Why do some changes ripple out across landscapes, societies, and the world- while others stay stuck or are fleeting and short-lived? The Six Conditions for Systems Change framework offers a suggestion (and a warning); the changes that are easiest to implement are not necessarily the ones that create lasting systematic change.
Today’s framework comes from John Kania, Mark Kramer, and Peter Senge’s 2018 paper The Water of Systems Change. In it, they describe six interdependent conditions that hold a system in place: policies, practices, resource flows, relationships and connections, power dynamics, and mental models. Change any one in isolation, and the system will usually snap back. Change several together, across different layers, from external to internal, and the shift has a chance of becoming embedded in the fabric of society.
The framework borrows its structure from Donella Meadows’ Places to Intervene and the Iceberg Model, both of which make the same core point; what you can see and measure is rarely what’s at the heart of the problem.
Today’s framework groups the six conditions into depths and asks us to look at the deeper driving forces behind why things are the way they are.
Structural change, or the explicit layer
These three conditions are the easiest to see and the easiest to change (on paper). A new policy can be signed in a single meeting.
An organisation might write up a position on tolerance, while the social fabric of the organisation remains unchanged. That’s exactly why, although a crucial part of the process, they don’t necessarily lead to lasting change on their own.
Policies
The government, institutional, and organisational rules and priorities that direct action. Land-use regulations, subsidy schemes, protected-area designations.
Practices
The activities of institutions, coalitions, and networks aimed at improving progress — plus the everyday procedures and habits that shape how an organisation actually works.
Resource flows
How money, people, knowledge, and infrastructure get allocated. Who receives funding, whose labour is paid for, whose knowledge is treated as expert.
Relational change, or the semi-explicit layer
This layer is harder to see than a policy or funding, but it’s often the layer that decides whether structural change survives in contact with reality.
In the organisation above, if the new position on tolerance becomes an accepted and embedded part of the organisation, with everyone being given equal opportunity, speaking time and access, the change has a chance to become embedded in the culture of the organisation.
Relationships and connections
The quality of communication between actors in the system, especially those with different histories and viewpoints.
Power dynamics
The distribution of decision-making authority, both formal and informal. Influence among individuals and organizations- who is respected and listened to?
Transformative change, or the implicit layer
Kania, Kramer, and Senge use an example about food security to show how this plays out: a city can create policies and financial incentive to attract grocery stores into neighbourhoods, support farmers, and convene residents, landowners, and officials to build relationships and shift decision-making power. But unless the mental model shifts too — from treating food insecurity as a matter of individual “bad choices” to recognising it as a structural issue rooted in historical inequity — the change will never become self-sustaining.
In our fictional organisation, if the new policies, opportunities and social connections lead to a true mindset change: that everyone deserves respect, that difference is a strength, not a weakness- the change has truly survived and become an enmeshed part of that society.
Mental models
The deeply held beliefs and assumptions that shape how people think, what they do, what they value, and how they talk.
How can this be applied to landscape restoration?
A landscape initiative can change practices, introduce regenerative farming methods, and unlock finance. But we’ve seen over the years that restoration only lasts when farmers, landowners and local communities are included, their needs are addressed, and they have built relationships, connection and communication strong enough to sustain work that can take decades (as landscape restoration does). And this connection can only last when the underlying mindset has also shifted, from land as an asset to extract from, to land as the heart of life and the source of long-term, shared health and prosperity.
The Six Conditions framework gives language to something practitioners often sense but rarely name: that a restoration effort can tick every structural box — the right policy, the right funding, even the right governance structure — and still fail, because nobody addressed the beliefs underneath it all.
Where do you see your own work sitting in this structure? Are you working at the visible layer of policy and funding, the relational layer of trust and power-sharing, or trying to shift the mental models that hold the whole system in place? Real, lasting change usually asks for movement at all three.