Overcoming System Blindness

Community building has long been a concept in the United States that has seemingly been explored by small collectives from neighborhood communities, businesses, and educational leadership circles. Despite the limited range of groups that have examined its power, the community-building process has qualitatively transformed groups of diverse individuals of all ages into cohesive, committed, and supportive systems. Systems theory is a practice of identifying how a collection of parts work together cohesively to accomplish a mutually agreed-upon task in an integrated way (Kauffman, 1980; Sweeney & Meadows, 2010). In community-building terms, a collection of parts are the individuals that come together to construct the community. Barry Oshry, a systems thinking and community-building enthusiast explores systems theory and its implication for building community in an accessible way through his fictional construction of the Community of New Hope. Within Oshry’s fictional “community,” individuals have their roles or parts to play in the broader context of the system. What prevents the theoretical group of the Community of New Hope from becoming an authentic community is their system blindness or inability to see that they are a part of a greater system (Oshry, 1996) .

To understand the importance of being aware of the systems operating in a person's life,  I offer the following excerpt from Barry Oshry's book Seeing Systems: Unlocking the Mysteries of Organizational Life:

"When we don't see systems, we fall out of the possibility of partnership with one another; we don’t understand one another; we make up stories about one another; we have our myths and prejudices about one another; we hurt and destroy one another; we become antagonists when we could be collaborators; we separate when we could remain together happily; we become strangers when we could be friends; we oppress one another when we could live in peace; and our systems — organizations, families, task forces, faith groups — squander much of their potential. All of this happens without awareness or choice - dances of blind reflex.”

As an experiement, I have taken Oshry's framework for understanding systems and have applied it to diverse groups of students from various states and that represent many different school districts. The result is a celebration of system awareness, community-building, and self/social awareness.