Victor Udoewa and Palak Dudani
The rise and resurgence of authoritarianism in the West, specifically North America and Europe, as well as the history of authoritarianism raise questions about when or if explicit systemic design approaches are needed. There are authorities, leaders, dictators, and powerful people who are able to change systems quite easily without the need for various systems or systemic design methodologies. Yet most guidebooks, playbooks, and toolkits in design leave out the importance of context. Instead of telling readers when the toolkit should be used and when the context is not right for the toolkit, users inadvertently apply the toolkit, guidebook, or methodology to all situations.
If the same is true in systemic design, the situation encourages us to ask an important question: when is systemic design needed and when is it not needed? Here we are not talking about whether there is a situation or dynamic systemic enough to warrant a systemic approach. Instead we are asking a different question: in situations with systemic dynamics, is a systemic design approach always needed?
In this paper we examine three case studies related to using systemic design or systemic practices in society. Then we compare our learnings from those case studies to three case studies in which leaders of countries changed systems without explicit systems practices or systemic design methodologies. Using the six case studies and a power analysis, we lay out important assumptions underlying the use of a systemic design approach and a possible pathway for systems change that diverges from explicit systemic design.
Keywords: systemic design, systems practice, systems methodologies, power in systems, implicit assumptions in systems work