Creating systemic-structural change

For most of my life, I have been interested in organizational systems, be it newspapers and media when I delivered newspapers as a child, or restaurants and restaurant chains when I worked in restaurants, universities and colleges when I was in college, and local government as an interested and involved citizen.

In college, I came across the field of organizational development, and crossed paths with one of the founders of the field (Ronald Lippitt). The textbook Social Psychology of Organizations was probably one of the more important books I've read, along with Diffusion of Innovations by Everett Rogers and Change: Principles of Problem Formation and Problem Resolution which distinguishes between "first order" and "second order" change.

My focus on systems only increases with each new experience. Working for the Baltimore County Office of Planning over the last year was particularly instructive because I had never worked for a local government before (I worked for a Main Street program funded by DC, but there was still somewhat of an arms length distance), and while on the "inside" I learned that it was a whole lot harder to push change forward than I had thought. (At the same time, it was a great experiment for me to figure out the various levers of different agencies, the barriers to improvement, and try to come up with a way of dealing with all that--many different agencies, the executive leadership, elected officials, and state agencies too.)

The pedestrian and bicycle access plan draft I produced is all about building a system and structure for bringing about structured, structural and behavioral change--in an environment, the suburbs, where creating a positive environment for walking and bicycling is very difficult, because of how the suburban transportation system was set up to optimize automobility. We'll see what happens with it. (The draft should be released within the next couple weeks, although my contract ended and it's somewhat out of my hands although I'll still have input.)

Anyway, I was reading the Sunday New York Times Magazine yesterday and I had seemingly no interest in this article, "The New Abortion Providers," but I was eating a meal by myself and I ran out of things to read so I read it and I'm glad I did.

It's a textbook description of how to build a system to bring about structural change, in this case, providing and systematizing education and training for family physicians and ob/gyn doctors in how to do the procedure, and how to build a more supportive environment within the health care system (clinics and hospitals) so that providers aren't considered pariahs and marginalized.

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Just how I am not in favor of "expanding choice" in transportation, instead I focus on optimality, in many instances, while I favor the idea of "nudge" and incentives (see e.g., "Gentle Nudges Work to Get People Exercising" which I discussed in the Baltimore County plan, in terms of building a system of education and encouragement to assist people in their move from automobility to walking and biking), I think it's better to focus on building a system that produces the right outcomes. See the introduction to the past blog entry, "System transformation or people vs. systems and structures," as well as "Stultified vs. flat organizations, democracy vs. autocracy" for more on this point.