An Enquiry: On What Lies Between

Exploring connectedness, connectivity & connectorship

Photo credit: Sam Baumber

Hannah Smith, November 6th, 2020

We are so used to looking at objects. We look, and we see things. People, trees, birds and bees. My organisation and your organisation. Discrete items — each one apart from another. But what if — instead of separation — we saw connection? What if we could see what lies between? The glue that holds it all together. Our families, our organisations, our communities — and our ambitions to make the world a safer, kinder, fairer place.

These Covid times have got more of us thinking about the importance of connection, connectedness and connectivity. What it means to feel connected, disconnected, more connected. About how we develop and maintain our connectedness without physical proximity. The importance of our connection to the rest of the natural world. Like never before, we are experiencing just how interconnected our personal and global challenges are. There is a brighter light shining on the stickiness between us. The glue between ourselves.

Imagine if we could talk as easily about this ‘invisible in-between’ as we do about the ‘things’. Had a similar depth of understanding around how this mysterious matter grows and develops. And a similar appreciation for the craft of fostering, nurturing and developing it. Perhaps a little more fluency, a little more dexterity here could enable us to better connect our multitude of individual efforts. Perhaps it could help us invest and design more wisely. And perhaps it could even increase our collective capacity to address the hyper-connected challenges of our hyper-connected world.

Photo credit: Hannah Smith

Connectedness, connectivity & connectorship

Biologist Merlin Sheldrake calls the relationship between organisms ‘the most basic principle of ecology’. I am embarking on an enquiry that centres on this principle — that there is value in developing our capacities to see, understand and work with ‘what lies between’. It’s an enquiry with three strands — like a woven braid. Each strand a part of hauling ourselves forward in a quest to see better through the lens of connection.

The first strand is ‘connectedness’. What is mysterious matter, this glue, this stickiness, this amorphous substance that grows between us? We reach for words like trust, empathy, familiarity, intimacy but how exactly does it emerge and evolve? What conditions facilitate or inhibit its development? What’s the difference between ‘a connection’ and ‘connectedness? And why does it matter?

The second strand is ‘connectivity’. Think of this as the amount and quality of connectedness in a system. The mycelial network from which our shared endeavours grow. How do we assess the presence, volume and quality of connectedness across our systems? And how purposefully are we fostering it? Is it, in fact, something that can be fostered or will serendipity and magic always play a role?

Which leads to the final strand — ‘connectorship’. The idea that there exists a craft, a skill, a practice — of actively developing connectedness and connectivity. Like entrepreneurship — it’s an activity that seeks to create new value in the world. Whereas entrepreneurs grow ventures, businesses and organisations — ‘connectors’ grow connectedness between nodes in a system — thus fostering its connectivity.

Photo credit: Hannah Smith

Unravelling the strands

“Relationships move at the speed of trust, and social change moves at the speed of relationships” — Jennifer Bailey

Let us begin with connectedness. Imagine it as a substance. Something slightly sticky perhaps. It attaches us to each other. To our organisations. To our places. It is largely invisible and variable in its consistency but — like pancake batter or a good sourdough — it’s a substance we can get to know with practice. Think of all the language and knowledge we have for objects, for places and for people. And compare that with the paucity of our ability to visualise, describe and understand the quality of what attaches them to each other. To me, this is where the juice is — in the joining.

I am curious as to the extent to which this substance, this ‘stickiness’ can be understood in and of itself. Is what lies between two people, the same as what lies between a person and an organisation or community? Or between a person and place? Does connectedness develop in the same way between humans, as it does between a human and an animal, or a place? And if so, what might we learn from this? What might be the implications for our thinking about relationships between humans and the rest of the natural world?

Photos credit: Sam Baumber

“The future won’t be a new big, tower of power- but well trodden paths from house to house” — Raimon Panikkar

And so to connectivity. When I think of connectivity I picture a rich, colourful, dynamic heat map. Something that helps us perceive and understand more about the quantity and quality of connectedness in a system. Not just the connections — the simple ties of ‘who knows who’ that you might see on a classic network map — but an indication of the nature and state of the relationships between the nodes. Where the most generative pockets are, and where there are gaping holes.

Connectivity as the soil — the earthy goodness — of a system is another useful metaphor. Where it is rich and well nourished, what is seeded there is more likely to flourish. Paying attention to how and where connectedness is forming — or failing to form — can help us understand more about the health of our systems. About what’s flowing and growing, and about where the blockages are. In turn this can help us focus our energy and resources. What kind of conditions and activities help or hinder greater, and richer connectivity? And where it is poor, how can it best be nourished?

“Hope is the consequence of action” — Cornel West and Roberto Unger

Which brings us to connectorship. If connectivity is the soil of a system, perhaps those who do the work of making and deepening connections are the quiet wee creatures of that system — the birds, the bees and the beasties. As there appear to be natural entrepreneurs, so there seem to be natural connectors. Most of us know people who seem to more frequently facilitate connections between others. They are often quiet, humble, more introverted types. Focused on the whole, not the parts — and who instinctively understand the value of enhancing connectivity.

So much is written and understood about the science and art of entrepreneurship. It is studied, funded, supported, held up as an economic engine and a pillar of strength. The entrepreneur is seen as an alchemist — a spinner of gold from rare reserves of ideas, energy and dogged determination. Imagine if connectorship occupied a similar place in our consciousness. ‘Connectors’ as the weavers of all the untapped potential hidden between people and organisations. With the same commitment to purpose, but through nourishing whole systems instead of single organisations. What skills, tools and insights might ‘connectors’ have that all of us can learn from? How might we better resource the valuable work they do? What might be possible if we could become more conscious, purposeful and skilful about how we nourish our connectedness, and the connectivity in our systems? How much more effective could we become?

Where to from here?

On one level, connecting is something we do and understand intuitively. An in-built human capacity — much like parenting, caring, grieving or falling in love. But I believe it’s still possible to interrogate our instincts. Embrace our curiosity and refuse to rest comfortably on easy assumptions. As these strange times continue, it is surely valuable to be continually enquiring.

Kāore te tōtara e tū mokemoke — The majestic tōtara doesn’t stand alone

It’s easy to look at the forest of our endeavours and be drawn to the biggest, most striking trees. But these trees are rooted in soil. Kept healthy by a multitude of quiet creatures. For those of us more accustomed to a paradigm of separation, this more interconnected, whole systems perspective can be daunting. After all, heroes make for compelling stories. But I believe it’s time for such narratives to shift. Our interconnected challenges call for interconnected solutions. We humans are not separate from the earth, the water and many forms of life on which our own lives depend. We exist in relationship. A great wild, occasionally overwhelming mesh of relationship. This knowledge lies at the heart of so many indigenous cultures, yet has been sidelined by our increasingly dominant Western ways of being and doing. The times we are living are surely telling us it’s time for a re-understanding. In the words of poet William Stafford, ‘it is time for the heroes to all go home’.

Over these coming months I will be purposefully enquiring into these notions of connectedness, connectivity and connectorship. Combining thinking and doing, scholarship and stories I will explore some dimensions of connectedness, the challenges of building connectivity and consider the skills and tools of connectorship.

My grounding place for this work will be Aotearoa New Zealand, through my work with Pocketknife and as part of the Edmund Hillary Fellowship — a fascinating, global collective of bright minds and warm souls who are engaged in meeting the challenges of our time head-on. By experimenting, exploring, creating and reflecting — together — I hope we can build connectivity in our own systems, and share learnings along the way. Please connect or comment if you have thoughts, questions or would like to get involved in the exploration. Or sign up for regular updates here.

And more soon. Much more.

Naku te rourou, nau te rourou ka ora ai te iwi
— With your basket and my basket, the people will thrive

Thanks: Many, many conversations have helped shape this piece and this project. Particular thanks to Sam Baumber, Natasha Zimmerman, Hélène Malandain, Richard Alderson, Erin Crampton, Denise Young, Rosie Walford, Ants Cabraal and my dear friends at The Point People — whose time, words, wisdom and encouragement have made all the difference.

Why the feminine business principles?

Abby Rose

Jul 13 ·

This is the first of three posts sharing about a collective investigation with The Point People into what sisterhood — or regenerative—economics might mean. The second is here, and third here.

This questioning began a number of years ago for me, when I came across the Feminine Business Principles created by an artist & business person in LA, Jennifer Armbrust co-creator of sister.is. For me, the principles are a way to experiment with reaching a new level of business in the world — to start to define what regenerative business might look like.

They are important because we can see it is impossible to regenerate the earth if you operate an extractive business model. If we want a shift to regenerative farming and to regenerate the earth and all beings, then we need to have the way businesses operate also be regenerative.

These principles are so vital to me because they give me hope that business can transform into a force for positive change.

