Having A Beer With Systems Thinking

By Nick Ellinger, Chief Brand Officer

Stafford Beer, that is. Beer, the British systems thinker, coined the term POSIWID: The Purpose of a System Is What It Does. Good intentions or Orwellian naming conventions notwithstanding, systems always work correctly to get the results they get. The machine is never broken.

Those who have worked on the nonprofit programs side know this intimately. At MADD, we used to say that we have the level of drunk driving we tolerate. If the system had stricter enforcement, better deterrents, or more uniform application of treatment and technology, there would be less drunk driving. But there isn’t. The system is doing the thing it is designed to do with a result of thousands of empty chairs at dinner tables each year. The purpose of a system is what it does.

POSIWID is a valuable concept for fundraising as well. If you have a finance department in charge of the budgeting process whose goals are high ROIs, low overheads, and positive Charity Navigator ratings, you can effectively call this finance department a Marketing Prevention Machine. The resulting downward spiral of expenses and revenues isn’t a good system that had bad results. The results define the system. The purpose of a system is what it does.

Nor are we fundraisers immune. Thinking happy thoughts may help you fly, and clapping while believing in fairies may bring Tinkerbell back to life. But no amount of happy thoughts will prevent channel conflict if you have financial goals, data systems, metrics, and staffing by separate channels. The purpose of a system is what it does.

• When the brand police kill effective fundraising
• When donors receive 30 different offers from different departments in one month, a hodgepodge of calls to action in a mishmash of media
• When donors get the same communication as every other donor

The system isn’t broken. The purpose of a system is what it does. We must judge systems on their impact, not their intention.

And if the system is doing what we don’t want done, and it’s not broken, then we need to break it and regrow it from the shards.

The only way to change a system is to make it want something else.

It’s like the old joke about how many psychiatrists it takes to change a lightbulb: first it must want to change. Thankfully, as fundraisers, we already have the tools that make people want to change.

We must muster the same urgency to change our systems – to make them want better experiences and results – as we want our donors to have when we send an OMG IT’S A 3X MATCHING OFFER BUT ONLY FOR 12 MORE MINUTES [firecracker emoji] email!

We must realize what parts of the system are us. When we say that it’s how we’ve always done it or that’s not the best practice, we are part of the system that gets the results that it gets.

We must use our storytelling powers to tell the story of what a donor sees or what the future looks like with another round of budget cuts. So often, we default to Excel and PowerPoint when jousting with our finance brethren and sistern, which, in terms of home-field advantage, is like Nadal on clay or trying to invade Russia in winter.

We paint pictures, so we need to paint.

P.S. Here’s how we tell the story of how to create great 1:1, personalized, omnichannel donor experiences.