Navigating Complex Systems
How might we help people more effectively navigate social systems that are meant to serve them -- without adding to system complexity?
Systems Design Lab helps social sector organizations use systems thinking and human-centered design to collaborate, innovate, and amplify their community impact. We work with technical tools, but we focus most on people. We are really good at bringing together diverse perspectives to make radical changes that lead to radical social change.
We’re having a campfire conversation about motivation and conflict. Join us on May 21 at 12 pm ET for Why They Do That (and Why You Do, Too): A Real-Talk Session on Relationship Intelligence.
TL;DR // Many complex systems are adding roles to help users navigate layers of process. These roles are improving outcomes, which is exciting. Yet, many of the examples we have seen may become difficult to sustain as resources in the social sector are diminished. How might we solve this sustainability issue early in the design process, especially by leaning into the stuff that feels really hard?
When I was a newbie to the world of improvement and system change, I worked on a project to help beginning teachers get better at teaching and stay in the profession. We were then (and still are) facing a significant shortage of young professionals who kept teaching for more than 1-2 years. I read a story about a leader in Baltimore who, one day, hung a paper on a beginning teacher’s door and asked every adult who went in to offer advice or direction to make a note. The end of the day revealed the image below: a web of lines and arrows that all added up to one incoherent experience for that young teacher. She received feedback from many individuals, much of which was conflicting, leaving her to figure out what to do next on her own.1 If this was typical, no wonder many beginning teachers fled teaching for new jobs!
This was my first exposure to using tools to make users’ experiences of systems visible. In systems design work, we call the resulting incoherence a coordination challenge. Coordination is a common issue in complex systems, especially bureaucratic ones, where multiple actors with varied interests serve the same user. This has become one of those things that I see everywhere I look in my work (thanks, attention bias…), and I’m starting to notice a trend in how we respond to this challenge.
Most people come to SDL to improve a currently undesirable outcome in their system. They find us because they are interested in designing new ways of working, which means that we bump into the coordination problem…a lot. Usually, it shows up early when we begin reviewing artifacts, interviewing users, and mapping their experience to see the system as it currently exists. Here’s how it often goes:
The user receives conflicting information from different sources and is left to integrate that information and make wise decisions.
The user is attempting to navigate multiple actors in a system, but those actors do not communicate with one another, which adds a significant burden to the user.
Recently, we worked with three systems experiencing a coordination problem. Interestingly, each one pursued or strongly considered the same innovation: adding a new role responsible for helping users navigate the system.
The Work-Health Coach: People are most likely to return to work from disability leave within the first 12 weeks. After that time, they are at high risk of exiting the workforce, which may lead to adverse outcomes in mental and physical health. A state department of labor set up a new role to help individuals out of work due to disability navigate the healthcare system by holding 1:1 check-ins, building an individualized and coherent return-to-work plan, and helping folks access resources they’re eligible for.
The 9th Grade Coordinator: 9th-grade success is a strong predictor of on-time graduation. A school district we worked with dedicated significant resources to creating this new role, which focuses on supporting the transition to high school. This includes things like understanding how to calculate a GPA, building 1:1 relationships with students, and helping students register for the right classes.
The Capacity Building Navigator: Nonprofits often work with third-party capacity builders to improve their performance, many times at the request of a funder. It’s difficult to know how effective these providers are. Moreover, nonprofits serving historically marginalized communities often struggle to find providers who share their communities’ identities. One funder is exploring creating a new role dedicated to matching nonprofits and providers based on their needs, skills, identities, and dispositions.
The first two instances were implemented, and both improved outcomes. This makes sense! Adding a human touch to an experience that feels disjointed and frustrating brings humanity back into complex systems. It says that care coordination requires human interaction, which is especially important when forces like AI remove that humanity.
So, what’s the problem?
This strategy faces a significant operational challenge: because it bridges organizational boundaries, it is unclear who should manage the role. So, it’s really adding complexity to already-complex systems, and you can imagine that when there’s unclear long-term resourcing and infrastructure (e.g., training, management support), the role is unlikely to be sustained.
This isn’t a new realization. It’s the crux of David Graeber’s 2018 book Bullshit Jobs. He’s an American anthropologist, an anarchist activist, and (clearly!) a provocateur. He puts it bluntly:
“There will always be a certain gap between blueprints, schemas, and plans and their real-world implementation; therefore, there will always be people charged with making the necessary adjustments. What makes such a role bullshit is when the plan obviously can’t work and any competent architect should have known it; when the system is so stupidly designed that it will fail in completely predictable ways, but rather than fix the problem, the organization prefers to hire full-time employees whose main or entire job is to deal with the damage.”
Whew! If that’s not a call to action for examining the system and redesigning the blueprint, I don’t know what is. So why don’t we do it? Maybe it’s too painful. Maybe it requires asking individuals to change things they really care about, and that negotiation feels daunting and un-fun. Maybe it’s just the strong pull of the status quo.
Whatever it is, I’m interested in pushing into it. I’ll be pondering some questions until our next client shows up with a coordination problem…
Why don’t extra-system innovations (like a navigator/coordinator) supplant business as usual in the social sector? What might we learn from disruptive innovation in the private sector?
What if we centered subtraction as a design principle?
What does it sound like to provoke subtraction or re-design over adding complexity? Is it something like, “what needs to be removed from the system to provide a better experience for the user?”
How might we, as outsiders, support our partners through the things that make this feel really, really hard?
This last part reminds me of something I learned in grad school: The role of the consultant is so very often to lean into pain. My professor introduced us to the tool Reversal of Desire from Dr. Phil Stutz (yes, from the Jonah Hill documentary). It goes like this:
Face the Pain: Focus on the pain you are avoiding; see it appear in front of you as a cloud. Silently scream, "Bring it on!" to demand the pain; you want it because it has great value.
Move Toward the Pain: Scream silently, "I love pain!" as you keep moving forward. Move so deeply into the pain you're at one with it.
Freedom: Feel the cloud spit you out and close behind you. Say inwardly, "Pain sets me free!" As you leave the cloud, feel yourself propelled forward into a realm of pure light.
I’m not totally sure, but maybe it’s as simple as remembering that freedom — and better system outcomes — come from facing, moving toward, and making it through pain.
» Join us on May 21 at 12 pm ET for a conversation about motivation and conflict: Why They Do That (and Why You Do, Too): A Real-Talk Session on Relationship Intelligence
» Creating a second brain through digital gardening
» A botanist’s perspective on creativity and how life is constantly creating, adapting, and evolving in response it its environment
» Using grounding techniques at the beginning of a meeting
» A connector prompt to shamelessly steal: Is there anything that you always wished as a kid that you still wish would happen?2
Find us elsewhere:
This story comes from Learning to Improve (2015) in the chapter about being problem-focused and user-centered (p. 28-29).