They are literally the backbone of how I operate in the business world, they give me space for all the things that many people said had no place in business. Even just the first principle, ‘you have a body’ — in the business context is oddly profound. How did business get so disconnected from being alive?

In May Cat Drew and I led the first exploratory workshop on Sisterhood Economics for our monthly The Point People meeting. To get people thinking about Sisterhood Economics (which has no definition) we shared a bit about what economics means and is for, and some of the questions we might ask ourselves to imagine this new economic paradigm.

It’s important to acknowledge the economy is a concept humanity constructed to support our civilisation, it is a social science not a natural science. The word economy derives from the greek words for ‘household’ and ‘manage’. It’s literally how we want to manage households.

A given economy ‘is the result of a set of processes that involves its culture, values, education, technological evolution, history, social organisation, political structure and legal systems, as well as its geography, natural resource endowment, and ecology, as main factors. These factors give context, content, and set the conditions and parameters in which an economy functions. In other words, the economic domain is a social domain of human practices and transactions. It does not stand alone.’

The economy is not a set structure we must exist within but something we can help to transform by the way we organise, the way we produce, use and manage our resources.

Sisterhood economics is about recognising this and beginning to construct a vision of an economy that supports many feminine values, as outlined by the contrasting diagrams of the values of the feminine economy and masculine economy from sister.is. Consider that the current economy we have built acts to reward those who are willing to win at all costs; to foster aggressive competition; to reward those who already have assets; to keep us all in a state of feeling we need more; to hide our real selves at work; to aspire to have more than others and grow bigger than others; and ultimately to make as much financial profit as possible. Is that what we want?

Can you imagine a world where your work is a healing for yourself and others? Where telling the truth is rewarded more highly than turning a profit? Where feelings are celebrated and seen as a vital part of a thriving economy? Where you feel you are enough, just as you are? Have you ever experienced that in your life, or seen that in others? Can you recount a story, or give an example of what that looked like? If you are having difficulty just take a moment to realise what that means, how deeply it is engrained in us that we must participate to win, to accumulate assets for ourselves, to be better than all those around us and to always feel we aren’t enough. Is that what life is for?

As part of the workshop we asked ourselves the following key questions and shared examples and thoughts about beginning to answer them (they are rather massive questions, this is the tip of the iceberg).

What are the myths of the current economic paradigm? In her book Donut Economics Kate Raworth shows that the concept of ‘trickle down economics’, or that inequality will even itself out, is a story based on extremely limited data. Despite the limited hypothesis, this concept somehow become economic fact and was taught to all economics students for 50 years. It is of course a very compelling story for politicians and the wealthy as it means they don’t have to worry about inequality as the economy grows, so maybe no wonder it was so quickly adopted. Raworth lays out in her book how this principle has now been shown to be a myth — even Simon Kuznets who originally published the hypothesis re-iterated that it should not be used for making “unwarranted dogmatic generalisations”. And yet, our stories about how the economy works still haven’t changed. Read more here and we definitely recommend reading Donught Economics to uncover many more economic ideas you might be surprised aren’t true.

How can we have an economy that encourages capital sequestration rather than capital evaporation? Molly Madden of Red Hen Collective first introduced us to the idea of capital sequestration and capital evaporation. Capital sequestration is the idea of keeping capital embedded in the community, so a dollar spent in your local bakery will have way more impact on people’s lives than a dollar spent on Amazon that immediately evaporates into an off-shore bank account, and is traded on stock markets, having almost zero impact on the community. Essentially, how can we have an economy that is about nurturing a community, rather than ‘nurturing’ abstract figures that benefit a few people? A good example of focusing on capital sequestration is the Cleveland or Preston model of community wealth building, where spending money on local businesses is built into how the local council (and all its procurement systems) work.

If scaling and growth is not the goal? What are we doing this for? What might business look like without scaling up? If they don’t grow every year? I shared that when I look deep inside myself I realise it’s very difficult to imagine a positive existence where I was to live day to day without any concept of progress or change. I think that is true of most humans I know, we have to believe we are working towards something. However, I certainly can imagine a world where what I was working towards was not growing the company, scaling up and generating more profit. We discussed that there are many ways of scaling up impact without growing a company (more on that in the next question). What if we decided we had enough profit and instead we were working towards more gratitude, more ease, more empathy, being more fully self-expressed, being more connected to nature?

If you aren’t scaling up then you don’t get ‘economies of scale’. Where have you seen examples of infrastructures building resilience in fragmented systems?

It feels like this question speaks directly to a lot of the work The Point People do. Here are a few examples that occurred to us right away:

The work fellow Point Person, Cassie Robinson, is doing with Catalyst to massively accelerate UK civil society’s use of digital is a great example of infrastructure that is building resilience for the many different charities, institutions and entities that make up civil society today by providing digital know-how in a collective way. And the Foundation Design Lab is bringing many ideas and ways of working from the design world to the same sector to further build capacity across the many different smaller entities.

Small Food Bakery in Nottingham set up the Small Food Collective to provide supportive tools for the many local shopkeepers and food producers in their city. The Small Food Collective call to action for their first meeting was “There are many mechanisms (production and retail) that need to be re-examined, there will be many solutions, and perhaps all of them are useful. But underpinning everything, a better approach has to be one where power is devolved into the hands of more people, in stronger local networks. Our city needs more food producers and shopkeepers who are prepared to step outside the status quo and work in the interests of building a new cuisine with ingredients traceable back to good people and healthy soil. That’s why we need to mobilise a Small Food Collective.”

Farming the Future is an example of funders working in this way, they are specifically providing funding to support collaborations between different regenerative food and farming charities, businesses, influencers etc as well as building a general comms fund focused on collectively harvesting and sharing messages of a more regenerative food system far and wide, for the benefit of all involved. The power of these collective projects and messages are usually inaccessible to smaller fragmented groups, so Farming the Future is providing a new level of resilience for the many diverse smaller entities.

If the economy is a tool to support civilisation: What is our economy designed for? What do we want our economic system to support?

This feels like one of the most important questions of our day if we see the economy as the way we will continue to navigate life on earth and really the context for this whole exploration into Sisterhood Economics. In some ways this is the realm of the brilliant economic thinkers who are questioning and proposing viable visions for the future of our economy, such as Kate Raworth and Marianne Mazzucato (read more here). It is also a question we can all ask ourselves on a day-to-day basis through the lens of Sisterhood Economics, starting with the first feminine business principle, how have you recognised your body today in your work? Imagine — a new economics as the recognition that you have a body. Radical right?

In the next two blog posts first we explore some examples of Sisterhood Economics in action and then we re-imagine what the economy would look like if Sisterhood Economics was the norm.

Reimagining the economy with Sisterhood principles

Cat Drew

Jul 13 ·

This is the third of three blogs that Abby and I have written to record the collective thoughts of The Point People about a new type of economy we see emerging, which we’re calling sisterhood economics, inspired by Jennifer Armbrust’s The Sisterhood. In the first blog, Abby talks about why we think this is important. In the second, we share the examples of what we think these businesses look like. And this piece reflects the thought activity we did to reimagine what the economy would look like if sisterhood values were the norm.

Inspired by Dan Lockton’s New Metaphors, we spent some time first exploring the current metaphors that frame how we see (in the West) the economy: the words and phrases we use, the rituals, the values. Sometimes these are so ingrained in our language, we are not conscious of them. Lakoff and Johnson’s seminal Metaphors we Live By (1980) revealed how embedded these are in everyday language and govern how we see the world (and therefore our capacity to reimagine it). For example the metaphor ‘argument is war’ positions an argument as a tense act between two opponents (“his criticisms were on target”, “he shot down my argument”), rather than a joint dialogue exploring an issue.

Then we took one of the new Feminist Business principles, and did the same: unpacking it and understanding the words, patterns and structures associated with it. The final step was to take one of the old rituals or artefacts (e.g. the rich list, a pay slip, a performance review) and apply the new principle to it.

Here is where we got to…

Slide explaining our first exercise

Old metaphors…

Unpacking metaphors we currently use to expose how we frame our thinking

Upwards growth. Words like ‘build back better’ and ‘recovery’ suppose that the economy has weakened or crumbled and needs to grow. And the idea that we have to bring back what was before rather than something new. Some of the words and metaphors we use around ‘building’ that are ‘concrete’ and immovable, and others like ‘green shoots of recovery’ that have more organic connotations.

Two-way, hierarchical, binary power relationships. There are many words and phrases which denote exchange or transaction, but are two-way and with no sense of interdependence. ‘Profit and loss’, ‘winners and losers’, ‘queen bee versus worker bee’. These are binary camps you can’t fall between.

Within a performance review, someone is assessing someone else rather than it being a collective reflection. Employment means that someone is in the employ of someone else. The payslip on the one hand provides stability and legitimacy (and acts as a certificate). But it also is an arbitrary value someone else places on you (and bears no relationship to the actual value you have created that month), and places the receiver in a passive position of power (as opposed to issuing an invoice).

