For when it feels like you can't change anything

Everything is connected. Once you see it, you can shift it.

There’s always someone else to blame for why everything sucks.

When I run strategic skills training, one of the most common objections I hear is: “Alicia, this is good…but you should tell my boss this, not me.” Fair enough. Managers overload staff, make everything a priority, and put short-term fire-fighting ahead of long-term progress. Now they’re sending them on training to be more strategic?! The cheek of it!

There are lots of examples of how this works in our lives. There’s always a reason why things are shit, and those reasons are often people and forces outside of our control.

• We need to manage our time better, but everyone else is hitting us up at the last minute, thanks to their own overwhelm, so we’re trapped in an urgency loop.

• We need to eat better, but it’s easier and cheaper to buy junk than healthy food, especially when we’re tired from being in the urgency loop all day.

• We need to exercise more, but we don’t have energy, because we didn’t sleep well, thanks to the indigestion from our poor food choices, after our exhausted day of urgency.

Of course, there are broader forces influencing all of those factors, too. Workplace technology has broken down relationships and slowed workplace productivity. Extractive capitalism incentivises low-quality food choices. Dot dot dot patriarchy. It’s turtles all the way down.

In short, there’s always someone else to blame. You’re right.

But being right is not everything. (Cam, screencap this and wave it in my face later.)

It’s OK to be right. It’s even OK to be righteous. But it’s not OK if that leaves you feeling powerless.

You always have the power to shift your circumstances - and you can do that without letting anyone else off the hook. It’s perfectly possible to acknowledge the way other people contribute to a problem, see the broader forces at work, and get on with making things better at the same time. You contain multitudes.

Someone else will always be in charge

You may be comfortable or uncomfortable with this. Me, I’m terrible with authority. I resist it to the point that it’s self-defeating. As soon as someone tells me what to do, I don’t want to do it anymore - even if the it in question is something I want, (or possibly even asked for.) It’s one of my most toxic traits.

There is always someone else in charge, and there are others still, whom you depend on for success. No woman is an island. We are all connected and it is difficult to pull anything off, at least anything that matters, by yourself.

The dark side of this interconnection is that someone else will always seem to hold the key to real change. The journalist knows this best. After a crime, they interview the victim, who points to the criminal; the police, who point to insufficient resources; and politicians, who point to broader social issues. Full circle, with the blame hot potato. Nobody can change the system, because someone or something else is always the culprit.

You’ll always feel stuck if you view yourself as a powerless cog in someone else’s machine. The reality is, you’re part of a system - and when you understand how systems work, that is precisely how you can have power.

Why systems thinking will give you power

We tend to look at things, people, and problems in isolation, but the world is an interdependent, dynamic and connected place with lots of moving parts. In complex systems, like a community, family, or organisation, most problems are symptoms of something else. When you assume that the problem is never the problem and see things as part of a system, you widen the potential for intervention.

Every system has three main components:

1. Purpose - What the system is trying to achieve

2. Parts - The people, roles, tools and components

3. Relationships - The interaction and connections between parts.

Most attempts at change focus on the parts: get a new person in the job, a new piece of software, a new house, or a new husband. Change-wise, this rarely works. Things will settle back into their usual swing, because the system is still designed to produce the same results. Meaningful and lasting change is far more likely when you focus on redefining the purpose of the system, or transforming the relationships within it.

When you shift how two parts interact, you change both parts. Those parts then interact differently with every other part they touch, unleashing a ripple effect. That’s the hidden, terrifying and unpredictable magic of complexity: change anywhere can create change everywhere.

This is good news for the Average Joanne who’s feeling a bit powerless. You might not have direct influence over your system or organisation’s ultimate purpose, but you can almost always affect relationships between parts of a system - particularly the ones involving you.

Fix problems, not people

“An ignorant person is inclined to blame others for his own misfortune. To blame oneself is proof of progress. But the wise man never has to blame another or himself.”
- Epictetus

At work, it’s very trendy to focus everything on people. “We put people first” and so on. This is dishonest and carries perverse consequences. Organisations don’t exist to employ people, they exist to provide a service or fulfil a function. When we run a people-centric model, what do we blame when things go wrong? Yeah, people.

But people are usually fairly benign, if mildly incompetent, and problems are usually caused by a messy mix of systemic factors. It’s easier to blame people than go digging for other reasons, but it won’t fix the problem (otherwise that last restructure or hire would have solved your problem, wouldn’t it?)

