Local government can’t manage complexity one service, target, or programme at a time. This paper by Manuel Riemer and colleagues offers a useful account of what ‘systemic management’ might mean in practice.
It describes cities as service ecosystems: nested within wider systems, made through relationships between many interdependent actors, socially governed, and continually emerging. From that, the authors identify three requirements for management:
• integrative – working across organisational and policy boundaries, noticing interdependence, and attending to consequences elsewhere in the system;
• collective – sharing power, involving the people who shape outcomes, and treating local government as convener and participant rather than controller-in-chief;
• adaptive – looking for early signals, experimenting, learning rapidly, and changing plans as conditions change.
None of this is entirely new. The paper itself draws on Beer, Argyris and Schön, Senge, Ostrom, Human Learning Systems, resilience theory, and several other traditions.
But it puts the argument together well, and makes it unusually concrete for local government. Flexible budgeting. Participatory governance. Measures which expose unintended consequences. Cross-disciplinary teams. Plans treated as revisable commitments, not stone tablets produced for the committee cycle.
The difficulty, of course, is that conventional management persists for reasons. Funding is divided into programmes. Accountability is pushed down organisational tubes. Performance systems reward what can be attributed and counted. Power is protected. Failure may be praised in innovation workshops and punished in actual careers.
So the question isn’t merely how to give managers better systemic practices, it’s how to alter the conditions which keep selecting against them.
‘Systemic Management Practices—Enabling Local Governments to Adapt in Response to Complexity’:
https://doi.org/10.3390/world6020072
Abstract
Local governments are increasingly navigating accelerating change and escalating complexity caused by interconnected crises, commonly referred to as a global polycrisis. These crises, including climate change, lack of affordable housing, declining mental health, and geopolitical instability, both shape and are shaped by local conditions. Cities face growing pressure to equitably provide services that are responsive to evolving community needs while contending with the systemic nature of contemporary challenges. However, local governments are often constrained by conventional management frameworks and practices that do not match the complexity of today’s challenges. The purpose of this conceptual paper is to explore how systems science can be leveraged to define and characterize a transformative new type of management designed to enable local governments to more adequately address emerging complexity. To this end, the authors review the literature on contemporary management practice and explore how management for local government can be reframed in alignment with the insights from systems science, using a service ecosystem lens. The findings point to a needed shift toward systemic management practices that are integrative, collective, and adaptive. The authors illustrate the practical relevance of these three characteristics and conclude with recommendations for research, policy, and practice aimed at building the institutional capabilities required to transition toward systemic management frameworks and practices that match the complexity of the polycrisis.
Systems Community of Inquiry 