Dehumanised descriptions of resources (so that we can exploit them). ‘Human resources’ — or even the acronym ‘HR’, are actually living, breathing individuals with personalities, and the ‘environment’ which literally means surroundings, is also a living, breathing planet with an abundance of animals and plants living together with us.

Aggressive behaviours. The ‘rich list’ is the epitome of home economicus. It’s about ranking, striving, dominating and winning, and in a very one-dimensional way all about money. The idea of the list is a hierarchical rank with everyone better or worse than someone else. There are scarce resources at the top, so people need to compete. Words like ‘undercut’, ‘dog eat dog’, ‘sales pitch’, ‘be the best’, ‘rich list’.

Slide explaining our second exercise

New metaphors

Exploring new metaphors to help reframe what economy could be through different lenses

Reciprocity and flow. Which still allows exchange and market, but something that feels a fairer balance of power. We’re not just transacting with businesses in a commercial sense, but were able to integrate with business missions in other ways? Or not just transacting with nature but integrating with it.

Osmosis, porous, weave/woven, interdependence. We feel that our time is more engaged across different work — or purpose — boundaries (and not just paid work or purpose) rather than tied to a single 9–5 job.

Part of nature. Rather than us being simply connected to it, or it being an ‘externality’. Rather to talk about the planet as ‘the body’, and consider that how you treat your body will have an impact on the world. In Maori language ‘I am the land and the land is me’ is one metaphor by which they start and frame their conversations.

Balance and optimisation. We have to live within the limit of what we can regenerate. We don’t just want profit or loss, but something in between. Rather than a focus on maximisation, we should move to optimisation: just enough to satisfy needs rather than being a bit ‘grabby’.

New artefacts and rituals

Applying new framings to existing artefacts and rituals to make tangible what we mean and translate it into concepts people can understand

Payslip. Wouldn’t just be a certificate or proof of how much you’ve been paid in a transactional way, but could be a moment of giving thanks and acknowledging value. If work is around being in a relationship with other people to create some value, you are bonded to them through that creation, and it could be celebrated as a monthly moment of collective achievement.

Balanced budget. Delicate and skilled dance between the minimum resources a business needs for the wellbeing of the world, and what it gives back.

Paying a bill. Not just paying money in return for a commercial product/service/offer, but other ways that you could transact (for example giving your time, skills, connections, something from your garden etc).

The rich list. Rather than reading ‘rich’ as monetary, we could see it as the ample or bounteous stories that come through the act of doing (of providing something that gives people joy, or helps them achieve something) rather than the result of profit. And these could be surfaced through storytelling (where the listener also attributes the value they see), rather than a one-dimensional measure of value.

To end, Abby read an extract from Emergent Strategy by Adrienne Maree Brown

“If the goal was to increase the love rather than winning or dominating a constant opponent, I think we could imagine liberation from constant oppression. We would suddenly be seeing everything we do, everyone we meet, not through the tactical eyes of war, but eyes of love. We would see there is no such thing as a blank canvas, an empty land or a new idea, but everywhere there is complex, ancient, fertile ground full of potential. We would organise with the perspective that there is wisdom and experience and amazing story in the communities we love and instead of starting with new idea or organisation all the time, we would want to listen, support, collaborate and merge and grow through fusion not competition. We would understand that the strength of our movement is the strength of our relationships which could only be measured by their depths. Scaling up would mean going deeper, being more vulnerable, and being more empathetic.”

Signals of what a Sisterhood Economy looks like

Cat Drew

Jul 13 ·

This year, The Point People has been holding a loose enquiry into a new type of economics. Inspired by Jennifer Armbrust’s The Sisterhood, and their feminist business principles, we’ve been delving into what a regenerative, caring, generous business model might look like. Far away from the race to the top, the eyes on the prize (pound sign) and limitless growth. It was suggested at a collective gathering in January, and on the verge of Government decisions of how to support businesses to go forward after the immediate shock of COVID is subsiding, it feels more necessary than ever. So as well as weekly The Point People sense-making and support calls during COVID, we’ve been exploring how energy within businesses can be channeled into something that can nurture (rather than extract from) ourselves and the planet. In this first blog, Abby sets out why they matter to her personally, and why she felt like The Point People should hold this conversation.

Part of systemic design (another enquiry we’re holding with Design Council), is about seeking out signals of the future now, and designing ways of bringing them together into a bigger whole (or a ‘glowing constellation’ as Cassie Robinson calls it), and showing this to the world so others can be inspired and join. So in that spirit, our first task (after checking with which of the feminist business principles resonated with us personally) was to share an example of a business that displayed them — translating abstract principles into tangible examples. The following is a list of them, with some tensions we see described at the bottom. As this is still an early exploration we broadened our thinking beyond just the business world, to draw from different initiatives working in this way — what is interesting about all of them is that care seems to be at their core. Then the next blog shows how we have unpacked metaphors around the current economic system, reimagined them, and translated them back into what new artefacts, rituals and systems could be…

The values:

Values of the Feminine Economy created by sister.is

Our examples

Red Hen Collective

In the wine world, the wine producers produce the wine and harbour most of the risk but don’t get paid for 18 months which is extremely challenging for cash-flow. So Red Hen set out to pay the vineyards first, or on exchange of goods, or even prior to exchange of good. This allows the producers to have more flexibility so they can invest in more regenerative, environmental practices. What the Red Hen Collective didn’t forsee is that this one change — paying the vineyard first — has meant they had to reconsider the whole business model because the whole wine distribution system is based on paying the vineyards last, that the vineyards must take on the risk. If the producers are to be paid first then that risk must be taken on by others, and no one is willing to take it all on. It must be distributed through the system or navigated through more direct relationships with the people who are going to drink the wine.

Small Food Bakery

Small Food Bakery sell bread built on a completely different value system of nourishing every-being involved in that bread’s life, including the soil — they have completely different definitions of success. They offer alternative forms of exchange inviting customers to ‘barter with us, food is currency’. They also work with all players in the food system to build strong relationships and networks that allow for a new level of efficiency and nimbleness, supporting farmers who are using more ecological farming practices not just by buying their wheat but also creating menus that reflect the many different crops they produce and sharing the stories with customers. You can hear Kimberly Bell of Small Food Bakery talk more about her approach to redefining business in this episode of Farmerama.

Mercato Metro

The principles on which its founded are all about circular economy, interdependence, but also care and empathy and ease. For example, there are lots of people in the local community that are entitled to free school meals, so the owner made it really easy and natural for them to get those meals from the market, meaning it is really serving people living nearby. They also have a strong apprenticeship and experimentation approach, building skills and providing a springboard for local businesses.

Code for COVID

A network of 1,000 coders who gave their time, knowledge and experise for COVID related challenges. It was generative and generous.

First Things First 2020

An updated version of the 1960 manifesto, this online commitment brought designers together and commit to a set of social design values. The power of the many gave the manifesto credibilty and reach, as they then went out into the many businesses and professions they were part of to spread these principles further. A flock initiative.

Earth Logic

Is a fashion centred research plan which aims to shift language and practice within fashion from growth logic to earth logic. Started by two professors, one from fashion and the other from design, it aims to bring together a series of researcch and experiements to transform the fashion industry.

Birdsong

An ethical fashion brand which has honesty as a core value. There is no photoshop. There is transparency about their incentives and their supply chain. In an industry where this is so competitive, they’re trying to be responsible and socially driven.

London Early Years Foundation

The London Early Years Foundation could be described as the Buurtzorg of the nursery sector. They invest in low income areas and cross subsidise from high income areas. They talk about purpose and how care is intrinsic to later success. An orgainsation that makes care valued.

Little Village

Founded by one of our fellow Point People (Sophia Parker), it has feminist principles. It is generous in that it is about recycling good quality children’s clothes and toys to those who are struggling to afford them, and generative in that it also builds community by bringing people together across social and economic divides in a way that builds empathy. And through its volunteering programme it creates opportunities for people, including parents Little Village has supported, to grow new skills and networks. For Little Village, success is not measured by how far or fast it can scale the model, but instead in the long term by an end to child poverty, and in the more immediate term, by a shift in attitudes and beliefs about the causes of poverty.

As we discussed these examples, a number of questions and potential tensions came to us:

Feminine economy and language. We discussed that the words on the Feminine Economy diagram above felt potentially too tame but maybe words like fierce and warrior aren’t right either. So, what are new words for this economy? We explore some of these in our next post.

