165 – Systemic Change

[00:00:06] Lily: Hello and welcome to the IDEMS podcast. I’m Lily Clements, a data scientist, and I’m here with David Stern, a founding director of IDEMS. Hi David.

[00:00:14] David: Hi, Lily. What are we gonna discuss today?

[00:00:17] Lily: I thought today we could discuss about IDEMS a bit. I’ve had a lot of thoughts, and the one I’ve settled on today is how is what IDEMS is doing, making systemic change or aiming to make systemic change.

[00:00:30] David: I like the latter one better. We are certainly aiming to make systemic change. Whether we are succeeding at making systemic change yet is not clear to me.

[00:00:42] Lily: And I guess, how do you know when you’re succeeding at that? I suppose systemic change is meant to be something which is so long term and maybe not as noticeable, and IDEMS is still young.

[00:00:55] David: no, No, I think it is. I have a few areas where I believe I have made systemic change in the past myself.

[00:01:04] Lily: Okay.

[00:01:05] David: And that is part of what I’m learning from with what IDEMS is trying to do. And one of the main things to learn is systemic change is really hard, but it’s also potentially opportunistic. So when I was a lecturer at Maseno University, there was a moment in time when the university was about to shut down the double maths degree and my head of department at the time came to me and said, what can we do to save this, to make sure we get good math students in the future?

And myself and him, actually he became the dean and then the next head of department, the three of us worked together, and we ended up writing a whole set of new degrees. A degree in mathematical sciences, maths and computer science, maths and economics, maths and business. And these degrees became very successful. They weren’t perfect. They were never designed to be perfect. They were put together in response to the fact that the demand for the double maths degree was not there.

And there was a feeling that actually having better math degrees would create a demand, and there would be a demand for the graduates. And both of those proved true. There was a demand, these programs became highly in demand, they became replicated at other universities, there’s a number of people we’ve worked with who have gone through these degree programs. And the degree programs are not implemented perfectly, but that’s a separate issue.

The system has changed, there was systemic change, because within the system now these degrees existed, and, for better or for worse, I’ve had students come to me and say, did you actually think through the maths and computer science degree properly because maths and computer science don’t talk to each other as departments, and so we felt to feel a bit stuck in the middle?

[00:03:31] Lily: Sure.

[00:03:32] David: I had long discussions with the maths department and the computer science department, and it was clear that there were going to be implementation issues because actually sorting out these joint degrees was going to be complicated. And it is true that in the implementation for a number of years, there hasn’t been the interactions between the departments that I think I would have wanted for this to work as well as I would have hoped.

But the fact that the degree exists is systemic change. It’s changed the system, it’s changed what is possible, it’s changed a number of different things. So this is one of the things that I learned when I was embedded in an institution in Kenya, was that systems change is often seen as something which is planned for, and it takes a long time, it takes a lot of money, it needs to be done very carefully and so on.

And what I’ve learned is that systems change and systemic change can also be opportunistic about recognizing and identifying moments in time and when those moments in time happen, putting the work in. I was working day and night to write those degree programs. I had very little help, I had very little experience, but I did have enough experience and I had people I could talk to that what I was able to do was to bring together experiences rather to make something new, which was able to exist in that local context.

And so at the heart of what I believe IDEMS is set up to do is position itself to seize that systemic change which is opportunistic.

[00:05:28] Lily: I guess the first question was like how, but I guess like where is IDEMS trying to make this? So in that situation there, I assume you weren’t looking for change, you just found yourself in a situation where you could make change. But you didn’t go to Kenya going, I know what I’m gonna do, i’m gonna set up these…

[00:05:47] David: I went to Kenya to learn. I mean, I was a lecturer there, I wanted to learn how to use my mathematical skills to be able to educate, to transfer some of the mathematical knowledge I had, but to learn about working within the system.

So let me give you an area of IDEMS work where I think… I could go through a number of them and some of the ones that you are involved in and some of you are less involved in. Let’s start with our climate work. What is the systemic change which is underlying a lot of our work there? It’s the role of the national Met offices. A lot of our work related to climate is really around recognizing that with different skills, the national Met offices can play a different role in collaboration related to the ministries of agriculture, related to all sorts of other things.

And so here is an institution which exists, basically in every country in the world. It has concrete roles it plays, but it is also this custodian of the historical data. And there were other roles that it could play if its staff had the skills. And so we can, and a lot of our work is capacity building related to members of the National Met Service who handle the historical climate data.

But we’re not doing that just to build their capacity. We are doing it because there’s the hypothesis that if they have skills to be able to take advantage of the data that they are the owners of better and to become a partner, then that can change what others can achieve with them as partners that could not be achieved without. And this is an approach, which I think is rather different to the approach we have to many others.

