment, assets, machines, tools, etc,). Old, broken or outdated equipment is a symptom of old, broken and outdated business models implemented or executed by the actors. Somehow this is made possible by both the social context and the social as well as the economic technologies. Giving an actor a new artifact (equipment) does not necessarily change the system in the long term, as the actor is still the same. I have often witnessed how an old factory with outdated equipment but that is managed properly can outperform a modern factory run by incompetent management (management itself is an economic and social technology). Providing incentives for an existing business to buy new equipment is to address a symptom and not a cause of sustained underperformance. But an existing actor with a new attitude, better information or different behaviour is able to use existing artifacts more effectively. In the real world, this means that upgrading the equipment in a business is the wrong place to start. Rather promote new entrepreneurs or people who can better use the existing equipment. Physical technologies co-evolve with economic and social technologies; we are not dealing with an equipment problem only.
How do we get development programmes to embrace some of the strengths of complex systems? For example:
In complex systems, agents make decisions in a decentralised way. They make these decisions based on their perceptions of their environment and their perceptions of alternative futures, based on the information at their disposal. Thus flooding the system with valid information and promoting the view of how new knowledge or technologies can increase returns is much more valuable than physically trying to fix the actor. Education, technology demonstration and supporting experimentation are ways to provide entrepreneurs with better information to support decision making. It is often very difficult in developing countries to find this type of information which is needed for decision making support by entrepreneurs or firms.
A complex system exists of agents(or actors)and their artifacts, the interrelations between the agents and their common (system) purpose. Often in development, we describe only the actors, while ignoring the fact that a system has other elements that are important to include in our description. Already describing a target system as “small farmers using outdated equipment advocating for state protection” is already a much better description of a typical system, as opposed to “poor small farmers who are suffering”. We can also not just focus on “technology” without considering social and economic technologies.
In complex systems, the behaviour of the system emerges from the behaviour of all the elements in the system. This emerging behaviour, in turn, has an effect on all the elements in the system, which gives rise to complexity. In complex systems there are strong feedback loops between the elements in the system and the overall observed behaviour or purpose of the system. As economies become more complex, and as inter-dependencies between different systems increase, so too it becomes more difficult to predict or anticipate how a system will change, adapt or respond to a change. This means that we have to be more sensitive to the feedback loops. Our greatest weakness is that we are outside the system, but this can also be turned into a strength if we use our distance to provide a neutral perspective on how the system seems to be behaving.
Even if we acknowledge that complex systems also frequently resist change, it is necessary to acknowledge that complex systems are very sensitive to small changes. Can we identify the areas where the system is least resistant to change? Can we support small safe-to-fail experiments in the areas where the risks seem high? Can we help the system to develop alternative paths that the actors can try out? Let us make sure that we increase the options available to the stakeholders and NOT fall in the trap of pushing stakeholders to adopt a “silver bullet” approach.
In complex systems, proximity (closeness) and connectivity (social networks) really matter. Every agent is connected to other agents and to the greater system in many different ways, and each agent typically affects every other agent through their effect on the system and their close neighbours in the system. The behaviour of any given actor affects the perspective and behaviour of other actors who are close to them. This means that we should also work with the existing structures and not create new artificial networks. If your first instinct is that the stakeholders are poorly coordinated and therefore that more coordination is needed, then you are pushing the system in the wrong direction.
The starting state really matters. And so does the development or evolutionary past of the system. The history of the system is still very evident in the system, and it affects how the system responds to choices, opportunities, failures and challenges. Thus the future of the system is affected by its past in unpredictable ways. This is why a solution that works in one place will almost certainly not work in another.
In complex systems, correlations may be strong, but causation is weak or hard to identify with certainty. In fact, what caused a particular response in the past might have no effect in the future, so perhaps trying to understand causation is in itself a future exercise. It is often impossible to figure out cause and effect and its direction in a complex system. We should not propose interventions with “guaranteed” linear outcomes. We should rather use our resources to assist developing countries to try different ideas by assisting in the creation of multiple viable paths. This is a task with very uncertain outcomes, which is exactly why our counterparts don’t pursue these risky options.
For me, development cooperation and aid need to embrace the principles of complex systems. Dave Snowden, in a Cynefin training arranged by Mesopartner in 2013, commented: “you absorb complexity, you don’t delude yourself into thinking you can eliminate it”. What I am really surprised at is how my clients in the public sector meso institutions and in the private sector find it easy to embrace the principles of complexity, while development programmes resist these same ideas. For so many of the private sector people with whom I am now working, these principles are useful as they help to explain why certain well-intentioned interventions did not yield the expected results.
My frustration is that when we discuss these same principles with aid partners or development cooperation programmes which support the very same institutions with which I am working, they find many excuses for not embracing these principles. For instance, last week I was told that “we need a clear project plan (a.k.a. an impact chain), based on a detailed assessment so that we can precisely measure our impact. We need to clearly state and then work towards our indicators so that we have evidence that we have achieved change”. Read that sentence again and count the number of times “we” and “our” are used. It seems to me that development is about delivery or applying resources and not about supporting the evolution and expansion of complex economic systems in developing countries. Never mind how sceptical development organisations are about the insights of local stakeholders as to what is really going on in the system, and how confident they are that they know exactly what the problem and the solution are.
I cannot help but wonder whether aid and development cooperation is systemically unsystemic.
23-07-2019 comment by Shawn. I decided to re-publish this post as I still find the same patterns in development. As a team, Mesopartner has moved deep into complexity thinking and have made profound changes to our consulting practice, research themes and capacity building events. Yet, much remains to be done. We are constantly also challenged by our clients in development who have to meet their funder’s requirements for predictable and quantifiable results, despite the people in these development organisations knowing that their interventions might not be addressing the real needs in a developing country.
Its been a while since I have last posted here. The reason for my absence is two-fold.
Firstly, I am busy with a course offered by Coursera and the University of Michigan about Social Network Analysis (SNA). My business partners and one of our associates in Mesopartner are participating in this course. The course is 9 weeks long and I must admit that it is taking much more of my time than I originally anticipated.
The second reason I am hardly online is that the industrial policy in South Africa is starting to have positive effects on local industry. As I work mainly with the manufacturing sector on topics like innovation systems, industrialization, identifying and addressing market failures, and the competitiveness of regions, it means that there is suddenly an upsurge in demand. The demand is lead by state owned companies that are suddenly obliged to procure manufactured content locally, and by local industries that realize that years of underinvestment and fighting to survive against cheap and sometimes lower quality goods have left many sub-sector uncompetitive.
But these two reasons are also having an effect on each other. I have been applying many of the principles and tools of Social Network Analysis in my diagnostic work for the last 2 years, and for the last year I have been using SNA as my main diagnosis instrument. This recent course have simply forced me to read up more and more on many of the theories and the concepts behind the instruments I have been using. I am still trying to figure out how to do this kind of diagnosis fast, and how to teach these instruments and theories to the practitioners that we (Mesopartner) are working with around the world. At this moment the diagnosis that I am doing in valve, pump, tooling, automotive and industrial equipment is still slow and it takes all my attention.
What is the benefit of taking a SNA approach to sub-sector development?
Well, firstly, a network diagnostic very quickly reveals whether there is a cluster or even a value chain. We often assume that these constructs are real, but in the last few years we have learned that just because all the actors that should be in a chain are there doesn’t mean that a value chain exists. Same goes for a cluster, just because all the elements are there doesn’t mean there is a dense network of cooperation, knowledge exchange and systemic competitiveness.
Secondly, a network view assists with understanding the deeper relationships, trust patterns and information flows in a small part of a real system. These relationships makes it possible to predict how information flows, who the thought leaders are and how influential institutions, leaders, officials and business people are. This is directly relevant for my work with innovation systems.