Resistance to growth. Feminist economy businesses don’t need to scale. For example, Little Village sees an ambition to scale as problematic: would it reinforce and prop up a system that has failed children for many years, by providing a sticking plaster over the ever-widening chasm of inequality? By framing its work as an intervention to shift the system, it keeps the focus on its work of building community, growing empathy and shifting unhelpful stereotypes. However this approach doesn’t always reflect the mindsets of investment models that equate success predominantly with scale and growth in more traditional terms.

Some of the B-Corps don’t fit. Overall the companies are socially minded, and can be really generative (for example hosting or sparking other organisations). But from what we know, some of the leadership styles don’t fit (often because of what is being asked of them by investors — see below).

Values versus behaviour. We know the behaviours of many women that we personally know in business innovation circles speak to all these qualities, but the language of start ups are about the standard structure of competition: growth, touching millions of people and scale. This is clearly a tension.

The Navigator —Responses to a disrupted world

Hannah Smith

May 4th, 2020

Part 3: Perception

This series — The Navigator — is reconciling how The Point People are navigating this moment of collective grief and uncertainty, the transition from a pre-Covid time to an uncertain future. It is an imperfect record of our experiences and reflections over this period.

Afew weeks further into it all, and our virtual gatherings continue. In various constellations, but always with a similar orientation towards care and exploration. We speak of phases, momentum, beginning to think forwards to a time when we might re-emerge — blinking — into the light again.

For some of us it’s brought to mind the Kübler-Ross Change Curve — how it feels to be at the bottom of the rising limb, beginning an uncertain climb. Our individual curves take different forms — perhaps one day we’ll draw them — when we can see all this with a little more perspective.

Perspective and perception — themes that seem to come up a lot in our conversations. A couple of weeks ago, one of us experienced a long, fast drive for the first time in a while — the clouds and the landscape zipping by. After so much containment it was discombobulating this sense of speed and space.

It makes us wonder if our sensory landscapes might be changing with the shrinkage of our day-to-day, not to mention all the screen time. Screens allow for seeing and hearing, but our other means of sense-making are truncated. How does this affect how we then experience the ‘real’ world? Away from the screens, is there a little more awe? A little more ecstasy? A little more awareness of the intense delights of full sensory engagement?

Question: What are you perceiving anew?

Perhaps this is what also lies behind our changing relationship with place. We barely even noticed the layers of place in our lives before. We were comfortably multiple— it was home and work and cafes and trains and planes and parks and cultural venues and so much more. Newly confined to just one place, we began by grieving those we’d left behind — but more and more we are finding ways to enjoy and celebrate where we find ourselves.

We are better acquainted with how the sun tracks across a kitchen table as the hours go by. The dimensions of our homes are expanding as we discover new ways to arrange ourselves; unique corners for work, rest and play. When the end of a street becomes a place to go to celebrate a birthday, we know we are discovering the richness of place like never before.

For now, all these personal micro-worlds are separate — perhaps we’ll never truly know another’s. But a macro-experience is being shared like never before. Whoever we speak to, wherever they are — we are all facing new realms of stretch and challenge.

It helps us appreciate how far care travels. We may not be sharing touch or presence, but it seems we’re pro-actively caring for each other more than ever. We newly understand that to care is to act. It is something that we do. And we are all doing so much care. The calls, the messages, the bouquets, the birthday surprises. Innumerable nuggets of thoughtfulness. If our To Do lists were relabelled To Care lists, how much prouder we would be of all we are achieving just now?

Question: What does it feel like to prioritise care over achievement?

The Kindness Rocks Project, Wellington. Photo credit: Hannah Smith

Asthe days of this time pass, increasingly we find ourselves asking — where to from here? How will we all emerge into the afterwards? There is anguish, anger and fear around deepening social inequalities — Sophia’s perspective from the frontline is a sobering one. Yet at the same time, we are each feeling chinks of optimism around what these vast new volumes of ‘lived experience’ might be doing for our capacities for empathy and imagination:

“We won’t forget that it’s possible for the supermarket shelves to suddenly be empty — this is a defining moment for years to come. Things won’t just go back to how they were before this, the question is what will this ‘new normal’ look like? What do we even want it to look like?” — Abby

There is something intoxicating about this challenging time being a harbinger of a new era. In the words of Rebecca Solnit “…disaster is a lot like a revolution when it comes to disruption and improvisation, to new roles and an unnerving or exhilarating sense that now anything is possible”. An emboldening perspective for sure but practically speaking, it’s still hard to think forward. To frame our thinking we lean towards a few broad brushstrokes of scenario planning — i) a return to ‘normal’ ii) a state of permanent emergency or iii) a society built on a new social contract. It feels clunky and incomplete, but it’s what we have for now.

Question: What tactics can we use for thinking about ‘afterwards’?

And so we keep going. We keep on paddling and we take the days as they come. He waka eke noa — we’re all in this (canoe) together.

‘Til next time,

The Point People x

Compiled by Hannah Smith. With a special shout out to Victoria Stoyanova and her new venture, The Institute of Belonging.

Contributors: Sneh Jani-Patel, Abby Rose, Cathy Runciman, Nish Dewan, Beatrice Pembroke, Sophia Parker, Ella Saltmarshe, Anna Mouser, Eleanor Ford, Jennie McShannon, Sarah Douglas, Jennie Winhall, Cat Drew, Victoria Stoyanova, Kyra Maya Phillips & Joana Casaca Lemos.

The Navigator —Responses to a disrupted world

Hannah Smith

Apr 20th, 2020

Part 2: Oscillation

This series — The Navigator — is reconciling how The Point People are navigating this moment of collective grief and uncertainty, the transition from a pre-Covid time to a brave new world. It is an imperfect record of our experiences and reflections over this period. We are all grappling, recalibrating, coming to terms with something new and discombobulating. There is so much to navigate — practicalities, possibilities, hopes, thoughts and fears. We hold no answers, but we travel these unknown seas together.

Photo credit: Sam Baumber

Afew weeks on, further into this new time. Our Point People calls remain a lodestar for many of us and they are ever warmer. For most of us the call takes place in the evening, following the new normal of Thursday night cheers for the NHS, for those who are at the coal face of it all. For one of us, it is morning. Bleary eyed as the day begins, there is comfort in sharing the evening of the day before. We are all separated these days, what’s a few thousand miles between friends?

Our conversations swerve and curve. Rolling between personal, cerebral, practical, emotional. From dancing like plants, to the challenges of post-pandemic urban planning. The oscillation suits us, seems to suit the mood of this time as we each find ourselves rocking between so much of everything. In fact it seems this oscillation is one of the few constants we are finding in this strange new normal.

Grappling, juggling, see-sawing, lurching — words we use often as we navigate these new seas. Noticing this I wonder — are we in fact finding ways to be more comfortably plural with thoughts and feelings of ‘both at once’? We are grieving AND we are optimistic. It happened so fast AND the days seem so slow. We are swept up in concerns for society and humanity AND dealing with deeply personal challenges. We are being forced to face our edges, on both sides, at once. There is a mass recalibration going on. We are working out how to be and do in an entirely new context. No wonder it feels hard.

There is a sense of everything being in sharper relief. This ‘great pause’ is endowing us with heightened sensitivities. Perhaps it is the confinement, the concentration. Typically modern humans, many of us have lives usually spread across multiple places, multiple roles. We are jugglers and plate spinners — seeking and trying and racing all the time. And now we must stop for a while. It’s making us question our places, our roles, our priorities. We are holding the sadness of all we can’t have, whilst encountering untold beauty in this strange new confinement.

Kyra describes her experience below:

Medieval monks, I heard recently, believed that the world was a book, and that moments of transcendence — what I imagine Virginia Woolf would have called “moments of being” — are those rare, wholly ecstatic, and sublime flashes of light that allow us to read a few lines before it all goes dark once again.

It is often said now that the world — our book, if we continue with this monastic train of thought — has indeed gone dark (“I hope you are well during these dark and uncertain times,” reads one e-mail; “The lights have come off,” offers a headline). It is as if humanity is experiencing a prolonged total eclipse — “the sun,” as Annie Dillard wrote in her stunning 1982 account of an eclipse, “was going, and the world was wrong.”

Photo by Jongsun Lee on Unsplash

The world being wrong is a sentiment I am, at the best of times, completely overwhelmed by. The irresolvable tension between the sublime and the everyday gnaws away at my soul, often leading to tortured admonishments that tell me how little I know of how to live a good life, or how impossible it is to derive meaning from daily existence. These extraordinary moments, when you can read those few, sacred lines, when the world comes alive and you can feel the life quivering inside it, are — so much of the time — inaccessible to me. The words of Lily Briscoe, from Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, often circle around in my mind:

“To want and not to have, sent all up her body a hardness, a hollowness, a strain. And then to want and not to have — to want and want — how that wrung the heart, and wrung it again and again!”