Many people I talk with who work in climate say, oh, we just use the satellite product, whichever one you want, because it’s too hard to work with met offices. We can’t get access to the data, or we can’t do this, or we can’t do that. And I understand that position. But what if that wasn’t the case? What if the met. offices were good partners for all of these different projects? What if they could be used and brought in and be part of different collaborations, and therefore people wouldn’t just use the satellite data?

That would be a systems change. Just like the other systems change is to say, well actually you make the satellite product available, which means you don’t need to use the met. offices. Now, that’s a systems change as well. And arguably that’s the one which people have been levitating towards. But that leads to the problem that in many cases we are finding that the information isn’t the same as the information, which would really add value when you go to work with agricultural researchers and farmers. The information they need is different, and often that’s lying with the met. offices, but it’s not really accessible.

So that would be an instance where if met. offices could be different partners on that and could become part of this in a different way, then a lot of the agricultural research could change. Maybe the farmer federations could access this information in a way that would help their farmers. There’s a whole set of different things that could change. The ePICSA app is a really interesting example of where in at least two countries that work has led to a product which is now making not the raw data, but useful products generated from the raw data available.

[00:10:05] Lily: Yeah.

[00:10:05] David: That’s only possible because we are not doing it. In Zambia and in Malawi, the Met Office has the skills to maintain that data flow, to update it, to put the new results in as new data becomes available, and to maintain that digital product.

[00:10:26] Lily: So, just add some context to your ePICSA example because I know it fairly well, a little bit since I work on it, but I’m aware that maybe not all listeners would know it. But we have these kind of met. offices, Zambia and Malawi are the two that we’re working with, and they have heaps of their kind of historical rainfall data and they don’t want that historical data to be accessible, but we could still get really good information out of it by using kind of summaries of it such as start of the rain, so deciding on what they want to define it as, when does the rainy season start each year? And for each station we can get these kind of summaries.

[00:11:11] David: Yeah. Let me take a step, two steps back.

[00:11:14] Lily: Yeah. Okay. Thank you.

[00:11:16] David: So PICSA is Participatory Integrated Climate Services for Agriculture. I recently did an episode with James on this, and so you could refer back to that previous episode. And within that, our role, capacity building and giving these workshops to met. services is again described in some of those previous episodes, so we don’t need to go into too much detail. But the point you made is correct that it’s not just Zambia and Malawi. Every country in the world pretty much has a met. service that has the historical data, which has been collected for many years for their country. And they are the custodians of this data.

Some do make it available easily, but that’s pretty rare. Most could sell it if you have a commercial partner who needs it and who wants to use it. But almost all are mandated by their governments to use it for public good. PICSA is a really interesting example of that last mandate. So this is about, with the Ministry of Agriculture, the extension service, they use the PICSA approach where they take, not the whole data, but these products produced by the met. services, these summaries, and they then communicate those to farmers to help farmers make better decisions.

And that’s a process which has been well established, and this is something where in many countries, there’s well over 20 countries, that use the PICSA approach to some extent or another. But Malawi and Zambia are special because they are the first pioneers of trying this ePICSA approach, which is to say not only should those products be available, but they should be made available through an app. And so those summaries are available through the app and they can be used by extension staff in their communications to farmers, by farmers themselves, or by other agents.

But it’s just the summaries, just like on their website, other summaries are available. But these summaries are tailored to the needs of smallholder farmers. And so that approach, our role in this is an interesting one, I don’t say we are unique in this, but our role is very much at this interface of the technology, we’ve been, you yourself have contributed to that technology, building out the technology stack which is needed for this app to use that data to produce this, to display that for farmers and other actors. The capacity building of the actors involved. Who owns what. We’re very careful that we don’t take ownership of the data and we don’t want ownership of the data. We want that to stay with the National Met Office partners.

And so that care of ownership, and the complications that come with that, are things that as part of the collaboration, we play the role of leading to systems change, and I will give the concrete example where I feel this is systems change. We recently had a discussion with a project from Cornell who were going to look in Malawi at this large scale experimental process, very exciting work, really interesting. And they wanted to include climate estimations and all sorts of other things for the farmers related to this. And they were going to use the satellite data because that’s the only thing they could have access to.

And we said, wait, you are in Malawi. You also have access to these summaries because PICSA has made them available. And that means in Malawi alone for these, in these areas, it’s different, what you have access to is different. And therefore what you could do or what you conceive of doing is different. And that’s really powerful, and that’s really something which I think, again, we don’t always get these, but these are the sort of systems changes that you are looking for. You are looking for those small pieces of, be it technology, human capacity, collaboration, which means that what is possible changes.

