The story of the system
How do our stories of the systems we are trying to change, support or constrain that change?
In thinking about strategy as a story I’ve looked at the story of ourselves or our organization, and the story of our audience and community. Another hugely important story is that of the system/s we are part of and that we are trying to change.
Articulating our story of the system will help make our understanding of the system visible to us. We can then begin to interrogate how accurate we think that understanding is. What is it about the system we need to change, and where are the levers for change? It might be that we need to first change our story of the system in order to understand how to begin changing it.
For example, we often hear ideas like ‘the system is broken’. I’ve heard that about the health system, the economy, and electoral politics for example. But as many messaging experts have pointed out, talk about ‘the system’ being broken can leave us feeling there’s nothing anyone can do about it. We begin to think of ‘the system’ as huge, mystifying and complex — beyond anyone’s control or ability to understand. Anat Shenker-Osorio points out that we even talk about some systems, such as the economy, as if they are living beings: ‘the economy/markets won’t like it’. Rather, we need language and stories that help us see systems as created by people for particular purposes or to serve particular ends. If people made them, people can change them.
It is also important to tell a meaningful story of how power operates within a system and whose interests it serves, in order to help counter system justification. According to the theory of System Justification, developed by psychology professors John Jost and Mahzarin Banaj and verified through a great deal of research, there is a human tendency to justify existing systems, seeing them as necessary or even ‘natural’, even when they harm or disadvantage us. For example, a study in 2016 found that, instead of seeing an unjust social system as the source of their problems, many low-income racial and ethnic minority women attributed poverty to drug and alcohol addiction and “character deficiencies of the poor.”
For this reason we also need to understand our audiences’ stories of the system - particularly if we wish to elicit their support in working to change it. How does their story of the system differ from ours, and how do we work to create a common understanding that will help align our efforts? If our audiences don’t see the injustices in a system, or see them as necessary or natural, we will have trouble building power to change it.
A frequent barrier here is that many times people can't see a system at all. Stories, in the news media, or entertainment, tend to focus on individuals or small groups of people, and their actions — whether ‘good’ or ‘bad’. We are generally terrible at telling systemic stories — how systems work to constrain or direct individuals’ choices and actions. For example, research by the Frameworks Institute shows that many Americans have trouble seeing racism as systemic, rather than simply as individual prejudice — although in recent years this has started to change. Americans are also seeing the economy more systemically — but when it comes to health, an individualistic view still prevails (health as the result of individual decisions, rather than of systemic and structural factors beyond individual control). On the news, we see stories about isolated weather events — a hurricane, or a flood, but rarely do journalists draw the connections to systemic factors such as climate change (although this has recently started to change, but it’s too little, too late). We need to be able to tell stories that make systems visible.
Finally, what is the system’s story of the system? What stories circulate within the system about its origins, its necessity, its inability to change? How do people within a system use stories to perpetuate it? The film Living, starring Bill Nighy, an adaptation of Akira Kurosawa’s film Ikiru, in turn inspired by Tolstoy’s novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich, presents a great example of this.
Once we have a sense of the various stories about the system we’re working to change, it’s important to then ask, where do these stories come from? Who benefits from them? Where are the dissonances, inconsistencies and tensions in these stories that might be useful pressure points for change?
Finally, what is our story about how we and our community/audience can change the system? Our story about our own capabilities, but also about the system’s vulnerabilities or pressure points, and about what sorts of actions and approaches are appropriate, permissible and justified? Do these stories serve us, or do they stand in the way of successful action? For example the Frameworks Institute research I referred to earlier found that even when people think of issues as systemic, when asked about solutions they revert to individualistic ones. So how do we change these stories, to open up new and potentially more fruitful collective courses of action?