This essay is a condensed and less in depth iteration of the thinking I do in my recently posted video essay “Displeasure as Politics: How the Far Right Mastered Systems Change.” While the essays are similar they’re not the same! If you find this essay interesting or helpful, please consider subscribing so you can see the full video or read the transcript! Your paid subscription also helps me continue to do work like this! You can also listen to this essay by clicking the “article voiceover” button!
A few weeks ago, I sat in a meeting where a consultant from a firm I won’t name kept using the phrase "systems change." Over and over again: systems thinking, systems transformation, systems innovation. And the more they talked, the more confused I got. Because what they were describing weren’t systems. They were fragments—programs, projects, sometimes just… vibes. Not systems.
Here’s a thing I say all the time: words mean things. And “system” is a word with a meaning and, moreover, systems theory is a discipline that you can learn and then practice. But increasingly, the word “system” has become a cipher in consultant speak that just means “pay me more.” When I ask people to define the word “system” or to explain to me what their ‘systems level approach’ is all I get back is jargon. I’m worried that the progressive organizations desperately in need of systems analysis and systems level strategy are getting sold $100,000 powerpoints that don’t even provide a true systems analysis, let alone a systems level strategy.
Systems change has taken on a metaphoric quality in our speech. It’s aspirational rather than operational. We say “systems transformation” and everything goes soft focus, starts to glow a little. And then nothing changes. There’s no transformation.
Bummer.
I. What We Talk About When We Talk About Systems
The act of governing, at its core, is about creating predictable and repeatable outcomes—regardless of the setting or individual actors involved. Systems aren’t just institutions. They’re not just programs or policies. Systems are the fundamental architecture of our lives that drive aggregate patterns of behavior regardless of whether or not we want them. A system (in the human context) is the set of incentives and disincentives that create the necessary structure to create predictable outcomes.
But so often when I hear people talk about systems they’re using the word interchangeably with some unit of activity (a department, an organization, an institution) when those organizational units are not the system, they are outputs of the system as it seeks to drive human behavior towards the designed outcome.
And the people inside these systems? Complicit. Yes, even the ones describing themselves as “systems thinking change agents.” Not out of malice, but out of design. They are also locked inside sets of structured and (dis)incentivized choices. These systems are working exactly as intended. That’s the problem.
II. Behavioral Economics, Discomfort, and the Southern Strategy
One of the most successful systems change projects in recent U.S. history came from the far right: the Republican Party’s Southern Strategy.
It was effective not because it was technically complex, but because it leveraged behavioral economics. It understood that systems are about choices: which ones feel good, which ones feel bad, and which ones even feel possible. The Southern Strategy banked on the idea that racism feels good to some people. Equality, by contrast, was going to feel like loss.
(As Toni Morrison put it, some people only know how to feel tall when someone else is on their knees.)
That’s the part progressives keep missing. We believe that moral clarity is enough. That if we present the facts, people will choose the right thing. But that’s not how people work.
People choose what feels good. Even when it’s wrong and especially when it’s familiar. If we want people to choose differently, we have to make the better choice feel better too.
III. Systems Change Is Not Just for the Marginalized
We can’t keep pretending that systems change is something we do for marginalized people while letting everyone else stay inside the current structures that keep them comfortable. If we’re serious, then middle-class white Americans have to be part of the change, too. And not through shame or guilt, but through futures they actually want to live in.
The same goes for the ultra-wealthy. If we’re talking about economic justice, wealth redistribution, or climate repair, then the wealthy have to be in the room—not as the architects of what comes next but as another faction to be organized towards a politics of possibility. We cannot default to letting those who have the power to fund strategies dictate who gets to choose the strategy. Even if we like some of them. Even if they’re named Oprah.
IV. Discomfort and the Neurodivergent Case Study
I think about discomfort a lot. I’m bipolar, have PTSD and ADHD. I’m on the spectrum (or several). My brain is actively out to get me on a good day, and I’ve spent a huge part of my life avoiding things I didn’t necessarily understand why I avoided.
Now that I do, I’ve started designing my life around how to work with discomfort instead of against it. But it took years of failure, therapy, and pattern recognition.
Here’s what I learned: if it feels bad, I probably won’t do it. Even if I want to do it, even if I know it’s good for me. For me, that can look like being paralyzed for an hour while I try to decide if I want to take a walk or not. And I know that most people don’t live at that extreme, but what is true is that all of our decisions are often structured as choosing between comfort and discomfort. And I don’t believe that progressive ‘systems change’ tactics know how to account for that. Wanting to do a thing is not enough in most instances of systems design—the path to doing it has to feel good. Janet Jackson was right (always is), it really is all about the pleasure principle.
We need to start designing for pleasure. For comfort. For the behavioral truths we already know. Not to coddle people, but to bring them in. To create feedback loops that feel like relief, not punishment.
V. What’s Next
I offer this not just as critique (although certainly I am critiquing), but as an attempt to start the necessary conversation that could end in building something usable. Something that recognizes power, emotion, incentive, and discomfort as the raw materials of real change.
For me, some of that work will live here on Substack. Some will live in a book I’ve been writing. Some will show up in workshops, salons, or new coalitions. And some of it hasn’t found its form yet (and isn’t that exciting?).
But this is my invitation to all of you. Subscribe. Share. Become a paid member if you want to dig deeper. Not because I need your money, though, real talk, that helps, but because I believe we need a different kind of conversation about systems change.
Not as metaphor.
As practice.
As craft.
As the only thing that might still save us.
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