Lastly, Social Network Analysis also highlights how complex even a single link in a value chain can be. When you look at the spider web of relations, ownership structures, communication channels and knowledge spillovers, then you see how traditional development interventions have completely missed the leverage points.
All I can do at this moment is to commit to blog more frequently once this course is done. I will share some of the results of the industrial diagnosis that I am currently busy with in a few weeks time. Below I will give a sneak preview of the network map of the valve manufacturing cluster in South Africa. You will immediately see that some manufacturers (in red) and some foundries (in blue) are more connected than others. The yellow dots are valve manufacturers that are not yet part of the formal valve cluster structure. Hardly any additional analysis is needed to show that the more connected firms are the ones we should work with.
However, the additional analysis that we can run on this cluster further narrows the choices of whom to work with to get both the highest impact (in terms of both ability to grow their business, increase employment and meet customers needs) and in terms of getting the highest demonstration and spill over effects. The latter is important, because when you want to upgrade an industry you should prioritize firms that are able to create positive spillovers and that others are willing to follow. To do this kind of analysis we need a combination of qualitative and quantitative information, and we use specialized software applications. But more about this in a future post!
In my daily work I often switch between working on firm level issues about innovation to working on the more systemic level of innovation systems. My focus is mainly on the institutions that are trying to get whole regions or sub-sectors to uprgrade technologically. In other words, they want modernization of a particular sub-sector or region for a specific reason.
In the last few years I have noticed some patterns that explain why these technology intermediaries are not hitting their targets:
2) an underlying assumption in many Technology Transfer or economic development programmes with an emphasis on technology is that the problem is that firms cannot innovate (for whatever reason), therefore agencies must innovate on their behalf. It therefore takes a very narrow perspective that innovation is about products or processes, and that technology is about hardware + training. It completely miss the point that innovations emerge from within a specific framework, and that giving a firm a new product on a platter is not technology transfer nor sustainable.
4) Innovation is somehow disconnected from creativity and creative thinking. Creativity in innovation is all about getting different people to think together. Maybe they agree, most often they don’t. But somehow they need to recognize constraints, threats, opportunities and then work from there. It requires some tension and often a lot of argumentation. It isn’t serendipitous journey. It requires strong leadership and a lot of guts. And it takes time.
Let me stop here.
Earlier in a post I have written about the different levels of innovation that are commonly identified as:
Product or service innovation
Process innovation
Business model or organizational innovation
Social or societal innovation
The funny thing is that everyone is focusing on helping firms to develop new products or maybe even a better process. Yet, the biggest obstacles to product and process innovation is not a lack of effort, or funding or ideas. It is complacent or outdated management, or perhaps business models that worked in another time but that has not kept pace with change. How often do we hear that someone we know or even a whole group quit a firm to start their own enterprise because management wouldn’t listen to their ideas?
Lets get practical. For example, large parts of our South African manufacturing sector is focused on the manufacturing of components designed somewhere else in the value chain. This is most likely explained by several factors including the concentration of corporate ownership in a few industrial holdings (a left over from sanctions and import substitution) and the presence of highly organized supply chains in many sectors like Automotives or electronics. Partial success in getting larger firms to compete internationally, combined with local framework conditions that inhibit the growth of small firms (for instance inflexible labour laws, collective bargaining, Black Economic Empowerment and a preference to procure through tenders) re-inforce this pyramid structure, with many component manufacturers at the base and product integrators (OEMs) at the top of the pyramid. The product owners dominates both their supply chain, the product architecture and the performance criteria. Most component manufacturers are squeezed both on their margin but also on the processes that they may use.
Are we getting things the wrong way around?
To help manufacturers to design new products and services is not entirely a bad idea, but this doesn’t address the systemic problem. We need business model innovation. We need new OEMs to emerge with new product combinations that draw on existing or easy to develop component competencies. Or we need some business model innovation where some traditional component manufacturers expand their business by manufacturing their own products. Perhaps we need some manufacturers to diversify horizontally, or vertically.
