How Much of Transformation is About Finding the Right Intervention?

I've been studying systems and transformational work professionally since 1994. If someone asked what that work has actually done to me, I'd say it's one of the best anti-ego exercises there is.

It forced me to stop assuming that one particular intervention I brought into a system was what made the difference. Because what exactly worked? The intervention itself, or the particular structure it happened within? And how much of this was my doing anyway?

A living system (as I see communities or organizations) is in constant exchange with its environment. What happens inside it can't really be separated from that.

The same intervention can create movement in one place and do nothing in another. Sometimes even the problem we think we're addressing looks different once we look at the structure around it.

That's what became interesting to me: not assuming we already know the problem or the solution, but staying curious about the structure producing what we're seeing. Paying attention to the context. Because how we describe a situation is already part of how we engage with it. Call something a lack of capacity, and you'll go looking for capacity building. The description decides the search before anyone starts looking.

This is exactly why our work on Community Economy Development in African communities isn't about finding an "African solution" to an "African problem." That framing would already be the mistake, assuming the problem sits with the people.

The real question underneath it applies far beyond to anyone working inside a system and trying to change it: how much of transformation is about finding the right intervention, and how much is about learning to see the system differently?

Address unemployment only through jobs or business funding, and you can improve individual lives without changing the conditions that let prosperity actually circulate through a community. The same pattern shows up inside organizations. You can develop individual leaders for years and still not move the organization to its next iteration if you don't touch the structure of the system itself.

Context is everything. Understanding a system isn't a step before transformation starts. It's part of what transformation is.

Read why we see context as the foundation of everything: