One person’s actions eventually affect all of us, for we are all interconnected. Urie Bronfenbrenner (1992) proposed this with Ecological Systems Theory: people are embedded, affected by and influencing their micro, meso, and macro-systems through their nuclear and extended family, school, and communities. Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. describes our interdependence while writing from a Birmingham jail cell: “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

Connectedness is a fundamental concept of systems. Though many can agree that we are interconnected, it takes much more to accept its sobering implications. Leaders who deeply understand these truths can foster transformational systemic changes in education that lead to the collective growth of students and communities that we all yearn to see.

However, failure to act with an understanding of our inter- and intra-dependency has consequences and ultimately we as a society suffer as a result. For instance, a business leaders who gains more profit by paying their workers less may initially recoup more dollars from their business, but in the long run, they may pay more in recruitment and training as workers turn over, experience the health challenges of deferred healthcare, and other issues that plague low-wage workers. In public education, citizens must vote to pass improvement efforts, such as tax increases and bond initiatives, regardless if they have children eligible to attend or not. Failure to do so may lead to lower educational attainment, leading to lower wages and opportunities for young people to productively engage in society.

Our destinies are contingent upon one another’s actions. System Dynamics (SD), a method of understanding complex systems over time, describes a potential outcome of our interconnectedness called the accidental adversaries archetype.

The accidental adversary archetype

The accidental adversaries archetype, tools used in system dynamics, describes a pattern where two groups decide to work together to obtain mutual benefit for their alliance. The parties are not exactly the same and in fact have unique differences that make a partnership useful. Problems arise when one or both of the subjects need to fix a localized gap in performance, perhaps due to external pressure. One partner initiates actions to fix the gap and incidentally undermines the other’s success. The result of these activities may produce a sense of resentment or frustration between its stakeholders or it may even turn them into adversaries, thereby destroying the alliance (hence the archetype name). A Causal Loop Diagram (CLD) depicting the accidental adversaries dynamic is demonstrated with the following structure.

Figure 1. Modified Structure of the Accidental Adversaries Paradigm. Arrows depict causality. The polarities (plus or minus signs) depict how the origin variable influences the connected variable. A plus sign means that the variables move in the same direction. For example, when the origin variable increases, the connected variable increases. When the origin variable decreases, the connected variable will also decrease. Negative polarities depict opposite relationships, therefore when the origin variable increases, the connected variable decreases. If the origin variable is decreasing, the connected variable increases. These loops depict causal relationships over time, which cause complex dynamics in the system. For more information on understanding causal loop diagrams, visit Causal Loop Diagram Construction: The Basics by Colleen Lannon.

Examples of the accidental adversaries archetype

Examples of accidental adversaries are everywhere, especially in organizational partnerships. Let’s examine the case of Amazon and its Marketplace Sellers. Prior to partnerships with Amazon, individual stores were fighting to compete with Amazon’s large share of online shoppers. Smaller stores could not compete with the offerings that Amazon was able to provide its customers. Now, however, through a strategic alliance, Amazon gives its rival sellers on Amazon Marketplace access to its customers and warehouses. While it loses some direct business and the markup associated with it, Amazon makes a commission on marketplace sales. The company also learns more about what people are searching for and their preferences. For marketplace sellers, a partnership with Amazon opens a market of customers that may not have found them otherwise. It also provides warehouses for smaller shops to store their goods and grow their businesses.

Amazon as a case study confronts us with an important point: to avoid or treat this archetype, parties must sacrifice short-term, individual gain to achieve a system-wide collective gain.

Accidental adversaries in education systems

This archetype can also be seen in current public education systems. From neighborhood and district public schools, to private schools and now charter schools, families that can, have made choices for their children’s schooling. Outside of traditional district and charter schools, private schools were only an option for those with the resources to access and navigate the increased barriers to enrollment (e.g., tuition or transportation). Charter schools were meant to provide that same type of choice to all children through public funding, regardless of whether they could pay tuition. Charters were formed as a solution to address the issue that wealthier, often white, parents were exercising “choice” and exacerbating racial segregation by pulling their children into racially homogeneous private schools.

While this is highly debated, according to the Wiley Handbook of School Choice, the concept of charter schools were created by an educator in the 1970s named Ray Budde to ensure children in academically struggling schools could gain access to new methods of instruction in innovative settings. According to this source, he hoped teachers could set up contracts or “charters” with their local school board to discover new approaches in the field of education to meet student needs. By empowering educators with additional freedoms, the hope was it would foster greater student success and models to share with traditional school district leaders so all benefit. Other sources attribute the creation of charter schools in the 1990s to the Al Shanker, the president of the teachers’ union, the American Federation of Teachers.