I have played with this idea with students in my classes, and almost all business model innovations will lead to interesting product, service and process innovations. However, we can generate long lists of product/service and process innovations that have not resulted in business model innovations. Partly because these firms cannot sell their new innovative products to their existing customers, they also need to diversify their markets which sometimes requires a completely different business approach.
To stimulate a sub-sector or a region to upgrade cannot be achieved only by helping one firm or a few firms at a time. Somehow we have to challenge management models, we have to help business people identify areas for management innovation. This will result in business model, process and product/service innovations that are self perpetuating; meaning businesses can do it again and again because their competence have increased. Actually, the best impulse into innovation is still modern management that is strategic not only about the internal dynamics of the enterprise, but that is also looking outside of the firm into the market place, at their collaborators, new technologies and their competitors. With firms that are aware of what is going on inside and outside the discussion about innovation is a fantastically creative discussion about what is possible or impossible, with the latter gives rise to very interesting discussions. But a firm that is under-managed or managed with outdated principles is very difficult to assist. Giving the latter group a new product, or taking them to a new market simply won’t do the trick.
Perhaps this is where creative destruction of Schumpeter comes in. Sometimes the only way to upgrade a sector is to allow enterprises with new combinations of management, ideas, products and processes to outcompete older more complacent firms. Hopefully some of the incumbents will at least be able to imitate the signals from the new entrants.
A while ago I posted an article about the exciting developments in the various fields around complexity science and development (actually there are several earlier articles making reference to this topic). Recently Marcus Jenal wrote a great review of the work of Ben Ramalingam (author of the blog Aid on the Edge of Chaos) and Harry Jones with Toussaint Reba and John Young. The paper can be downloaded here.
Perhaps you have noticed that I often make reference in my posts to “complexity”, “evolution” and “complex systems” in the context of development. Some have even asked me why I do this. Well, already there are moves by donors and monitoring bodies to start using a more complexity-sensitive approach to evaluation. This is not entirely fair, as too many development programmes are still designed in a very linear way (log frames, impact chains are mostly used in a linear fashion). This means that to reach your impact you must combine your programme activity with faith and good luck (plus good weather) because most programmes are operating in a sea of complexity. There are just too many factors that can influence your outcomes. And even if you hit all your targets the system may remain exactly the same way. (wink wink: I wonder why no-one is making more of a fuss of the poor track of donor programmes in South Africa that were supposed to deal with systemic failures in education, rural development and even Local Economic Development?)
Another reason I am interested in these topics (other than my usual curiosity) relates to my practical activities around building industrial systems from the bottom up. Although I am still biased towards manufacturing with some emphasis on specialized services, I am trying my best to understand the complexity of not only relations between the actors, but also between the factors that are influencing their behavior. Then throw in some factors like policies several self justified meso-level organizations, mix in some government failure, market failure, network failure and also just the uncertainty from Europe. That makes for a complex system where there are a myriad of vicious and virtuous cycles and then the dynamism of time delays.Mix into this that the political system in South Africa also fights bottom up decision making. Local stakeholders have a limited number of instruments at their disposal and can hardly hold other spheres of the public sector (and other organisations) accountable. Despite this all kinds of firms are innovating, and there are even innovation systems that involves individuals in public agencies that are committed to support local actors (even if their institutions is unwilling or incapable to assist).
I find a lot of comfort and maybe some good questions in the literature on complexity and perhaps also the literature on evolutionary economics. Perhaps I even find some comfort that even the so-called industrialized world is struggling with the increasingly complex and interrelated policy environment.
If you are working on bottom-up industrial policy then please let me know, perhaps we can exchange notes.
There are hundreds of ways of describing the word systemic. Yet in development it is important that we at least narrow down the definitions as to not cause confusion.