I am aware of how easy, or cliched, it is to say that I will now hold dear all that this radical suspension of normal life has exposed as meaningful, but that before was veiled by the numbing effects of habit. But this, precisely, is what I am now holding in my heart: some of the most melancholy moments of this tragic time happen when, like in a vivid dream, what has been lost appears (it is right there!) and yet you cannot reach for it. Our friends are in front of us, two metres away, perhaps, while they drop off a batch of homemade pasta, or a loaf of freshly baked bread, or, even, a glorious pile of books, and yet we are unable to touch them.

The impossibility of fulfilling our deeply held longing for those tiny, ordinary, daily intimacies — even, perhaps especially, with strangers — is one of the many losses that illuminates the inseparability of dailiness from the ecstatic. They are not, as I was utterly convinced they were, opposing forces. There is always, it feels right now, a quality of the sublime — that longed for “moment of being,” when the world is a book you can read — in the everyday.

Yes, the world is a different, and in so many desperately tragic ways, a darker place than it was only a couple of months ago. But as with everything, there is a crack — and through it, the light gets in, enough of it, even, so that we can read what this moment might be trying to tell us.

Photo credit: Sam Baumber

The light is getting in right now. The air is clearer; we can see differently. It may be tricky to see far — mostly it feels like there’s just yesterday, today and tomorrow. But where we can, we soak up these moments of quivering, radiant life.

To end, some beautiful words from John O’Donohue, read by Fergal Keane; they really are worth a listen.

Until next time, take good care.

The Point People x

Compiled by Hannah Smith, with writing by Kyra Maya Phillips. For more from Kyra, subscribe to Marginalia, a beautiful newsletter made for The Point People.

Contributors: Sneh Jani-Patel, Abby Rose, Cathy Runciman, Nish Dewan, Beatrice Pembroke, Sophia Parker, Ella Saltmarshe, Anna Mouser, Eleanor Ford, Jennie McShannon, Sarah Douglas, Jennie Winhall, Cat Drew, Victoria Stoyanova, Kyra Maya Phillips & Joana Casaca Lemos.

The Navigator —Responses to a disrupted world

Hannah Smith
April 9th 2020

These days are challenging in so many ways. We are coming to terms with a new normal. This is not what we thought 2020 would bring and yet here we find ourselves. As The Point People we feel drawn to respond.

The Point People are a close collective of friends and collaborators, who have long found each others’ hearts and minds a tonic. We share an interest in systems thinking, and bring perspectives from diverse professional and personal lives. In these strange days we have found turning to each other nourishing and helpful — and want to share our noticings, learnings and reflections.

This series — The Navigator — will reconcile how we are navigating this moment of collective grief and uncertainty, the transition from a pre-Covid world to a more physically distanced existence and into an unknown future. It will be a record of The Point People’s experiences and reflections over this period. We will share authorship, publish irregularly and allow the content to evolve as our experience does.

We are all grappling, recalibrating, coming to terms with something new and discombobulating. There is so much to navigate — practicalities, possibilities, hopes, thoughts and fears. We hold no answers, but we travel these unknown seas together.

Part 1: Beginning

As the strange new world began to unfold, The Point People network was buzzing with thoughts and noticings. Instinctively it seems, we were drawn to the hopeful things — to sharing and collating what we were hearing and seeing; examples of ways that resources, energy and behaviours were transforming in this unfamiliar time. We were also drawn to connecting more frequently.

In a shared document we asked each other:

• What’s an insight you’ve found helpful/something you have observed recently that is helping you navigate everything?

• What small acts of kindness/ ingenious workarounds have you seen that you’d like to share/amplify?

• What are the new behaviours/dynamics that you’re seeing?

• What’s supporting you to be well?

• What questions are you asking? (about the crisis or society?)

From our conversations so far, and some of the responses to the questions above, here are some initial reflections and a few themes we’ve noticed emerging. We’ll share more as we go.

Time

Many of us have spoken and shared a new awareness of, a new relationship with time — how ‘time feels weird’ just now. We’ve observed how things seem to be taking twice as long, even though many of the ways we usually spend our time are no longer possible. On our calls we’ve discussed the challenge of ‘unended, unboundaried time’ and shared anxiety about failing to maintain our usual levels of production, contribution and commitment. We share a sense of navigating a new time continuum — seeking to be more deliberate in trying to stay present, and endeavouring to avoid projecting into the future.

Question: What are we learning from this new sense of time?

Fixed Versus Flux

The design thinkers amongst us have been particularly struck by the human ability to innovate, and adapt to unexpected constraints. Whether individuals working remotely, businesses shifting their organisational production to what is needed most or neighbours finding ways to become more connected. It’s all happened so quickly, yet people have been able to respond fully and well. Rapid pivots in business models and innovative collaborations have emerged — like catering companies becoming home delivery services, or fashion labels moving to production of masks and gowns.

We see the importance of keeping resource flowing in a system, as areas of slack and of need rapidly evolve — empty hotels housing key workers, breweries repurposing their production processes to make antibacterial hand gel, people contributing time to mutual aid societies. Much of this is occurring organically through the insight and kindness of individuals reacting to what’s happening. Even in our own system, we see an evolution — we are moving away from fixed modes of interaction and rigid expectations to a more malleable approach — leaning into where capacity exists, and understanding that everything is shifting, all the time, for all of us.

Question: How can we better attune to flows of resource through a system? How can we work with these flows to better support those who are struggling?

Care and Generosity

More generally, we see how COVID-19 is forcing many of us to see more systemically — focusing on relationships and interdependence. Several of us feel we’ve never communicated so much — more regular connection with family and friends and so much purposeful reconnection and kindness. Every day there are new initiatives that seek simply to provide sustenance, care, love — with the expectation of nothing in return. From teddy bears in windows to enliven family walks, to online art, language, dance classes, museum tours — there is a sense of generosity and mutuality. We are offering more to our fellow humans, finding ourselves friendlier, less hurried in our everyday interactions — it feels like we’re being softer somehow.

The Point People are also reminding each other to go gently — to take time to ease into this entirely new, extremely challenging period of our lives. If we don’t write, produce, learn, create, do all the time, it’s OK. If we feel overwhelmed or bewildered sometimes, it’s OK. We are reminding each other that we don’t need to have all the answers — compassion, kindness and ‘threads of love here and there’ might just be enough for a while.

Question: What are we learning about care?

On that note, more soon. Expect some thoughts on what we’re learning about place, complexity and emergence. ’Til then, stay safe.

The Point People x

Photo credit: Hannah Smith

Chapter compiled by Hannah Smith.

Contributors: Sneh Jani-Patel, Abby Rose, Cathy Runciman, Nish Dewan, Beatrice Pembroke, Sophia Parker, Ella Saltmarshe, Anna Mouser, Eleanor Ford, Jennie McShannon, Sarah Douglas, Jennie Winhall, Cat Drew, Victoria Stoyanova, Kyra Maya Phillips & Joana Casaca Lemos.

Systemic design: examples of evolving and current practice

Cat Drew

Dec 24, 2019

At the beginning of December, The Point People together with the Design Council hosted an event on systemic design. We had 120 people sign up in less than 24 hours and a large waitlist. There is interest and intrigue. What is systemic design and why is it important?

This is a long read and like the event, full of rich information which we try and distil down at points throughout.

• I start with an intro to why we convened the event and why design is good at working in systems.

• Jennie Winhall talks about designing for a new system: inversing patterns, developing new norms and connecting a community of change, giving employment as an example

• Cassie Robinson writes about transitioning to a new system: building the field, creating new narratives and creating clusters of what a new field could look like, from her work with the Catalyst (which supports the civic sector adapt to a new world)

• Alistair Parvin, Ilishio Lovejoy and Nick Stanhope provide three talks to highlight elements of systemic design: finding the root of the problem, providing information as feedback and knowing your role, from their experiences in planning, fashion and children’s services

Introduction and why we convened the event.

There are a few definitions and writings around about systemic design, design for systems, systems transformation, transition design etc. But if we start with what we’re trying to address… The issues that we are facing at the moment are complex, messy and interconnected. We need to dig deep to find the root causes, which can be things that are said, and unsaid — like unequal power or the way we think about an issue. There is no one fix. Things are interconnected, so we do one thing over here and it pops up over there. And sometimes we need to design a new system entirely rather than just patching up or improving the current one.

We believe that design can hold some of the answers here. And people in the systems change world have increasingly been using design methods in order to bring about desired change.

But this is an emerging practice. It might be simply the intersection between design and systems theory. But it might be something a bit different. So we are conducting a loose enquiry into how this has and is evolving — and doing this by listening to designers who have been working systemically. And because we know people are interested in working in this way, we are sharing this as we go. We can’t entirely define it right now, but we can share some elements. And we want to do this so that designers can explain to their colleagues/clients what it is, start working in this way, and therefore develop their own practices to add into the mix, influenced by other designers or other professions too.

