Future Here Now: Change doesn't take a nudge. It takes a system
Signals
In the last few weeks we have gone through all of the ways that our present and future are so different than our past - from what we learned, and what we assume without thinking about it.
And how we work at cross-purposes to our intentions when we do that.
We will spend some time each week looking at a broad range of news stories, discoveries and trends from across industries, and across the world. Futurists call these Signals - indicators that point us in the direction that the Sea Changes are pushing us.
Today we look at three stories that signal that the kinds of changes we need - in our businesses, in our communities, and even in ourselves - aren’t going to happen just because we say we’re going to change. They’re too deeply hardwired into us. Working and living in Future-Ready ways requires us to put into place the kinds of systems - from public policy to procrastination-busting apps - that channel us into the direction we want to go.
Read about the Ground Condition of Change Systems here. And give yourself a full subscription to Future Here Now to help you, your organization and your community get Future Ready.
Productivity is about your systems, not your people
https://hbr.org/2021/01/productivity-is-about-your-systems-not-your-people
Given the Megatrend of creativity becoming more essential to success than labor, company leaders sometimes assume that they need to give their producers and innovators a kind of carte blanche to dream big, create something new, build the next Google. But what often happens? Those innovators don’t create the thing that leadership was looking for - they might go way off from what leadership wanted (but didn’t tell them). Or they might flounder.
In either case, leadership responds to these failures by flipping back to a draconian, Industrial Era-style command and control model. Stringent time-keeping, strict production benchmarks, dress codes, etc. In the face of our good intentions failing to deliver, we all revert to our Industrial-Era training, channeling our inner Henry Ford. And that, invariably, doesn’t make anything better - and makes the original objective harder and harder to achieve.
And to be clear, this isn’t just a private sector problem. I just went through a state-level grant program that followed the same trajectory.
As HBR shows us, we all need systems that build future-ready actions into our day to day work, because otherwise we fall back on the systems that we used a long time ago. And because they don’t fit current conditions, they don’t take us where we need to go.
Without a system, they don’t learn to read
This article stopped me in my tracks.
Many people have a hard time learning to read. As an education undergraduate student, I was taught that one-third of almost any group of children would struggle to read, no matter what methods you used. Adults who struggle with literacy certainly represent the remnant of that sobering statistic.
What I didn’t realize was that the barriers that stymie adults who want to learn to read have as much to do with the challenges they face in getting access to decent help, as they do with the challenges of learning to read in the first place. As Pro Publica illustrates, the fragmented systems that are supposed to help adults learn to read leave too many without feasible options.
It’s not enough to want to learn. If the systems are not in place to help you get there, chances are you won’t be able to make it happen.
More bureaucracy…yay?
Noah Smith is an economist, but in this article he puts his finger on a whopper of a systems issue. As Noah demonstrates, the popular perception of “bureaucracy” has swung wildly negative in the last half century. As an urban planner who has spent a lot of my adult life trying to untangle the damage done by a few mid-20th century civil servants, I am not entirely unsympathetic to that sentiment. A little well-placed hubris would have gone a long way.
But as Noah describes very clearly, the challenge that we face today isn’t bureaucrats run wild, but a system that was designed to de-center the civil servant’s role in everything from development to environmental protections to solving societal problems:
In other words, environmental regulation doesn’t threaten America’s economy via a sea of red tape enforced by an army of punctilious bureaucrats. It threatens America’s economy via a plague of lawsuits and pointless paperwork that we implemented as an alternative to hiring an army of punctilious bureaucrats. If we scrapped this legalistic permitting regime and replaced it with an army of bureaucrats, we would still be able to protect the environment just fine, but we would be able to do it without causing insane multi-year delays and driving costs to the moon.
The nine most terrifying words in the English language are not “I’m from the Government and I’m here to help”. Nine far more terrifying words are: “Please spend four years completing your Environmental Impact Statement.”
Once again, the system you build determines the results you get. And many of our current systems underlying the issues we struggle with were built for a time and a place that isn’t where we are today.
So if you want to change something in your work or community — whether sales team effectiveness ot policies that impact millions - don’t just throw a new rule or program on top of the old mix.
Instead, take a hard at the systems underlying it. Because if those systems are working at cross purposes to what you want, your good ideas will get washed away.
And be prepared to rebuild those systems.
Make them Future Ready.