What is systems change?
The Agenda 2030, with 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), was passed by the UN General Assembly in 2015 to galvanise action under the slogan 'transforming our world' (United Nations, 2021). Despite this and other efforts, existing institutions are failing to halt global warming and protect biodiversity, and the next decade is our last opportunity to do so (IPCC, 2018; Derwort, 2016). Climate change is one of the wicked problems humanity is facing: problems without an ultimate or clear solution, where every aspect of the problem can be considered a symptom of another problem, and where every implemented solution has consequences (Rittel and Webber, 1973). This inability to protect the commons at a large scale (Ostrom, 2011) is “highlighting the failure of conventional solutions and established paradigms entrenched in intractable institutional settings across all three conventional sectors of society” (Nicholls and Murdock, 2012, p. 8).
This realisation has led to a growing movement for innovative approaches focused on large-scale change, so-called systems change (Nicholls and Murdock, 2012). Proponents of systems change work highlight the need of addressing root causes, rather than only fighting the symptoms of problems or providing direct help (Scharmer, 2018). Certain authors go as far as claiming that the point of social innovation is “rather than simply providing disruption within existing systems, [...] to disrupt and reconfigure systems themselves via changes to their internal institutional logics, norms, and traditions” (Nicholls and Murdock, 2012, p. 2). Collaborations, especially amongst heterogeneous actors, have come to be recognised as crucial to do so (Kramer and Pfitzer, 2016), and social innovators increasingly turn to social extrapreneurship strategies (Aranda-Jan, 2020).
Systems change as a form of large-scale institutional change
Within organisational theory, Mair and Seelos (2021) concluded after 10 years of research that deep institutional change is best understood with a systemic lens. They anchor the concept of systems change in organisational theory by terming it ‘organised systems change’, defined as “effort [...] to alter the conditions that generate the characteristics of social problems” (Mair and Seelos, 2021, p.1). Ever since systems perspectives started emerging over sixty years ago, there have been part of organisation research debates (Mair and Seelos, 2021). For example, one study of the rise and fall of a particular organisational form demonstrated the importance of a nested systems approach, i.e., to see institutions as “interconnected, multilevel systems in which each action-level or arena simultaneously is a framework for action and a product of action” (Holm, 1995, p. 398). Others have analysed organisations as social systems (Harris and Sutton, 1986). There is appetite and potential amongst IW researchers to contribute to the emerging and still fragmented research field around systems change (Williams et al., 2017; Mair and Seelos, 2021).
This is an excerpt of Nora Wilhelm’s dissertation for the MSt in Social Innovation at the University Cambridge.
