Changing the Question.

I've spent much of my career working in and around systems that exist to improve people's lives.

Whether it was in education, health or community development, the intention was always good. People genuinely wanted to make things better. They cared deeply about the communities they served and worked incredibly hard to improve outcomes.

But, despite best intentions, many of the outcomes we cared most about remained unchanged, the same problems kept reappearing.   Over time, I found myself becoming less interested in the solutions we were developing and more interested in the questions we were asking.

One example that has stayed with me was the persistent overrepresentation of Māori in school exclusion and chronic non-attendance data. The data  didn’t change over time -despite countless interventions. We knew the inequities in outcomes existed.   We talked about it often, and said there had to be a better way.

But we were asking the wrong questions. We were asking:

• How can students engage better with school?

• How can we improve student attendance and behaviour?

• What options are there when a student is excluded and no other school wants them?

• How do we get parents to take responsibility?

They weren’t ‘bad’ questions, but they weren’t changing the outcome. The questions all  seemed to begin with the assumption that the problem lay with the people interacting with the system rather than the system itself.

What if we had our perspective wrong? 

What if the problem wasn't the people interacting with the system?

What if the system itself was producing exactly the outcomes it had been designed to produce?

That's not as crazy as it might sound. Every system is designed to achieve something.

Sometimes that ‘something’ is meeting people's needs. Sometimes it's managing demand, reducing costs, allocating resources or creating consistency. None of those objectives are inherently wrong, but they shape what the system makes possible.

Every system reflects a set of priorities. Those priorities influence the rules, processes, incentives and decisions that shape how the system operates. When those priorities don't align with the needs of the people the system serves, we shouldn't be surprised when inequitable outcomes persist, even when everyone within the system is working with the best of intentions.

So I started asking different questions. 

Instead of asking, ’How do we change people's behaviour?’ 

I began asking, ‘What is it about the way this system is designed that makes this outcome the most likely one?

I found the following analogy helpful;  When a tree isn't growing well, we don't blame the tree. We don't tell it to try harder. We don't ask it to plant itself somewhere else.

Instead, we look at the conditions around it. Is the soil healthy? Is there enough light? Enough water? Has something restricted its roots?

We instinctively understand that healthy growth depends on the conditions around the tree, not simply the tree itself.

So why do we so often take a different approach with people?

Why is our first instinct to focus on changing individuals  (or how individuals interact with the system) before we stop to examine the conditions surrounding them?

For me, that question has changed the way I think about leadership, organisations and systems. It has also changed the way I approach my own work. These days, I'm less interested in arriving with solutions and more interested in understanding the assumptions that sit beneath the problem.

What are we accepting as normal without ever questioning why?

Who was this system designed for?

Whose needs does it prioritise?

What has become so familiar that we no longer notice it?

I don't ask these questions because I think systems are broken, or because individuals don't have responsibility.

I ask them because if we begin by asking how people need to change, we'll almost always find solutions that require people to change.

But if we begin by asking what conditions are producing the current outcome, we open up a very different conversation.

For me, that's become the most important shift of all.