FAQs

Sociotechnical

Sociotechnical is just a fancy word that means people, technology, and power are entangled. They are mutually shaping and can't be analyzed separately. (Sign up for Untangled if you want to interrogate the world through this lens, and learn how to change it.)

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Complex systems

A complex system is non-linear, uncertain, and unpredictable. It’s the land of messy societal, human, behavioral, and institutional change, wherein cause-and effect-doesn’t neatly apply. In an oft cited example, a car’s engine is a complicated system (i.e. the way it functions is a logical outcome of all its parts working together) but traffic is a complex one. Traffic changes its behavior based on information from its environment. Focusing on one car won’t teach you much about the entire system because what matters is the interactions between them. In a complex system, there are many interdependent issues, and it requires an ongoing process of collective sense-making that draws on diverse perspectives in order to understand what’s happening and how to strategically intervene.

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One more thing: all sociotechnical systems are complex. Social systems shape technologies, which shape social systems, which shape technologies, and on and on we go. This doesn’t occur in a linear, causal, or predictable way. You can’t strategically intervene in your system without understanding the complex dynamics of the system. I can help with that.

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Collective sense-making

Sense-making is the process of developing contextual awareness so that you can strategically intervene amidst uncertainty. Right, just because a system is complex doesn’t mean you shouldn’t intervene. In fact, complex systems require action. Not via ‘strategic plans’ and ‘best practices’ — the desire for control and predictability ooze from those phrases, don’t they? — but via hypotheses testing and experiments that help you learn about the system. Doing this in collaboration with people who represent diverse perspectives and positions within the system is ‘collective sense-making.’ Make sense?

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Systems change

Whether you work in civil society, philanthropy, tech, or the public sector, you’re trying to change the system you’re in. But if systems are both sociotechnical and complex, then at least two things must be true about your future strategy:

First, other actors in the system will not respond to your strategic intervention passively or predictably. Your actions will shape their actions and the system you’re in, and vice versa. This requires thinking interdependently, not independently.

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Second, strategic interventions that map forward in time -- as if the future is a neat theory of change away -- must be replaced by those that map backward. This is both because complex systems don’t follow cause-and-effect assumptions, and it’s because our beliefs, values, and stories constrain our conception of what’s possible. Right, the past is always alive in the present, and systems seem impervious to change until they are not. Future thinking and visioning exercises can help any group or organization think beyond what’s possible, imagine alternative realities, and from them create a new future. 

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