Richard Hummelbrunner describes three emergent features of methods and approaches from systems thinking:
An understanding of interrelationships
A commitment to multiple perspectives
An awareness of boundaries
Richard then explains that each of these features focused in the development of the systems thinking field in the last fifty years. Up to the 60s, the focus was interrelationships. This was followed by an increasing awareness of the different perspectives as a critical issue. This affected the way people recognized interrelationships. In the 1980s the focus shifted towards the boundaries of the system, as practitioners realized that they system had to be bounded in some way to allow for diagnosis. This raised the ethical question of who decides what is part of the system and what is not, as the shifting of these boundaries has great influence on what is revealed and understood when the system is diagnosed.
Our firm, Mesopartner, is known for the “Systemic Competitiveness” framework that we use in our work. The framework originated within the German Development Institute in the mid 90s. One of the common misunderstandings about Systemic Competitiveness is that people confuse systemic with systematic. The latter in my mind would refer to a very detailed and exact way of understanding and doing things that may be very rigid. This may detract from the fact that to really understand a system we might have to embrace complexity, dilemmas and issues in a more dynamic way, something that a very recipe driven systematic approach may not allow.
Reference:
Williams, B and Hummelbrunner, R. 2010. Systems concepts in action: a practitioners toolkit. Stanford Business Books.
ESSER, K., HILLEBRAND, W., MESSNER, D. & MEYER-STAMER, J. 1995. Systemic competitiveness. New patterns for industrial development. London: Frank Cas.
MEYER-STAMER, J. 2005. Systemic competitiveness revisited. Conclusions for technical assistance in private sector development. Mesopartner
For those that have participated in any of the training events that I have contributed to in the last years would hopefully recall my favorite energizer called the Systems Game. In this game we simulate a complex system, with all the participants moving around trying to position themselves between two targets in the group, without the targets being aware who is chasing them. Things usually start of neat and tidy, but soon chaos breaks out. After the game we reflect on the system and how to better understand its behavior, and also how to figure out how to stimulate change of behavior in the system.
The participants secretly determine who they will follow
The participants tries to become system aware – who is following me?
One of the first insights is that our job as practitioners is not to try and fix the system, nor to solve a problem on behalf of the system. Our first job is to try and get the system to become more aware of its own behaviors, issues and dilemmas. Very often this will allow us to use some of the existing relationships, routines and networks of the system to improve the performance or to address some issues in the system.
I received the following little e-mail story recently that actually shows how actors that are aware of the system can easier manipulate the system to achieve certain outcomes. From a few google searches I could not determine the source of the story, except to see that its been featured in many fora. Therefere if you know the original source then please let me know so that I can give proper credit.
Here is the story as I received in my e-mail:
An old man wanted to plant a tomato garden, but it was difficult work, as the ground was hard.
His only son, Vincent, who used to help him, was in prison, and so the old man wrote a letter to his son: Dear Vincent, I am feeling sad because I won’t be able to plant my tomato garden this year. I’m too old already. I know if you were here, you would happily dig the plot for me, like in the old days. Love, Papa
A few days later, he received a letter from his son. Dear Papa, Don’t dig up that garden. That’s where the bodies are buried. Love, Vinnie
At 4 am the next morning, FBI agents and police arrived and dug up the entire area without finding any bodies. They apologised to the old man and left.
That day, he received another letter from his son:
Dear Papa, Go ahead and plant the tomatoes now. That’s the best I could do under the circumstances. Love, Vinnie
Now the moral of this story is that only people that are aware of how a system might behave can fully exploit the system to their advantage. I wonder how we can use this insight to promote better inclusiveness in development? From my everyday work experience I know that in value chains and production systems the poor, weak, small and marginalized are often the least aware of how the bigger system(s) around them work. The powerful, better informed and more successful entrepreneurs often have better information at their disposal. While some of this information could be formal, quite a bit of it is qualitative based on a deeper understanding of how things (might) work.
If you are interested in the topic of complexity then surf over to Marcus Jenal’s page where he provides some insights on the topic. Marcus is a very good thinker and practitioner I always enjoy the questions he asks.
ars we at Mesopartner have been purposefully experimenting with complexity and systems theories in our practice. Not only did we change our company logo and strapline based on our new learning, we started to dismantle and question almost every aspect of our instruments, tools and theories.
