Featured Article

World Cup 2010: Why We Must Not Forget What Just Happened

by Colleen Magner, Reos Johannesburg

Like many others locally and abroad, I have been curious about how we as South Africans have changed as a result of our hosting of the recent World Cup football tournament. In case you missed it, the event was a great success, and the international press and FIFA (International Federation of Association Football) depicted South Africans as efficient, friendly, united, world-class hosts. People from across the country, of all races and classes, came together to welcome the world and celebrate, despite the fact that their national team, Bafana Bafana, didn’t make it passed the first round. The day after the event concluded, The New York Times, one of the major international newspapers, had this to say (July 11 edition):

“As host of the most-watched sporting event on earth, South Africa set out to reinvent itself in the eyes of the world, casting off its reputation as a place defined by violent crime, poverty and AIDS. To a remarkable degree, it succeeded. But as the World Cup ended Sunday, what most surprised South Africans was how much the month-long sporting extravaganza had changed the way they see themselves.”

So, what just happened between us? As I write these words, weeks after the final whistle has blown, is this chemistry fading fast, or are these changes here to stay? Can we build on what was achieved during the World Cup?

Repairing the Social Fabric

My work has probably influenced my curiosity. As a facilitator, I work with groups trying to solve difficult social problems. Whether the issue is food security or xenophobia, structural and technical solutions help to a certain extent, but much of what lies at the heart of dealing with complex social issues is trust, and our ability to work in a functional relationship with one another. This is the stuff of the often-neglected “social fabric,” and the World Cup has taken South Africans a step closer to repairing these frayed relationships.

A few weeks before the World Cup began, we all noticed a change in the air. Social commentary in the media also picked up on the wave of optimism. Barney Mthombothi wrote a wonderful editorial in the Financial Mail reflecting on the sudden celebration of the South African flag within the country. Almost overnight, people were in love with their flag once again. He observed that in most cases, loving your flag happens in times of war and nationalism; seldom does this kind of veneration occur without the exclusion or harm of others. It was a rare moment to be celebrated.
 

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From Our Toolkit

Systems Thinking With the Iceberg: A Tool For Multistakeholder System Sight

by LeAnne Grillo

The Change Lab process is systemic, participative, and creative, allowing new possibilities, insights, relationships, and innovations to emerge. One of its main tenets is to create systemic results—outcomes that will shift whole systems.

In order to make this kind of transformation a reality, participants must carefully examine the system they are trying to change. They need to understand not only what is happening based on what they observe now, but also from a longer-term perspective—what is happening over time? And finally, what are the underlying structures and thinking that may be causing the issues?

In order to effectively identify these dynamics, participants of a Change Lab need to build their capacity to think systemically. Popularized by Peter Senge in his book, The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization, systems thinking provides a vocabulary, an approach, and a set of tools that can help you understand why things are the way they are and where the leverage points for change may be. Systems thinking looks at the interconnections and relationships between the different parts of a system, not just at the parts themselves. This perspective provides more opportunities to change the way a system behaves than a traditional analytical approach.

Before joining Reos, I was fortunate to work at Pegasus Communications, a company that provides resources to people who want to become better “systems thinkers.” There, I learned many lessons that I find valuable in a Change Lab. For example, one of the tenets of systems thinking is, The harder you push, the harder the system pushes back. Have you ever noticed how the more effort you put into something, the harder it seems to get? This resistance to change is a natural tendency of systems. To overcome it, we need to find leverage points—the places where we get more impact for less work.

Another systems thinking expression is, "The only way out is back in." Until we are ready to acknowledge our role in creating the system’s behavior and realize we are the only ones who can change things by changing ourselves and “wading” back in, we won’t be able to do a thing. We can’t change a situation from the sidelines.

But beyond axioms, systems thinking also provides us with highly effective tools. As part of the sensing phase of the Change Lab, we try to synthesize all the material that we have uncovered. A useful way to do so is by employing a common systems tool—the iceberg.

The iceberg makes us look at a system through different lenses. It forces us to expand our horizon and not consider just a single activity or event, but to step back and identify the different patterns that that event is part of, the possible structures that might be causing it to occur, and finally, the thinking that is creating those structures. It is through changing the way we think that we can effect the transformation that we seek.

To try this exercise in your workshop, download the Complete Facilitator’s Notes for Systems Thinking With the Iceberg.

In the Next Issue

In our December issue, Marianne Knuth of Reos Partners Johannesburg will present an article detailing her experiences and learnings working in the municipality of Midvaal, South Africa. In South Africa, the AIDS pandemic has ravaged the social fabric of a country already facing significant social and economic challenges.

This article will outline the story of how Marianne and her colleagues at Reos worked with the community of Midvaal to search for ways to serve and protect its most vulnerable children. The story will look at how the use of the U-Process as a meta-framework for multistakeholder engagement affected the project's outcomes, both positively and negatively.