Mechanistic controls.  Tight interdependence.  Centralized authority and clear hierarchy. These are concepts we often associate with bureaucratic organizations.  Perhaps the most common visual metaphor for such systems is the picture of interlocking cogs and wheels.  “You’re just a cog in the machine,” is a phrase that has crystalized into a euphemism for a lack of agency or power to create change or exercise independent thought within a bureaucratic system.

While I do think that many of the bureaucratic controls alive and well in our organizations have outlived their usefulness in the context of our dynamic, information ubiquitous and fast-paced society, my purpose is not necessarily to bemoan bureaucracies.  To the contrary, my purpose is to point out that even in traditional bureaucracies – such as a large public school district – the metaphor of the cogs and gears simply doesn’t hold up.

In Santa Ana, for example, we’re engaged in a partnership with the CORE Districts and the Carnegie Foundation to use the tools of Improvement Science to better understand our current systems of operation and make deliberate, strategic decisions to improve those systems.  At the center of this work is learning to think with a systems perspective.

To help our district and school leaders adopt a more systemic perspective on their work improving outcomes, our improvement coaches Juli Coleman and Amanda Meyer from CORE designed a game they called the “Butterfly Game.”  Taking cues from the idea of the Butterfly Effect, the game is designed to help participants experience the interdependence of working within a system, and how small changes can sometimes cause large perceptible shifts.  However, unlike in the metaphor of cogs and gears where causes and effects are predictable, the game reflected the much more unpredictable nature of improvement work.

We started off standing in a circle.  The only rule we were given was to identify two other people in the circle, and then when we heard “go,” position ourselves equidistant from those two people without making it obvious who we were tracking.  Immediately on “go,” everyone in the circle started moving, trying to make physical adjustments to stay equally distant between their two human guideposts.  To the outside observer, this impromptu system was little more than chaos.  To participants, there were clear, if unseen, relationships influencing our every move.  Of course we all had chosen different people to track, and that interdependence spread messiness everywhere.  People were crashing into tables and nearby trees – paying such close attention to the the people they were positioning against that they failed to spot stationary obstacles.  When a participant came late to the circle from the bathroom, nobody really paused to clue her in to what was happening, so she did the best she could to figure it out without looking and feeling confused.

At some point, the movement slowed down to a trickle, and the system seemingly came into equilibrium.  Then the game designers decided to make a few structural changes, moving just a few participants from one location to another – citing the promise of greater efficiency and effectiveness as the motivation for the move.   When we heard “go” a second time, the system immediately started moving in response to the structural shifts imposed on the system.  I myself had difficulty avoiding a collision with both tables and other participants as they adjusted their positions.

Again, the system eventually settled into a tenuous equilibrium.

The debrief of this experience was rich in drawing out metaphors and parallels with our work as systems leaders.  Relationships are deep and often unseen.  We can’t always define the rules of the system but often can see and measure their impact.  Small changes can cause unpredictable outcomes.  We sometimes neglect newcomers to the system or allow others to sustain contact or injury without taking much notice.

Yes, we have to work together to get the work done – but the systems within which we are working are much less linear and predictable than we like to admit.  Often, our solutions offer technical, linear fixes to systems where human intuition and human error are in constant play.  The tools of improvement science are meant to equip us as leaders with analytical practices that slow down our shortcut-seeking, solution oriented administrator brains.  Instead, we apply methodical, analytical processes that help us get better at getting better.