There is an entire field of practice loosely referred to as “systems change” that guides how to effect substantive social, environmental, and political changes in our world. The methods and tools are varied, and the means of evaluating system change are numerous. Still, the general thrust of these approaches is designed to unlock social innovation, influencing practices, cultures, and policies to increase benefits across communities.
But is it time to retire the term? I argue that we should consider it.
What is Systems Change?
The concept of “systems change” in social innovation refers to transforming the underlying structures, relationships, and mental models that perpetuate social problems, rather than merely addressing their symptoms. This approach acknowledges that issues such as poverty, inequality, climate change, and injustice are deeply ingrained in interconnected systems—economic, political, cultural, and social—that perpetuate the status quo. Systems change advocates argue for strategies that influence root causes over providing more services and programs.
Systems change work typically involves identifying leverage points where small shifts can create cascading effects throughout a system, shifting power dynamics, changing incentives, and fostering new ways of thinking and operating. This may include policy reform, changing organizational cultures, forming new coalitions, or developing alternative economic models. Practitioners emphasize approaches that foster collaboration across sectors and work at multiple levels simultaneously—from individual mindset shifts to institutional reforms to systemic reconfigurations. It could be argued that the ultimate goal of these efforts is to create self-reinforcing changes that make positive outcomes the natural result of how the system operates, rather than something that requires constant intervention to maintain.
I’ve no issues with these goals, but what happens when we seek to pursue systems change in practice? What are the reasons we might want to (re)consider the ‘s’ ?
Removing the S
Systems change is challenging, complex, and involves multiple actors and agents working collaboratively, often across various disciplines, roles, and social contexts within the system. One of my frequent complaints is with the ‘s’ on systems change.
By asserting that we are changing system(s), we do at least two things: 1) we recognize interconnections between systems (which is positive) and 2) make our job a lot bigger, difficult, and harder to navigate. I see far too many initiatives fail under the weight of expectations and demands from having to address so many interconnected influences and structures. Further, the risk in changing systems is that we get lost in our data, unable to tell how well we’re doing, what we’re generating, and showcasing results. When we start overlapping systems, we obscure the means to determine what change is achievable and when it’s been achieved.
By removing the s, we make things simpler yet also risk oversimplifying things.
Another term that might do a better job is transformation.
Change to Transformation
Transformation refers to fundamental, irreversible change in the very nature and functioning of social systems—not just improving how they operate, but changing what they are and how they create outcomes. This irreversability recognizes complexity and resists the temptation for those seeking change to “go back” to the ways things were, which is impossible.
Transformation emphasizes the qualitative shift from one state of being to another, much like a caterpillar becoming a butterfly rather than just a faster caterpillar. In social contexts, this means evolving beyond current paradigms, structures, and relationships to create entirely new ways of organizing society that naturally generate equity, sustainability, and well-being. Transformation suggests a more organic, emergent process that involves not just changing policies or programs, but also shifting consciousness, values, and the fundamental patterns that shape how we relate to one another and our environment. It implies that what emerges is genuinely different from what came before—a new social reality rather than an improved version of the existing one.
Another reason the term “transformation” is preferable is that it captures depth of change required while avoiding the mechanical connotations that sometimes accompany “systems change,” instead emphasizing the profound shift in essence and possibility that social innovation ultimately seeks to achieve.
Our language matters and if we want to recognize the complexity of tasks ahead of us and the challenges we face, we might need a new term that better reflects this. I’ll be discussing how we might use this term to guide our work in future posts
Image credits: Lasclay on Unsplash, Getty images, Suzanne D. Williams on Unsplash, Bankim Desai on Unsplash (all used under license)