We started off by saying that designers work in systems already. Systems are made up of different elements that are connected together. A system can be biological (forest), social (a neighbourhood), organisational (the health system) or technological (air traffic control or a computer system).

Some aspects of design means that it lends itself well to working with complex systems:

• Synthesis — whether it is designing a house, an engine or a public service, design is a task of discovering how elements can come together into a coherent whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.

• Reflexivity — designers discover how to move forward with a design problem by making a move (drawing something, modelling something, taking a new action), seeing how that move then changes the situation and using that new understanding of both problem and opportunity to make the next move. It is reflection in action: what Donald Schön calls ‘back-talk’ between the situation and the designer.

• Creation — designing is also about the act of bringing something new into being: sensing the potential and then realising it. This matters to system innovation because it is one way in which we understand not just how things are but how things could be. And because design is visual, we can also paint a picture of what is possible, so that others can see its potential too.

Designing for a new system: inversing patterns, developing new norms and connecting a community of change

Jennie Winhall spoke about how to design for a new system (rather than making improvements within the current system). She says that when it comes to social systems, a new system forms through a change in one or more of four things: purpose, power, relationships and resources.

She gave examples of three different approaches to changing systems:

Inversing the pattern: At Participle, they wanted to create a 21st century welfare system. In order to do this, they looked at common patterns of activity across public services. Most deliver a service, rather than supporting people to help themselves. They work with individuals rather than with family units. They are limited to public finance rather than the resources inherent in relationships and communities. This adds up to a welfare system that is burdened by demand, rather than strengthened by participation. All of these services display the same dysfunctional patterns because they are based on the same underlying system logic: the same system ‘principles’ underpin each service. By flipping these principles around, Participle was able to design new employment, ageing and health services across the country that demonstrated a very different welfare system — in which people create their own solutions.

Changing dominant norms: At the Rockwool Foundation, they created Nextwork, a new employment system which connects young people and companies together in networks that build young people’s working identity. It takes a very different approach to the current job centre system. One of the challenges of introducing a new approach into the very dominant norms of an existing operating system is that the system has what Rowan Conway calls a kind of immune response: it rejects the new activity. To be successful the staff have to be highly skilled in navigating between the old and the new. That meant the design team scaling up the system nationally had to develop new ‘transitional’ tools. First they created a service blueprint showing staff how the new service works and trained them on delivering it. But it was a disaster — people couldn’t understand the purpose behind their new actions. So they threw away the blueprint. Instead they worked with theatre techniques to train staff in improvisation based on three core system principles. This has been much more successful: staff understand the purpose of acting in a new way, operate from a different set of core beliefs and are confident in developing further activities based on those three principles. This principle-based approach is a way to change the mindsets, behaviours and norms of dominant systems.

Connecting together a new ecosystem of innovation: ALT/Now, with the RSA and Mastercard’s Centre for Inclusive Growth have designed a programme to develop a new safety-net for 21st century work. Our current system of unemployment benefits, employer-delivered training, pension contributions and unions doesn’t work in a future increasingly made up of people in flexible, independent work, moving from employer to employer, or gig to gig. So we need to redraw this landscape. The team brought together a cohort of entrepreneurs to create a new system of innovations to support people working in today’s gig economy. One innovation alone is not going to change the whole system, you need lots of interventions — new ways of brokering jobs, smoothing income, new insurance models, new types of unions and new models for ongoing learning. These discrete innovations can have much greater power if they see themselves as part of the new ecosystem: they can amplify each others’ efforts and define a new market that benefits them all. The success of each venture depends on the success of the emerging system. Several ventures have already collaborated to form a safety-net for workers in the care sector. That’s the power of process of collective creation — and bringing them together into a community of change.

Transitioning to a new system: building the field, creating new narratives and creating clusters of what a new field could look like

Cassie Robinson spoke about her experience of designing the The Catalyst — which was originally set up as a way of building the digital capabilities for 40,000 charities and civil society organisation, but is now working to support the sector as a whole to continually adapt, become more accountable to communities and work together better for those it serves. It is operating at three different levels simultaneously drawing on the Berkana Two Loop Model and is funded by a mixture of Government and philanthropic funding.

Illustration by Cassie Robinson, model from the Berkana Institute.

Field-building

The first area of work that the Catalyst is undertaking is field-building and demonstrating early value in the overall concept. The activities happening here are responding to the sector’s immediate needs and through ensuring some of Catalyst’s initial activity happens in the present frame, they’re able to build goodwill and legitimacy. The work includes things like Open Backlog, a mechanism to reduce duplication of effort across the sector and encourage reuse, and the development of patterns and standards that enable and fast track more common approaches and shared infrastructure going forward. This part of Catalyts’s work is being done with a range of partners, who are funded through Catalyst. There are currently 30 different projects underway, all using Catalyst assets to visibly mark themselves as being part of the Catalyst transition work.

Visuals to show different elements of the Catalyst work

Networks and narratives

The second area of work that Catalyst is doing is a range of activities linked to networks and narratives. Another part of building goodwill and legitimacy is to shine a light on other people and organisations that are doing work that aligns with Catalyst’s mission. Deepening the network, connecting more of the system to itself and bringing coherence to it helps the ecology of people and organisations feel part of something that’s bigger than any of them individually. This is being done through commissioning content from the wider network and setting up a Catalyst “News Room” which Catalyst projects also use to create and share content. Alongside this, Catalyst projects are published on Ochre, a bespoke platform that shows the status of all the work that’s happening across Catalyst’s 30 (and growing) projects — an important part of transition work is to reflect the system back to itself, sharing progress, doing collective sensemaking and demonstrating momentum. This view of the system (held by someone in a ‘field-building’ role) means that different dynamics are revealed, and gaps and opportunities are made visible. It also requires an ongoing orchestration of connecting micro narratives (of the projects) with the macro narrative (of the whole of Catalyst’s ambition and mission).

The other aspect of this work is what Cassie calls “systems readiness” — using the sensemaking and intelligence being gathered across all of the Catalyst’s projects to understand what conditions need creating for the new system to emerge — a renewed civil society. In Catalyst’s case this has initially meant understanding what relationship dynamics need changing, what policies, regulation and decision making mechanisms are no longer fit for purpose, and the different ways that resources and value need to flow.

Redrawing the boundaries so a new system can emerge

If the field-building work was happening in isolation, and the narrative and network function was also only focussed on mapping and making visible the present, then Catalyst would simply be optimising the existing system (civil society). In this third area of work Catalyst is using a model called Clusters, which focus on the potential and creation of the future rather than the problems of what needs fixing in the present. Each Cluster (there are initially 8 across the UK) has been formed with the intent to explore the possibility space, making strong demonstrations and designing organisations to be in new relationships with each other, for example bringing together civil society organisations who would not normally work together, but who are trying to deliver similar outcomes in a particular place, or around a similar function (e.g. helplines) or to reimagine a particular service (e.g. childrens care). Here the narrative work shows how by drawing new boundaries around collections of organisations reframes the purpose of the system.

Alistair Parvin, Ilishio Lovejoy and Nick Stanhope at the panel discussion

Three talks to highlight elements of systemic design: finding the root of the problem, providing information as feedback and knowing your role

Alastair Parvin’s leads an organisation called Open Systems Lab. He spoke about their mission to change the planning system. He argued that all systems have an operating model. They can be quite clear, (like postcodes or grid references), but sometimes more opaque (like time or our historical understanding of land rights). But you can’t change a system unless you find it, and disrupt it. He likens it to ‘following the white rabbit down the hole’. He showed his maps of the system, starting at the relationship between rising house prices and the undersupply of homes, and then expanding out to increasing debt or lack of investment in construction innovation. So far, so normal (the top left image below). But then he flipped the map on its axis and looked at how lots of these causes and effects were all based on similar social values, knowledge models and methods of production. Such as manual paper based design methods, the way we think about money or — in red in the bottom left image below — freehold land ownership. You can then see how this underlying issue connects to so many elements of the system. So if you change that…you impact on many of the causes and effects.

Alistair Parvin’s system maps showing wide causes and effects, and the deep root cause that links them all

Ilishio Lovejoy is a policy manager for Fashion Revolution. In the fashion industry, one could argue that design is part of the problem — designers are designing clothes for a fast-fashion, consumer market which has a harmful impact on workers’ wellbeing in developing countries and environmental sustainability. Fashion Revolution was set up to challenge that. One of their main campaigns is the Transparency Index, providing more information to consumers about which retailers are more ethical, as well as campaigns where clothes have large tags to show the provenance of their manufacture. They have designed a number of different initiatives, using different levers for change, and inspire or work with others as part of a movement, including Spindye (which removes the environmentally damaging dying process) or Rent the Runway (shifting behaviours away from owning and towards renting clothes).

