Traps, Assumptions and other Policy Saboteurs – part one
Sometimes the more we try to fix something the worse it gets; or the people left to do the fixing end up broken. Sometimes we are not even sure ‘who’, ‘when’ or ‘what’ the ‘fix’ is for. Such is often the case with disaster struck communities. We suggest tools that can prevent unintended consequences, reveal these hidden policy saboteurs, and dismantle them at source.
This blog is the first in a two-part micro-series by Jo Chaffer, Deborah Blackman, Girish Prayag, Hitomi Nakanishi and Ben Freyens, taking a systems look at policy problems.
We’re caught in a trap……
Family Rich live in a Christchurch townhouse but they also own other properties rented out. They also have a strong social network of friends and family throughout NZ. Two streets over Family Young have just managed to buy their first home. They are new to the city and have few friends. When the earthquakes hit, both families lose their homes. Luckily the Riches other houses are undamaged so they move to another of these. They keep working taking some accrued leave so they can deal with insurers, lobby politicians and get involved community recovery activities. The Youngs have lost everything, they have nowhere to go so are living in an emergency shelter with very basic shared facilities, trying to run their lives from their phones. It’s almost impossible to work and they have no idea how to get help. Fast forward one year and the Riches have had a full insurance pay-out thanks to the intervention of a barrister friend. They have support from government grants, their house site is cleared and ready for rebuilding. The Youngs meanwhile are still stuck in emergency accommodation, are no nearer to settling their insurance claim and have only just managed to negotiate a mortgage holiday. The Youngs have had to deal with severe anxiety and are only able to work restricted hours. Through leveraging their social networks and post-quake governmental systems and structures The Riches ‘won’ ‘in ‘round 1’ and will most likely bounce back better, giving them distinct advantages to keep on ‘winning’ in future. For the Youngs it’s the opposite. Systems thinkers call this type of scenario a system trap – a structural problem with the system (in this case the post-quake recovery system) that creates unexpected, ‘perverse’ behaviours and unintended consequences. This particular system trap, where system ‘winners’ win more and system ‘losers’ lose more is known as ‘Success to the Successful’ or competitive exclusion. No matter how many consultations, grants, site inspections or other ‘fixes’ are applied, the Youngs spiralling problems remain. In fact, such generic ‘fixes’ may actually make the problem worse.
As a research group, we use systems perspectives to improve public service outcomes. In our review of the 2010/2011 Canterbury (NZ) earthquake recovery we saw that the emergence of individual and community wellbeing had been stymied by a series of system traps, including Success to the Successful (see Box 1). Long-term disaster recovery got ‘stuck’. Examples of agencies trying to ‘fix’ the problems-generated using seemingly reasonable approaches such as placing increased responsibility on individuals, adding resources or enforcing greater controls emerged. Yet, these approaches were not always successful and some actually undermined wellbeing. The failure of simple solutions, or more accurately, when doing more of something that should work leads instead to increased problems, tells us that a system trap is at play. People ‘inside’ the trap, working away to solve the problems may be completely unaware of the unintended consequences of their actions, thus the imperative for policymakers is to design and scaffold monitoring into recovery systems, looking out for unintended consequences, and for patterns around any intractable problems. These will help identify the system traps.
System traps can therefore be helpful analytics, identifying hidden causes, and often the underlying structural problems in the system. These deep structures are the places to intervene to make a difference in lives of people and communities. Interventions at the right time in the right place can release the trap and get the system moving again. By its very nature, a deep structural problem is likely to require significant effort to shift, however the results should pay off in spades.
In our Canterbury earthquake example, the Seeking the Wrong Goal trap pointed to a discrepancy between espoused goals (communities’ recovery) and the actual goals, revealed by the recovery activities, which were mostly focused on rebuilding hard infrastructure. The assumption was that having safe buildings, sewers, roads etc would somehow lead to ‘community wellbeing’. Building bigger and better still failed to produce wellbeing and for some, led to further disenfranchisement. This was the trap. The way out was to explicitly state ‘wellbeing recovery’ as a goal and align recovery actions to achieve this.
We believe the application of a system trap lens to public policy areas can reveal traps that allow leadership to intervene and restore systems to health. Thinking with system traps prompts us to look-out for the intended and unintended consequences of decisions, to course-correct and maybe prevent traps happening in the first place. A basic understanding of system principles and design such as where system boundaries sit (who is ‘inside’, who has a voice) and how open these are; of feedback loops and flows etc., is a good start to both preventing and mitigating traps.
Box: System Traps found in the long-term recovery from the Christchurch earthquakes:
To read more on this, please go to the full paper here.
Content moderator: Sarah Jane Fenton