Beyond work, blaming people is a common and surprisingly peaceful way to move through the world. The world is a more comfortable place when someone else needs to do all the changing, after all. Unfortunately, if your goals depend on other people changing their ways, you’re unlikely to get where you want to go.

Making the radical shift from fixing people to fixing problems requires us to assume positive intent of the people involved, and look for other reasons why they might have failed. When we fix those things, we leave the whole system better off.

How to generate systems solutions

Here’s a quick systems-thinking process you can apply to any frustration to find out how it fits inside a broader system:

• Why is this happening? (Identify root causes.)

• So what? (Clarify consequences.)

• Is it, though? (Challenge assumptions.)

You will get the best results if you ask each of these questions multiple times, in a nested fashion - i.e. you should ‘why your whys.’ The gold standard is five, but you will usually reach a meaningful cause, consequence or assumption around the second or third repetition.

Repeatedly asking these questions helps you zero in on the real issue beneath the surface. Once you understand the system that the problem exists within, your solutions become more targeted and useful.

More often than not, the most impactful solution shifts the relationship between two system parts. When you dig out the root causes, understand the consequences you’re really trying to tackle, and challenge your own stories, you will find opportunities to improve connection points between parts.

Systems thinking in action

Problem: Your mornings are chaotic, and you’re always rushing.

• Why? Because the kids are never ready on time and you have to chase them up.

• Why? Because they’re constantly losing things - a shoe, their drink bottle, their jersey.

• Why? Because they drop them around the house haphazardly after school and can’t find them in the morning.

• Why? Because they’re racing to their screens and there’s no ‘place’ to put the stuff.

By asking ‘why?’ repeatedly, we’ve gone from you having a rushed morning, to moving a few steps back in the chain. Your kids are rightly keen to embrace their after-school downtime, but the lack of structure at the end of the day is messing up the next morning. A new hallway setup (bag hooks, shoe racks) and/or simple rule-change (no screens until your stuff is put away)- could change your mornings, start your day off on the right foot, and improve the relationships in your family.

You can either blame the kids and be right, or change the system and do better.

You can move through the same process with the other two systems questions, and might achieve a different result. When you interrogate consequences with ‘So what?’ you might find that the thing upsetting you isn’t the rush, but the arguments and conflict that result, and the impact that’s having on family relationships. Then, you’ll design a solution that puts the quality of your relationship first.

Or when you interrogate assumptions with “Is it, though?” you might realise the kids are just fine, but the real barriers to your morning are hard-wired stories about how presentable you need to be for work, or what standard of house cleanliness is reasonable for a working parent, or how impressive the kids lunchboxes need to be.

All three of these questions will deliver you insights about connections, relationships, parts, and ideas that you have the power to shift, without pointing fingers, blaming, or throwing your hands up in the air about how useless other people are.

You can change the system from any position inside it

Systems don’t just change from the top down. In fact, that can be the worst place to change it from. Systems change from within, through the system's interactions within and outside of itself. You have the power to influence any of the systems you’re in. You can change the way people interact, information flows, and processes work from any position.

Is this victim blaming? What about all the bad guys in charge?

Let me be very clear: bad actors and structural discrimination both exist and create terrible outcomes for lots of people who don’t deserve it. They change the laws and ruin people’s lives. People are being bombed and having their lives destroyed. Everyday, people experience entirely different outcomes based on gender, colour, sexuality, race or class. These things are real and brutal and ghastly.

Finding power in systems does not mean we stop demanding change from the top. Honestly, we should probably be edging closer toward burning the whole thing down.

But you are not powerless. Nobody ever changed the world by deciding they were powerless. They changed it by seeing the impact of their choices and interactions, and leaning into that impact. Agency and advocacy are extremely compatible.

You have the power

You have power. You can influence the system you are in, no matter your role. You can make your household, relationship, workplace, community and organisation better.

Ask better questions. Zoom out. Fix problems, not people. Start small, and focus on improving the connection points between different parts of the system, leaving it better for the people who come next.

Til next week,
AM

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Recommended viewing

For more on how systems work, I strongly recommend watching this sensational video from Dr Russ Ackoff. Enjoy the production quality and hairstyles, and drop into the comments with your favourite quote. They’re all bangers.