Why do we need to think systemically?

When we see that a product or industry is generating a whole bunch of problems, what’s the best way to handle them?

One path is to solve each problem as it arises. But if similar problems are coming up again and again, we can end up in an exhausting, never-ending battle to fix them. In a situation like that, we need to see if there’s a root cause generating all the fires, because fixing that root cause in the system might be a much more efficient solution. That’s called a systemic solution.

Consider fast food. About 85 million adults in the U.S. consume fast food every day.⁵ Why? Because it’s affordable, quick, and takes advantage of our bias for salty, fatty, and sweet foods (which are energy-rich and helped us survive in much tougher pre-modern times, when energy was scarce).

Fast foods are carefully designed and tested to be addictive to drive sales. For many people, that addictive quality makes resisting fast food very difficult, leading to a crisis of obesity, high blood pressure, Type 2 diabetes and heart disease that’s spreading globally.

If we want to address problems like obesity and heart disease we can (and should) build more hospitals and research better medical treatments. But doing so is extremely expensive, especially if millions more people each year are eating food that’s worse for our bodies.

In this example, examples of more systemic solutions are:

These types of systemic solutions can reduce the overall number of dangerous outcomes that require expensive medical treatment.

Similarly, if we want to address the harms of social media we can and should directly address problems like misinformation, hate speech, cyberbullying and addiction. But we should also address the mechanisms that cause these problems by changing the way that algorithms are trained, products are built, and the technology industry is regulated.

Ultimately we will need to change the way we think about consumption if we are to build technology that helps us lead healthy and balanced lives.

It may seem initially that fast food is “what we want”... but who really wants to get addicted and to struggle with health challenges? Is it a fair fight when companies are scientifically engineering foods that are designed to addict us? When it comes to food, a system designed to get us to consume more winds up looking very different than a system designed to make us feel healthy and balanced.

What is true for food is also true for social media. At the root is a way of thinking, an idea that people consuming things makes them happy. This leads to a set of mechanisms designed to give people engaging content, things like recommendation algorithms and product features. These mechanisms lead to patterns in the kinds of information that people see on social media. Things like COVID-19 misinformation and hate speech are huge problems in large part because they are a highly engaging form of content. People will consume a lot of them even if doing so doesn’t make them happy or healthy in the long run.