More About Systems

School leaders aren’t to blame. Teachers aren’t to blame. Parent aren’t to blame. Students aren’t to blame.

When it comes to failing schools, especially those who serve black, brown, and poor children across the country, no individual group is to blame.

Failing schools, and under-performing schools (and there are a lot of those) happen because of a failed system. Our public education system no longer works for kids or their families or the adult learning leaders charged with making those kids smarter and stronger.

I read with interest an article appearing recently in the Harvard Business Review titled “Today’s Most Critical Workplace Challenges Are About Systems.” Ludmila N. Praslova, professor of graduate industrial-organizational psychology at the University of Southern California, writes,

“W. Edwards Deming, a forward-thinking American who helped engineer the Japanese economic miracle and was the father of the continuous quality improvement philosophy, wrote that 94% of issues in the workplace are systemic. Only 6% are attributable to individual-level, idiosyncratic factors. Improvement, therefore, should also focus on systems – no individuals.”

“Recent research supports Deming’s thinking. Systemic factors embedded in organizational cultures and processes are the primary cause of critical workplace issues – for example, leaders failing to execute strategy within organizations, threats to employee mental health and well-being, and a lack of belonging and inclusion.”

“And yet, many of these and other issues are still mainly addressed on the individual level. Here are just a few examples of those issues and their individualized interventions:

“Mental health apps, resilience training, or lunch-break yogy are often seen as solutions to employee stress, burnout, and moral injury.”

“Systemic issues that interfere with performance (e.g., operational bottlenecks and systematic understaffing) are ignored, while individual employees are invasively monitored and ‘squeezed.’”

“Chronic lack of diversity and inclusion is “addressed” by advancing a token person or two.”

“Bullying problems in toxic environments are tackled with assertiveness training for targets and self-awareness coaching for bullies.”

“Lackluster leadership performance is expected to improve after attending an off-the-shelf training program.”

“Training is thrown at problems that can’t be solved with training – for example, ineffective decision-making processes.”

…

“Why do organizations keep investing in remedies that don’t work and have little chance of working? An automatic bias in how we perceive and explain the world is a likely culprit. Here’s how that ‘superbias’ manifests – and what leaders can do to combat it in their organizations.”

“A common glitch in human cognition might be partially responsible for a tendency to pay more attention to individual rather than systemic factors. When we perceive people, it shows up as fundamental attribution error (FAE), or a dispositional bias; a cognitive bias that leads us to explain others’ behavior largely by their disposition (i.e. their personality, ability, or character) while ignoring situational and contextual factors (e.g., a worker is irresponsible rather than overstretched).”

“Similarly, the group attribution error (GAE) may bias our perceptions of social groups that are not our own. As a result, we attribute these group members’ behavior to internal characteristics rather than circumstances. For example, many assume that women don’t negotiate because they lack negotiation skills, while in fact many women may hold back because they’re worried about negotiation backlash – a social penalty for violating gendered norms of ‘niceness.’”

…

“On the individual level, FAE and GAE are difficult to overcome, mainly because of our tendency to revert to automatic patterns and biases when under stress. However, developing empathy and perspective-taking, as well as expanding one’s cultural experience, may help. Perspective-taking training reduces dispositional error, at least in the short term, because it allows us to think about others the way we think about ourselves: contextually. Training individuals in systems thinking and practicing drawing and explaining systems diagrams may also increase cognitive flexibility.”

“However, while individual-level solutions for ‘changing minds’ are limited, group-level solutions can help develop a more balanced and flexible collective cognition and enrich the collective contextual intelligence. Here are five ways organizations can tame the superbias at the group level:

Diversify the collective cognition in leadership.

Integrate contextual thinking into forms and procedures.

Address the stress.

Invite broad input.

Appoint a system champion.”

“Developing a more balanced way of thinking that carefully considers both individual and systemic factors can help leaders be more objective and compassionate, earning employee trust while making more accurate decisions. It can help leadership teams address inclusion systemically and go beyond fragmented efforts. It can help organizations create effective productivity systems that don’t burn out and alienate employees…”

The problem with our current system of K-12 teaching and learning is that the overall system is broken and can’t be fixed. We can try to identify and hire skilled school leaders, we can try to attract talented teachers, we can try to improve curriculum, we can try to arrive at “the perfect test,” and we can try to create a tutoring system that works for all kids. Even if we do all that, our current system doesn’t focus enough on learning – individual learning – for it to carry us much longer.

It’s time for a new system.

Til tomorrow. SVB