Fashion Revolution’s I Made Your Clothes campaign

Nick Stanhope is the Chief Executive of Shift, which is a service and product innovation charity working a lot around children’s services. He talked about the need for everyone to find their own role. He described a common situation where many charities, and design agencies who support charities, are in effect competing with each other for funding to provide services that help support their own mission. Which means that the incentive is for everyone to ‘talk up’ their own work as the most important (and trying to get more of it), rather than seeing their work as a piece of a larger whole that needs to exist alongside other initiatives, which will also require funding. Working in this way — as an innovation ecosystem or as a set of field catalysts mentioned by Jennie and Cassie earlier — also requires building relationships and making connections between organisations. This ‘invisible’ connective tissue needs designing. And a change of mindset, so that we don’t individually think we can ‘move a system’, but that we are ‘in service of a system’. He called for us to all be clear about our ‘role’ in the system, to be clear about the contribution we make, but how we have to work alongside others.

There are so many types of practice and elements to what they are doing, and there are different ways and words for describing what they are doing. But if we had to summarise the rich tips and discussions, we would say — that in order to design for today’s big challenges, designers need to:

• Design deeply — Understand the wider context in which a person or idea sits, tackling the root cause of an issue — which might be things that are said or not said, patterns of behaviour or mindsets that frame the way we see opportunities.

• Design hopefully — Imagine entirely new systems, and creating a clear narrative or vision that allows lots of people to design things that move us towards it.

• Design disruptively — Creating something (and it can be small) that changes a behaviour, an interaction or a relationship — for example a new norm or a piece of information — and that can have a wider ripple effect.

• Design collaboratively — Bring together a portfolio of innovations at different places across the system, and connecting to others striving for the same goal, working intentionally as an ecosystem rather than alone, with each knowing how to play their right role.

We hope the event inspired designers to consider how they can shift their practice to design more systemically — deeply, collaboratively, hopefully and disruptively. And to experiment with other methods (reaching out to other professions) and add to these practices. Please get in touch to share your work with us as we continue our enquiry.

The role of design in complex social and environmental challenges

Cassie Robinson.

Oct 11, 2019

Back in 2017 the Point People (Jennie & I) met with the Design Council to talk about co-hosting some events that linked together systems change practice with design practice. Two years later, and with the arrival of their new Chief Design Officer, Cat Drew (and fellow point person), they’re happening.

The purpose of these events is to raise the profile and understanding of what design can bring to the complex and systemic nature of society’s biggest challenges. These challenges — the climate crisis, the power of big tech, ageing populations, in-work poverty, and the polarisation of society — are not ones that anyone can tackle alone, and not ones that all the current answers aligned together would successfully address. We need to design for whole new approaches, for transitions from old frames into new, and to take a more systemic approach.

The community of people working more systemically has grown over the last decade, often drawing on design practice as part of this work. And there are more designers looking to bring a systemic approach to their design practice. We’re a group of designers who were early to bring a more systemic approach to our work, recognising the limits of service design back in 2010 when we set up the Point People, and we’re now keen to do several things -

1. Further explore and articulate the particular role design can play in transitions and systems change work, revisiting, revising and evolving some of the tools and practices we’ve created over the last decade.

2. Support more designers to adopt and evolve the practices, and show designers the unique role they can play in addressing complex social challenges.

3. And make the case to commissioners and funders to adopt systemic, transitional and design-led approaches.

This first workshop will focus on the particular role design can play, and we aim to leave the session with a set of principles or standards that describe this.

We’ll also be running workshops and events for designers new to working in this field, funders, and commissioners.

If you’re a designer, and want to get involved, please get in touch.

Collective Points

June’s Sensemaking: Regenerative Thinking

Sophia Parker

Jul 5, 2019 ·

“The city of Leonia refashions itself every day: every morning the people wake between fresh sheets, wash with just-unwrapped cakes of soap, wear brand-new clothing, take from the latest model refrigerator still unopened tins, listening to the last-minute jingles from the most up-to-date radio. On the sidewalks, encased in spotless plastic bags, the remains of yesterday’s Leonia await the garbage truck. Not only squeezed tubes of toothpaste, blown-out light bulbs, newspapers, containers, wrappings, but also boilers, encyclopedias, pianos, porcelain dinner services.

It is not so much by the things that each day are manufactured, sold, bought, that you can measure Leonia’s opulence, but rather by the things that each day are thrown out to make room for the new.”

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

Like Leonia, we are living in a world built on ‘degenerative design principles’ — where we take the earth’s natural resources, turn them into stuff we use, sometimes just once, and then throw away when we’re bored or have moved on to the next thing we want. We’re caught up in a consumerist mindset where we are defined by our shopping basket, our taste in home décor, or our ability to keep up with the latest trends in fashion. A satisfied consumer is a fearful spectre, posing the threat of not buying anything, and therefore undermining the goal of continuous growth that was normalised in the last half of the 20th century.

In a world where ‘more’ is synonymous with ‘better’, cutting back on consumption and living in line with the planet’s resources can only really be understood as ‘lack’; or ‘going without’. It creates a sense of paralysis as each of us try to calculate what we might be willing to give up versus what we feel we’re still owed. I was talking to someone the other day who argued that it was fine for them to fly because they’ve cut out meat and dairy this year. What’s difficult though, is that the underlying mindset — that consumption is still the most desirable way of life — hasn’t changed.

Regeneration, which was the theme of our Point People gathering this month, offers the prospect of a different way of engaging with the world, with the potential to lift us out of the fear and paralysis so many of us are currently experiencing. We talked about ‘regenerative thinking’ as a mindset that has the potential to shape our individual choices and collective lives in radically new ways.

Kate Raworth has written about the seductive attraction of ‘growth’ as a metaphor for progress, that is deeply embedded in the Western psyche. To replace such a powerful frame requires us to find an equally compelling metaphor that has all the positive associations of growth, but that enables us to see the crucial importance of all the other elements of life and nature, beyond markets, that help us, and the planet, to thrive.

Regeneration and regenerative thinking could be just that frame. Regenerative thinking is built on a view that rather than humans being a virus on the planet, we have the capacity within us to regenerate the world. What feels important about ‘regeneration’ is that it has many of the positive characteristics of the ‘economic growth’ frame that has had so much power over the years. Both create a sense of forward momentum, of progress. And regeneration is fundamentally an imaginative concept, full of hope and the possibility of new life. It’s about joy, communion, connection and shared goals.

There were two themes in particular that we explored together.

Grounding our work

Here, our conversation landed on the question of what regeneration looks like in relation to our own practices at the Point People. Is consultancy inherently extractive? Can you be and act regeneratively without having some kind of more grounded connection to the land? What if we put our systems approaches into practice in order to advance our agenda? What would the Point People intentional community look like? We reflected on the power of the Bauhaus motto — ‘Hands On and Minds On’, based on the insight that we can’t think without doing, and that the two need to be deeply woven together for the richest and most powerful ideas. (incidentally I was reading the Peter Kalmus book noted below this week, where he talked about hands, minds and hearts — I think there is something very powerful in this).

My reflection after the meeting was that regeneration is fundamentally local at some level. Regenerative commerce would be local, embedded, and without long, complex supply chains that criss-crossed the globe and were shaped by global businesses motivated by a singular goal of extracting value for themselves. It would be about shared value, manifested in co-ops and other more distributed ownership structures, acting collectively in the interests of the community and the planet. Sounds like it might be time to dig out that copy of Small is Beautiful again…

Creating an non-performance space

We’ve always tried to create a space of honesty and authenticity at the Point People, but the group acknowledged that even when we’ve put that conscious work in, the monthly document we fill in has the unintended consequence of creating performance anxiety for a number of us. Am I busy enough? Am I having enough impact? Do I sound a bit boring, or like I’ve watched a few too many box sets rather than working on system change?

This pressure to perform feels like the opposite of regenerative thinking. In our consumer society, we have become commodities ourselves, constantly marketing ourselves in a quest to be seen, to extract value from others. Germaine Greer put this succinctly — ‘in this society, invisibility is tantamount to death.’ We need to perform our value at every opportunity online and offline, making ourselves desirable to our fellow consumers, and judging our success by how busy we are, and how many likes our posts receive. We all need to find more intimate spaces of non-performance, where the emphasis is on being as well as doing; on the collective purpose as well as the personal value. That’s what we’re continually trying to build through the way we convene as the Point People.

Themes of the month

Anyway, that was the meeting, and a chance for us to reflect on the huge amount of work we’ve done collectively on climate crisis this month, not only here in the UK, but also in Brussells, Barcelona and Klosters. What of the other themes from our work across the month?

