Together or Alone: Can Philanthropy Effectively Tackle Systems?












Maybe she’s on to something.







One comment

  1. Robert Fritz

    Nice report, Crystal. I think the most critical idea, one that usually is under-developed, is the way systems and structures give rise to patterns of behavior, ones that become intrenched over time. If the system remains the same, any change effort, no matter how good on paper, will eventually fail. The system is rejecting the change effort the same way the body rejects an implanted organ. Too often, experts approach change from a problem-solving orientation, and end up addressing symptoms and not causes. Also, in System-Dynamics as developed at MIT”s Sloan School of Management, they have describe this pattern: often well meaning “fixes” to a problem backfires, and over time, makes matters worse. When you push down on a system from a problem perspective, the system pushes back, and new problems, often worse, arise. Also, there is what is called “a shift of the burden to the intervener.” It is hard to know what to do that is worthwhile, sustainable, and useful. How best to use money and other resources to foster a self-generating orientation in which people have more and more choices in their life direction? A change of the underlying structure must happen if there is to be real and lasting change. The structure is usually invisible while the symptoms are obvious, and so the human tendency is to ask how to change something before we know what has caused the current condition. All the best, Robert Fritz

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