Though some argue the original intent and current dynamics playing out, one story has consensus — that district and charter schools were not meant to be at odds with one another. Over time, however, the idea that competition between schools would be a driver for innovation — and therefore the key to improving academic outcomes — crept in through business leaders and other privatization interests. In contexts where students are dwindling and resources are few, however, increased competition has fostered detrimental effects, arguably making things worse for the entire system over time.

For example, as the student population declines in St. Louis, leadership must consider closing schools in order to maximize limited resources. Often school closures are focused on schools who are not “getting results”, which are often in neighborhoods already struggling with the effects of poverty. While it makes sense from a competitive marketplace perspective, school closings can disproportionately harm the remaining children who were attending. Even people without children who live in the neighborhoods where schools close can feel the effect of a school’s absence, as the lack of schools in the community makes it difficult to attract and retain new residents or businesses. These neighborhood challenges can harm all of the students residing in the neighborhood, ultimately affecting the schools that educate them.

Schools’ actions to improve gaps in their performance may lead to perceived threats to the other’s existence, making it nearly impossible to collectively problem solve, share resources, and learn from one another as originally intended.

This paradigm creates a new set of dynamics. The perceived competition between schools (a stated “win” for school choice advocates) may actually lead to side effects that reduce the likelihood of either side achieving their goals over time.

For instance, a side effect of a complicated decision making process when choosing a school is that some parents have chosen to opt out of the decision altogether. Instead of navigating the stressful process of entering lotteries and applying without guarantee to schools, some families who have the resources to opt out, choose to leave public schools and/or St. Louis City altogether. The option to leave is perceived to be less contentious than choosing between a traditional and charter school, and increases the population of students in public school districts in nearby suburbs or private schools. This leads to an even smaller pool of students from which to recruit, leading schools to increase marketing budgets and strategies to recruit available students and educators. With a dwindling number of students, less money is available to support the operations of individual school buildings, leading to increased decline.

This archetype is demonstrated in Figure 2 below. This diagram shows the tension that may be felt from leaders in the charter/public school space. Though many cities have moved beyond this tension to a place of mutual success, other cities like St. Louis experiences perceived obstruction from one side to another, making it challenging for children to benefit, as originally intended.

Figure 2. Modified Archetype Demonstrating Charter and District School Dynamics

Though the terminology of the archetype may be debated, the dynamics may hold. For instance, the term “unintended obstruction,” could be questioned by people who perceive strategic intentionality behind obstructionist actions of one party against another. On the surface, this dynamic seems insurmountable: it is a complex problem too big for any one actor to solve. The seeming intractability of the accidental adversaries paradigm causes fatigue and burnout from those working in this space and is ultimately harmful to communities, school leaders, and — most importantly — students.

How Do We Move Forward?

Take heart. There are several ways to break free from this accidental adversaries paradigm. According to ReThink Health, a group working on this paradigm in healthcare, the following actions can help actors caught in this complex system find liberation from its grip. System leaders should:

1. Acknowledge the “accidental damage” that has been done, with the understanding that current actors in the system have power to address previous unintended harms. ←Doing so can reduce the levels of stocks of latent psychological variables, such as mistrust or anger in the system and start working to rebuild pathways.
2. Remember the shared vision that both groups hold and create and maintain generative space for new and shared ideas to achieve those goals. ← Remind yourself of the goals of the system.
3. Create consistent pathways for transparent communication to provide feedback to one another before intentions are taken the wrong way (talk!) ←This should work to optimize transparency and information flows between entities.
4. Determine where entities have shared goals and work together towards them. Then find new ones to work on once you figure it out. ← Find a reason to work together on something that affects the success of both groups.
5. Develop clear rules of engagement so one is not taken off guard by each other’s actions and commit to using them. ←Develop new feedback loops
6. And alternatively, some higher authority could change the system structure such that District and Charter systems’ activities to improve does not promise individual success of one over the other. ← Change the rules and incentives of the system.

The soloist attitude may win in the short-term but fails to account for the overall, long-term health of our school system. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmer writes about mast fruiting plants (pecan trees, specifically) as a natural example of inescapable mutuality:,

“If one tree fruits, they all fruit — there are no soloists. Not one tree in a grove, but the whole grove; not one grove in the forest, but every grove; all across the country […]. The trees act not as individuals, but somehow as a collective. Exactly how they do this, we don’t yet know. But what we see is the power of unity. What happens to one happens to us all. We can starve together or feast together. All flourishing is mutual” (15).

We dream of a flourishing, mutually reinforcing system of schools. Building this requires bravery, dialogue, and humility. Perhaps it is naive to believe that collaboration will foster a better system for students and educators, but the status quo is surely not working either.

Additional Resources

• Kemeny, J. Accidental adversaries: When friends become foes. The Systems Thinker.
• ReThink Health
• The Rules of Co-Opetition

Authors:

Saras Chung, PhD, MSW, Ellen O’Neill, MSW, Rachel Matsumoto, Hannah Levin, MSW