Turning Systemic Thinking on Its Head.

Abstract

The lesson of reform is to look for those strategies that are most likely to mobilize large numbers of people in new directions, Mr. Fullan points out. Overload and fragmentation are two major barriers to education and they are related. Overload is the continuous stream of planned and unplanned changes that affect the schools. Educators must contend constantly with multiple innovations and myriad policies, and they must deal with them all at once. Overload is compounded by a host of unplanned changes and problems, including technological developments, shifting demographics, family and community complexities, economic and political pressures, and more. Fragmentation occurs when the pressures--and even the opportunities--for reform work at cross purposes or seem disjointed and incoherent. Overload and fragmentation combine to reduce educators' motivation for working on reform. Together they make the situation that the schools face seem hopeless, and they take their toll on the most committed, who find that will alone is not sufficient to achieve or sustain reform. This situation would seem to be an ideal candidate for systemic reform, which promises to align the different parts of the system, focus on the right things, and marshal and coordinate resources in agreed-upon directions. The idea of reform is to define clear and inspiring learning goals for all students, to gear instruction to focus on these new directions, and to back up these changes with appropriate governance and accountability procedures. In this article I first want to present evidence that there is a fundamental flaw in the reasoning that leads us to conclude that we can resolve the problem by attending to alignment. Then I will make the case that we must turn the question on its head and ask not how we can make the system cohere, but rather how we can educators achieve greater coherence in their own minds and efforts. Finally, I will describe the main implications for evaluating reforms at the level of practice. The False Assumption of Systemic Reform There is an overwhelming amount of evidence that educational change is inherently, endemically, and ineluctably nonlinear. This means that the most systemically sophisticated plan imaginable will unfold in a nonlinear, broken-front, back-and-forth manner. It will be fragmented. This conclusion is both theoretically and empirically compelling. Dynamically complex societies, to use Peter Senge's phrase, could not operate in any other way.(1) In Change Forces I describe in some detail why this must be the case-why nonlinearity is built into the very dynamics of change. For a taste of this line of argument, consider the following: Take any educational policy or problem and start listing all the forces that could figure in the solution and that would need to be influenced to make for productive change. Then, take the idea that unplanned factors are inevitable-government policy changes or gets constantly redefined, key leaders leave, important contact people are shifted to another role, new technology is invented, immigration increases, recession reduces available resources, a bitter conflict erupts, and so on. Finally, realize that every new variable that enters the equation-those unpredictable but inevitable noise factors-produces ten other ramifications, which in turn produce tens of other reactions, and on and on.(2) No amount of sheer brilliance, authority, or power could possibly resolve the problem of nonlinearity because it is organically part and parcel of the way complex societies must evolve. The rational trap, then, is to take as one's central purpose the strategy of making the system cohere objectively. As will become clear, I am not arguing for neglecting reform. It will help to work on alignment, clarity, and consistency of policy. …