LFE’s Systems Thinking Approach

The current problems we face in education and health have proven to be notoriously difficult to solve. Inequity in terms of quality and access to education continues to plague the education system. With respect to health, India has the world’s highest incidence of rabies and inadequate sanitation infrastructure is a major public health concern. Entangled in wickedly complex webs, dedicated efforts to straighten the knots seem to only worsen the issue at hand. How, then, should action researchers approach a problematic situation, and ensure that change is happening for good?

Traditional methods of approaching problems have proved insufficient for analysing contemporary problems in the education sector. By solely focusing heavily on tweaking institutional structures, like the availability of a particular resource or an overarching policy, practitioners run the risk of designing ineffective solutions. System scientists advocate a holistic approach to conceptualizing systems - a system is an ecological unit, wherein its various components are distinct but interdependent. A systems approach, therefore, believes that localised issues have a ripple effect through a system, and have a far wider impact on system outcomes than previously acknowledged. For example, a designed government subsidy requires timely district level execution, which in turn affects public schools, and in turn, has an impact on individual student outcomes (Christens 2007). Additionally, complex problems comprise of multiple, conflicting perspectives of various stakeholders, and not attending to unheard voices might leave us with a superficial understanding of the problem at hand.

Developments in systems thinking have borrowed from fields like sociology, psychotherapy, philosophy and earth sciences - there is an acknowledgement of power structures and an understanding that the actions of one agent have the capacity to transform a system. In this manner, we can divide a system into several components, all distinct but still interdependent. Additionally, by identifying the role played by each stakeholder in maintaining equilibrium, a systems thinking approach to solving problems is both holistic and humanitarian.

Although initially criticized for being a pseudo-scientific way of addressing a problem, systems thinking has seen vast applicability across diverse fields. Take, for example, the criticism levied on mainstream research in education - there is consensus amongst scholars that by focusing too heavily on individual-oriented issues of "learning", and devising technical solutions to the same without a comprehensive study of the education systems present in the area, we fail to grasp the entirety of the problem at hand. It is true - children are not learning as effectively as they could, but a more fruitful method of approaching the same problem, while also tackling the pertinent issue of access to education, would be an approach that considers how various interrelated components of a system affect access and quality to education. This does include an inspection of institutional structures and the roles played by people within the system but also inspects how cultural and psycho-social forces play a role in determining the same.

Therefore, systems thinking is not merely a methodological orientation - it is also a philosophical conviction. In solving problems, all voices matter. In our endeavour to offer sound evidence-based recommendations to civil society organisations and the government, and ensure that interventions in the education sector are effective, Leadership for Equity adopts a systems thinking approach for evaluating and diagnosing education systems. We begin with describing the education landscape in the system, through an examination of secondary data available and conducting stakeholder needs and satisfaction assessments. This involves interacting with students, teachers, parents, civil society organisations and governmental bodies. Secondly, for the purpose of evaluating the system’s health, we develop a system diagnostic tool and analyse the resultant data.

LFE’s conceptual framework divides the larger education system into two main sections - tangibles and intangibles.