You know, that’s what I really love working towards. I’ll give you the one other one which I have to mention, ’cause of course it’s our big one right now. The parenting work has been for a long time now, over a decade, these well-established parenting programs, which are open, which were available, Parenting for Lifelong Health has been hugely successful in a number of trials with its impact. But it wasn’t scalable. Since 2019, we’ve been working with them to develop these digital interventions. And the trial in Tanzania on ParentApp for parents of teenagers has just been completed, and the outcomes are astonishing.

They’re not fundamentally different outcomes from the face-to-face interventions. But that’s amazing in its own right, because of course, the cost of deployment of a digital intervention, or in this case a slightly hybrid one, you are taking it down from over a hundred dollars, a family down to six, potentially at scale. And this is a game changer in terms of what a government, like the Tanzanian government, could do. And I was just in meetings earlier this week where we were saying, we’ve got some work we’re supposed to be doing, which is being held up because the Tanzanian government is pushing so hard to try and get this rolled out.

We’ve got more studies to do, to find out more, to understand how to do this better to make improvements and all sorts of different things. But the Tanzanian government is actually occupying the partners on the ground to try and say how do we roll it out? We want to get this out, we want to get it out at scale, we can use this. And so that’s great. This is again, creating these things that unblock. It’s not that the Tanzanian government didn’t want to offer these services before, it’s that it was blocked in doing so because the cost of doing so was out of reach.

A lot of our work is to understand how do you unblock a system so that people can do the things they want to do anyway. There’s a lot of people wanting to work and use these parenting interventions to reduce violence against children, there’s so many other benefits which have been shown for this. But the blockage has been the cost of deployment. And so our work in digitizing them and reducing that cost of deployment, it was part of creating that systemic change.

Of course, then the next blockage might be something different and unanticipated. That’s the nature of wicked problems. It’s not that we are thinking of solving these, it’s that when you study the systems, you can try to see what is the current blockage, and can you make progress at removing that blockage and freeing things up in some way for the system to change and reach a different level, a different state? And then you can see what’s the blockage, which is stopping the progress, which people are wanting.

That’s an approach, this is my opportunistic systems change. What’s the opportunity to remove blockages with the changes to the systems which people are looking to do? That’s what IDEMS is aiming to do, and there are some things that we’ve been able to do even when we’re small. And there are other things that, to be honest, until we grow, until we actually become more, we aren’t going to be able to really impact certain blockages.

And so there’s that element of scale of what you can do. Now, there’s also elements that our current scale means we can be agile at identifying and removing certain types of blockages. Might we lose that capability if we grow? Maybe. It’s not that big is good and small is bad. It’s more complicated than that.

[00:20:28] Lily: Some bits can grow and some bits can’t as well. As you say, the parenting work is our biggest bit of work at the moment, and I know that that bit is, when we get new people joining IDEMS, most of the time they’re joining that side at the moment, from my point of view anyway. I’m sure maybe that’s…

[00:20:47] David: What you are saying is there are other parts of IDEMS work where we are not successfully growing as the way we would like to at this point. We could benefit from actually getting an infinite increase, but we haven’t had the same opportunities to do so.

[00:21:00] Lily: Okay, because I was gonna say, because you were saying, you know, there’s some bits where you are bigger and some bits where you’re not and that’s fine. I suppose it makes me wonder, ’cause I know with the parenting work, or I think with the parenting work , you didn’t go into the parenting work going great, now we’ll do this. You were given this kind of opportunity and then you then saw how it could develop and build out.

[00:21:21] David: What was so interesting with the parenting work is, fundamentally, we went into it being given this challenge that the partners, particularly the partners leading it at Oxford University, they didn’t believe that technology was the solution. The parenting programs existed and were working because of the human connections that were made, because of the facilitators, the facilitation, because of all these other things. And so they were skeptical that the problem would be solved with a digital solution. And we went in and we didn’t say, oh no, technology’s the solution.

We said, no, we agree, it’s all about the human capacity. But what the digital can do is help to make things more scalable and to help to get it so that we could be doing this. And so we can still include humans in the loop and we can do this and we can design with that in mind. And I think that’s where, you know, we were brought in as the technology partner, but we weren’t advocating for technology to be the solution. We were understanding the problems that they were facing and what they were trying to solve, and we were with them on the question of saying, okay, if technology isn’t the solution but it could be useful, how can we use it to be able to enable things to become more scalable?

And I would argue, this is what’s so interesting, the app we built is very different from what we or anyone else would have recommended. But it was a very negotiated process where it was deeply understanding what it was that they had already learned from their decades of experience creating these parenting programs that were successful in all these different dimensions, including reducing violence against children and so on, and saying, we can’t replicate the face-to-face program, but what is it that we can create, which can enable some of the same outcomes to occur.

