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Creating Change in the System
Interview with William Reckmeyer
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Dr. William Reckmeyer is professor of Leadership and Systems at San
José State University and faculty chair of the International Study
Program in Global Citizenship at the Salzburg Global Seminar. He served
as chief system scientist (2003-2006) at the Systems of Systems Center
of Excellence, which was established to develop more integrative
approaches to complex issues, and was a visiting scholar with the Center
for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University.
SGI Quarterly: What does it mean to
look at the world from the systems theory perspective?
William Reckmeyer: Systems
scientists see the patterns which connect everything rather than all the
differences that separate them. They see that there are patterns of
organization, how the parts relate in
different ways and interact with the broader environment. Most people
become specialists in some particular subject matter or are used to
looking at things from a particular cultural or national
perspective--for example, computer programmers don’t look at the world
in the same way as marketing people. So systems people are interested in
looking at knowledge that cuts across traditional boundaries to see the
commonalities that we think underlie everything. It’s looking at
everything in the universe in terms of patterns of organization and
change.
SGIQ: The world and its problems
seem to be growing more complex; are we getting closer to solutions to
the global crisis or more distant from them?
WR: The world is growing a lot more
complex in large part because we are creating the complexity. Human
beings’ ability to manipulate matter, energy and information has
increased vastly. At the same time, we are also becoming more
knowledgeable about how the world operates and how it’s interconnected.
Our growing interconnection means that more of us are able to influence
others, and vice versa, in a way that is unprecedented in human history.
The ability to anticipate the future is a unique feature of our species,
and this can make us despair or it can make us hopeful. My optimistic
view is that as long as we are breathing and thinking, we can always
make things better. We are now more knowledgeable about the potential
impact of major global issues, and we have more collective capability to
address them than at any time in history. There is also
a greater level of caring and responsibility for others. If people
aren’t entirely selfish in their approach to addressing issues, I think
we can resolve almost anything that’s facing us.
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A Bolivian woman, in India as part of the Barefoot College's
international teaching scheme, learns how to maintain solar panels;
international students take the skills they have learned back to
villages in their
own countries to set up rural solar energy projects [Robert
Wallis/Panos Pictures] |
For a long time there has been a lot of emphasis on the value of
individual success, but in the globalizing world, at the leading edges,
there is far more interest in and awareness of the need for
collaboration than there used to be. And we are learning how to do that
in terms of technologies as well as in terms of attitude. A big
challenge to collaboration, though, is the increasing specialization of
knowledge. We have people who know more and more about less and less,
who are "part-smart but whole-stupid."
Systems science provides a rigorous framework that promotes
communication and collaboration across different disciplines.
Operationally and metaphorically, it is equivalent to the way English,
as a common standard interface, enables people of many different
cultures and languages to interact in our globalized world.
I believe there is a lot more collaboration happening today, because
there is a growing awareness that we are in this together.
Global Citizenship
SGIQ: How can people become effective agents of change?
WR: I think the notion of global
citizenship is important here. People have both the responsibility and
the right to care about what happens to the world as a whole--not just
to become aware and care about it,
but to actually do something. One of the most radical ideas in the
universe is the notion of self-authorization, that you don’t need
somebody’s permission in order to try to do something. I think there
is more hope for more people now than there ever has been in human
history. Because in the past leadership was primarily exercised by
people who were powerful enough, rich enough, strong enough, or
mean enough to be the boss and tell everyone what to do. For a long time
most people had very little say in what went on in their life, other
than trying to eke out an existence. The world has become more and
more free in terms of economic choices, personal choices and
governmental choices. There is more and more opportunity for people to
get up in the morning and say, "I am not happy with this and we’ve got
to do something about it."
The scientific term for that is self-organization. Many systems are very
self-organizing; that is, action is primarily initiated by the parts,
not by external factors or subject to external control. The parts come
together and start organizing in new ways and can create their own
systems. Now, we know that as grassroots organizing, for example. It’s
the heart of democracy.
A classic example is Candy Lightner. In the early 1980s, her daughter
was killed by a drunk driver and she decided she had to do something
about it, that there were too many drunks killing too many kids.
Everybody told her, "You’re just a housewife, you can’t do anything
about it." Well, she ended up starting a movement in the U.S. that has
now profoundly changed the laws with respect to drunk driving.
But what’s even more difficult, she’s changed the culture. It is no
longer acceptable, especially among young people, to drink and drive.
Empowering People
SGIQ: You have particular interest in leadership development.
WR: In human society it’s always
been a relatively small number of people that shaped what was going on,
but now it’s getting to be a bigger and broader group of people.
Fundamentally, leadership is best seen as not about being in charge, but
more about how you mobilize people to pursue shared goals. Leadership is
much more about influence, persuasion, collaboration and facilitating
change. That’s especially true in a global world, because nobody has
sufficient power or the knowledge or the authority to tell everybody
what to do.
Leadership certainly becomes more critical the more challenging the
situation. The root word of collaborate is "labor," and that’s the
difficulty of creating collaboration: it’s hard work. So the heart of
leadership is fundamentally being able to empower people and to help
them focus their energy to work for the greater good in ways that
transcend self-interest.
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Students in the Netherlands
demonstrate against world poverty wearing T-shirts with the word "One"
[Rob Huibers/Panos Pictures] |
It is also important to emphasize that there isn’t any single common
definition or characteristic of what makes a good leader. Research shows
that there are universally acceptable and unacceptable behaviors and
traits. Integrity, for example, is valued by everybody. Dictators and
arrogance are valued by nobody. But what we find is that leadership is
very contextually dependent and what works well in one setting doesn’t
work in others. In some cultures it’s appropriate to be very explicit
and forward, for example, in the classic Western view of leadership as
somebody leading a charge up a hill.
In other cultures this kind of behavior immediately denotes you as a
fool and is not viewed as appropriate. What you have to be careful of in
a global world is that, while leadership is absolutely critical, one
needs a much more multidimensional view of leadership in the global
context than in a particular cultural context or organization.
SGIQ: I understand that from a
systems science perspective, it’s important to understand the goal of a
system. What, in your view, is or should be the goal of our human
system?
WR: Not all systems have goals, only
those that are cybernetic or purposeful in nature like human beings.
What should our goal be? Build a sustainable world. Which means that it
has to be sustainable
ecologically and environmentally, socially and culturally, and also
economically. If everybody lived at the average standard of living of
the U.S. and Japan right now, it would take somewhere between three to
eight Earths to support the current number of people on the planet. That
isn’t achievable and it’s certainly not sustainable.
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