Activity 2.22 asks us to apply one of five system archetypes to our situation of concern. The first is ‘fixes that fail’:
In this archetype, the initial benefits of action to address a problem are found to be temporary. What seemed initially to be the solution stops working. It turns out the temporary fix has failed. For example, when you hear a statement like ‘I get stomach pains almost every day but I find the indigestion remedy from the supermarket deals with the immediate problem but actually may cause other ailments later on’. The point here is you don’t need any medical understanding at all to see that a fix like an indigestion remedy does nothing to forestall any unintended consequences that are completely unseen at this stage.
(The Open University, 2020)
I’ve recreated the diagram from the module materials:
So if we take increased opening hours as an attempt to increase visitor numbers we get an impact on the budget and staff workload, which can potentially lead (after a delay) to a decline in service quality and, after an initial spike, a reduction in numbers of visitors:
Equally, I could apply this archetype to:
Expanding digital access: the problem is low engagement with library services, so the fix is to expand digital access and promote ebooks. After a temporary benefit of increased engagement, after a delay, reduced demand for physical resources leads to budget cuts, with traditional library users feeling alienated.
Increased marketing efforts: the problem (low number of library visitors) is addressed with the fix of spending more time and budget on marketing. This attracts more visitors initially, but after a delay the budget is strained, reducing funds available for other services.
More community activities: the problem of low community engagement leads to the ‘fix’ of increasing the number and variety of community activities. This increases visitor numbers, but also increases the noise, making is less suitable for quiet study. These users stop using the library.
It seems I might have jumped the gun a little when mapping my situation of concern last week. As fellow student Diana Dimitrova kindly pointed out, some of my causal links weren’t so causal, and I’d used events rather than nouns.
So now, as I come to complete Activities 2.17-2.21 I’ve had another go at mapping the situation. There’s definitely more I can add to this, which I created using kumu.
There are three ‘reinforcing’ loops in the above diagram and two ‘balancing’ loops. The reinforcing loops have either no, or an equal number of, subtracting/opposing causal connections (indicated in red). The balancing loops have an odd number of these kinds of connections.
It’s worth noting that this is all theoretical at the moment, I haven’t actually checked on, for example, the relationship between number of people visiting the library and budget allocation.
REINFORCING loops
Training: The more budget is available, the more staff training can be done. This improves staff expertise, which in turn increases library quality. In turn, this unlocks more budget.
Marketing: The more budget is available, the more marketing can be performed. This attracts more people to more community activities, which increases the number of library visitors, which in turn unlocks more budget.
Availability: The more budget is available, the longer the library opening hours. This increases the number of people visiting the library, which in turn increases the budget available.
BALANCING loops
Digital: The more budget is available, the more staff training can happen, which in turn improves staff expertise. This improves users’ access to the library’s digital provision, which increases ebook usage, and reduces the number of people visiting the library. This has a knock-on effect on budget.
Noise: The more community activities are run in the library, the greater the amount of noise. This has a detrimental effect on use of the study space, which in turn reduces the number of visitors to the library. This has an effect on the budget, which reduces marketing spend and the number of people attending community activities.
In writing the above, I’ve come to realise how all of my loops pass through the ‘budget’ node. While I’m sure that this is indeed a leverage point, there must be others in the system which I haven’t spotted. I need to go back and identify these.
Unless, of course, it is all about the budget, in which case libraries either need to massively diversify into paid services, or we need more public funding (or both).