And that process, it took a long time when we went through lots of iterations. It’s been lots of backwards and forwards. But that’s, I think what’s so important. It’s that distinction between actually saying tech is the solution, we don’t believe tech’s the solution, and tech can help to scale, it can unblock, it can be part of something which unblocks.

And I think this is critical to recognizing what I believe is the important role that tech can and should be playing in our societies going forward. And it isn’t just about building technologies, it’s also building capacity. It’s, you know, where is it human capacity, where is it technological capacity? Where is it actually the right tools? That’s where that complex balance is what I think is needed to be able to create systems change.

Now, don’t get me wrong, a tech solution changes the system, but it’s not the same in my mind as the approach we take to systems thinking. Let me frame this differently. Quite often a technological innovation changes the system in ways which are totally unanticipated and unpredictable. Whereas actually, if as we believe we can do in certain contexts, you design the tech differently, it can be disrupting the system in a more limited way in terms of reducing, removing specific barriers without necessarily changing everything.

And that’s what I think we’ve got with, for example, this parenting work where I believe that the technological solutions we are producing, there are elements about how they are changing the system of the parenting programs that can be delivered, but they’re not doing it in ways which are necessarily changing the power dynamics as abruptly as a different technological solution would do if it was actually also changing the power dynamics of who was controlling and managing this.

So we are actually putting these systems in the hands of the people who were already managing the face-to-face programs who would not normally be managing tech. But that’s that ownership piece. And so we are not necessarily changing the human systems as much at this point, so it’s not as disruptive for better or for worse.

[00:26:38] Lily: Yeah, and I can definitely see in there links with, say, tech for this kind of parenting work and links with tech for other areas like education in terms of having kind of facilitator led courses or still having that human interaction involved in the education, so that in those changes, it’s in the hands of, it’s not just down to just the tech.

[00:27:11] David: Absolutely, well, this would be the parallel with what we are doing in some sense with the courses work we’re doing at universities, for example, is there was a huge excitement over a decade ago about MOOCs, Massive Open Online Courses, and it never really lived up to what people had hoped. And part of what we’re learning with that is that that was centralizing it and assuming that everyone would just do these sort of central courses.

What we are doing is somewhere in between that and the old MIT open courseware where they just created courseware and allowed lecturers to pick it up and use it. And if you take the middle between those two, you actually get something where it needs to be more MOOC like, because it needs to be something which people can do and they can interact across institutions and all sorts of other things, but it needs to be something which individual lecturers can pick up and edit and make their own as well.

And so that sort of shades of gray in this is where again, it’s a very different situation, a very different approach to the problem.

[00:28:23] Lily: Yeah, I certainly, yeah, I agree and I can see what you’re saying. So in a way you can see that systems change in how it happens.

[00:28:32] David: This is the key point. Yes. You’ve actually articulated that very nicely. The point is that if you just build tools and they change the system, but you’re not seeing the system that you’re changing and you’re not actually interacting with it, that’s very different. That’s not systems change as I would see it.

[00:28:50] Lily: Okay.

[00:28:51] David: What we do is we actually look at the system, we observe the system, we are in the system, we work within it, and then we think about what are the barriers that we are observing which could lead to pretty drastic systems change of the existing system. We are not wanting to tear things down, we’re wanting to build them up.

This is this collaborative approach. It’s not that we’re wanting to suddenly say, oh, what’s out there, everything’s bad, everything’s wrong. No, like with the MET offices, there’s human effort, which is going into this. How do we build it up? How do we enable it to be more? That’s what we’re wanting to do. What are the barriers at the moment, which could be overcome to enable the system to work better?

So you could say, and there are cases where you want to be disruptive to the system, but what I believe, right now, at the moment there’s more than enough disruption in the world. You need forces which are not trying to tear things down, but to build things up. And that’s what I believe I see as the sort of systems change we’re aiming for. We are aiming to enhance the systems we’re working within by removing barriers, by creating things which enable the existing systems to thrive, to work better.

And that will cause disruption in different ways, but it is this collaborative approach from within the system trying to enhance the systems, rather than replace them or bypass them. Probably a sensible of a place to stop.

[00:30:36] Lily: Yeah. Yeah, I think it probably is. No, thank you very much. That’s been a very interesting conversation.

[00:30:42] David: No, thank you for bringing this up as a topic. It’s one which of course we’ve thought lots about. Systems thinking is one of our principles and part of our principles. But it is something which is very difficult to integrate into our daily activities.

[00:31:03] Lily: Absolutely. Thank you very much.

[00:31:05] David: Thank you.