Passing in the Dark - Making Visible Philanthropy's Hidden and Conflicting Mental Models for Systems Change

Summary

Two evaluators with three decades of foundation work name philanthropy’s two unspoken mental models of systems change. ‘Systems dynamics’ maps a system and predicts where to push; ‘systems emergence’ experiments and learns, “A Canoe in Unfamiliar Wetlands”. Mix them unawares and “Entire bodies of work can get derailed”. Yet “Neither of the systems-change mental models is inherently better.”

Rationale

‘Systems emergence’ is the stance we took for culture: “adapting as needed rather than pulling one big lever”. They’re more even-handed than us, though: some systems, they say, reward prediction.