Recent Academy Stories
One River, 31 States, USA
The Nature Conservancy’s efforts to bolster the health of the
31-State Mississippi River Basin.
Restoring a Scallop and Clam Fishery in La Paz, Mexico
The Journey of the Manglito fishing community and
nonprofit Noroeste Sustentable (NOS)
About The Academy Stories of Systems Change
by Nathan Senge
‘Systems change’ brings long-term improvements to a situation because core problems are being faced. This can yield short-term complications as one adjusts to a new way of being, but in the long run the situation improves. It is the opposite of a ‘symptomatic solution,’ which involves a knee-jerk, quick fix to an undesired situation. Such a response may make everything better for a moment, but over time the situation worsens as one’s ability to face the real problems at hand increasingly fails.
(M.I.T. Prof. Jay Forrester, Counterintuitive Behavior of Social Systems.)
Herein we illustrate systems change by way of stories. Systems change is not just about policies and metrics. It’s about beliefs and attitudes. The transformation of a system always involves relationships: relationships between people, relationships between people and non-human elements, and relationships within people themselves.
The work of the Academy for Systems Change is to foster and document this kind of change.