Work, efficiency, wellbeing

Lots of us are working in different ways of building a new way of thinking about work and wellbeing; one that gets away from the notion of ‘total work’, of maximum efficiency, aggressive forms of scale, data use, market focus and production. My personal reflection is that most of us are pondering these questions at a societal level at the same time as trying to manage punishing workloads and therefore thinking about them at a personal level too. This touches on the wonderful conversation we had last month about care and self-care. In a regenerative frame, care of self, care of each other, and care for the planet will be much more significant, valued and interconnected.

Being courageous

I feel like June was a month of courage for the Point People. We’ve started new jobs, met forks in the road with exciting possibilities, secured new funders, and created new enterprises. As important as all this doing, in true Point People style, we’ve been reflecting on all that hard work, journalling, taking time out in nature, camping, walking and talking together about impact.

Organising ourselves

We’re experimenting with new ways of working together. There’s a clear sense of the need to change the funding models that support the social sector, including considering new models of community sponsorship and ownership. We’re asking questions about how to organise more effectively to allow for future-sensing and for radical innovation. We are experimenting with bringing together grassroots and system-level organisations in new ways.

Convening people

Collectively we ran and spoke at events that reached well over 1000 people, talking about climate crisis, innovation, gender, work, technology and mobilising communities. We stretched ourselves, and put our ideas out there. And let’s not forget the many birthday parties we seem to have held this month, for people aged between 3 and 50…

Some Culture

We are reading…

Radical Help, Hilary Cottam (which contains some lovely references to the one and only Point Person Jennie Winhall)

Daddy Issues, Katherine Angel

Being the Change, Peter Kalmus

All About Love, bell hooks

Just Mercy: a story of justice and redemption, Bryan Stevenson

Hedge: a safety net for the entrepreneurial age, Nicolas Colin

All Out War, Tim Shipman

The Overstory, Richard Powers

Stories We Live By — a free eco-linguistics course, fascinating stuff about how the words and images around us shape our abilities to care for people and planet

The Mindfulness Conspiracy — is meditation the enemy of activism?

An American Marriage, Tayari Jones

Becoming Animal, David Abram

We are watching….

Ayana Ayana Johnson on everything to do with oceans. Watch this for how she talks about the need for triage in conservation — we can’t save everything so what do we save?

Kate Dundas at the RSA student design awards who is the City of Melbourne Planner and speaks in a great way about the hardware and software of a city.

Thatcher: a very British revolution — mindblowing to watch on so many levels.

Years and Years — not perfect, but surprisingly thought and discussion provoking in terms of what might be coming our way sooner than we would hope.

Juliet Arnott of Rekindle, talking about resourcefulness and regenerative practices as essential tools for human and planetary wellbeing.

Collective Points

May’s Sensemaking: Let’s talk about care

Abby Rose

Jul 5, 2019

In May we met and focused on one theme: The space for care of ourselves and others. This is something that we intend to address in every monthly meeting but we also felt the need to dig deeper into this question of care.

Something that often comes up in meetings is how liberating it feels to acknowledge all the care-giving that we are doing in our lives in this somewhat professional setting. We are a mix of women at different points in our lives and different family/relationship contexts. Some of us are spending large amounts of time caring for parents and grandparents, others have multiple kids to look after, some of us are focused on caring for the planet, or those in challenging social situations and we all work on multiple different projects.

The Point People are inherently plural in the way we work, but we are very singular and united in the statement ‘we care’.

But somehow in most of our working life, caring for family and those in our community goes unseen, it’s a hidden service that keeps our communities functioning. We acknowledged that we often feel that this type of caring must not be brought to the workplace where the ‘real’ work — work that contributes to GDP — is done. It was very clear that shining a light on and celebrating, or even just acknowledging care, is incredibly important and something we don’t do enough!

Key themes

Caregiver — care-receiver dynamics

The Caregiver — care receiver relationship can be very difficult, for example: sometimes the receiver has all the power because they lay down the parameters for receiving the care. This leads to a very complicated dynamic because there is guilt, love and fear of loss that drives the relationship and in particular the care-giver.

A number of TPP also acknowledged that we find it hard to be a care receiver. In so many parts of our lives we are care-givers but being the care receiver feels incredibly vulnerable, and there is a perceived power dynamic that as a care receiver you are showing weakness.

• How can we build healthier relationships between care-givers and care-receivers?

• Can we build care relationships that are more mutualistic?

Ella talked about Relationships Making a Difference, a recent event she was part of at Camden Council organised by social workers. It was co-produced by citizens and professionals that have worked together. Ella talked about how moving it was to see the mutuality of these relationships explored, with social workers talking about the different ways the people they work with contribute to their lives. Ella recounted that on the wall of the event was a big sign saying ‘To Love is to Act’… read more in this post on relational activism from the organisers of the event.

In certain situations caring can also be a defence against our own vulnerability. We all know people who give so much but suffer themselves as a result. When you are caring for others it can be convenient that you don’t have to deal with your own stuff. How can we better navigate this relationship so it’s working better for both sides? Jenny and Sneh introduced the power of YES…AND to have a powerful conversation in this context: Yes I care and…I am using it as a way as not looking after myself.

Caring and being cared for is often done from a place of great responsibility or love, and it became clear that this can lead to very complicated dynamics building up.

• Is there an opportunity for a care contract to empower both the carer and care-receiver?

• How can we better support both caregivers and care receivers as a society?

Caring and not caring gracefully

You can’t care for everyone, so how can you ‘choose’ who to care for? This question feels deeply uncomfortable yet it is something we all consider on some level — for example many of us effectively choose every day not to care for homeless people on the street, and if we did choose to care for each person we passed that would become the main purpose of our lives. However, many of us still recognised that we can’t just walk by people in need, we do want to acknowledge them and care for them on some level — whether that is giving money, food or saying hello. We talked about the inner justification for why we chose not to care for them. Some people took a more reasoned approach, calculating where they could have the most impact using their skill set and then staying focused on that. Whilst others felt care is much more instinctive and unreasoned, an act of kindness navigated on a more ad-hoc basis.

We asked is there a hierarchy of care — are you at the top of that, is that what prioritising self-care is? And if we definitely can’t care for everyone, then is there a graceful way of letting people know you are not able to care for them right now?

Redefining Self-care

Self-care has oddly become something to add to the to-do list — something you often have to purchase and/or ‘do’. But maybe we need to redefine self-care, maybe it’s not all about the capitalist individualistic version of self-care as we have come to define it in the western world.

Hannah shared about the idea of the ecological self, this is moving away from the concept of the skin-bound self that we all know well, moving our sense of self to a wider scope including other humans and non-humans around us.

This can be a difficult concept initially, we are so conditioned to think of the ‘self’ as contained within our bodies. However, it’s something that many indigenous communities have always understood. At the recent Fixing the Future conference, organised by Cathy and her team, a 22-year old indigenous person called Elisa, from the Amazon closed the event with the words (translated)

“I am the Amazon — care for me like another being”.

She said it with great humility and conviction, this was not a bold statement, but an obvious statement, she is the Amazon. In this sense ‘self-care’ takes on a whole new meaning, as the self is one with all beings around, she truly is the river and the trees and the sky and the oceans.

• What would self-care look like if we understood ourselves in this wider sense?

• I am the Thames, I am Epping Forest, I am the cherry blossoms, I am Hyde Park — what does self-care now look like?

This kind of re-framing and understanding the self in the widest sense can be very powerful. Cassie pointed to some work that shows evidence that community-care can often be a better starting point for self-care. When people act to care for a community, the individuals actually were better off than when care was directed on an individual basis.

In a way this is also another way of defining the caregiver care-receiver relationship, in that you are one. However, a key difference is that in this framing it is nonsensical to care for others at the expense of your body and life because by doing that you are harming the very self you are caring for.

I left the session feeling grateful to have focused on this question of care. It’s something I have certainly not had much opportunity to discuss with others, especially those in my professional life and it felt hugely empowering and important to share our thoughts on these topics in some depth. The session closed with one Point Person sharing that she had told her dad it was ok to go. She explained they had had a wonderful 18 months saying goodbye to him but he was in those very final stages of life for many weeks — It was as if he couldn’t let go, didn’t want to leave his family. She was completely burnt out, exhausted and unable to care for her children. They all were exhausted. It was as if he needed something to help him let go. He died a few days later peacefully.

She acknowledged she had never told that to anyone.

We need to talk about care. It’s clear that care is everywhere and is the glue of our society, so it only makes sense to speak about, celebrate and value care, we wouldn’t be here without it.

Collective Points

April’s Sensemaking Session

Sophia Parker

Jul 5, 2019 ·

In late April we had our Point People meeting not long after the hottest Easter break on record, then as now climate is still very much in all our minds. It’s a theme that really binds us as a group and was one of the many topics we talked about…

Redefining Radical Rebellion: The vibrancy with which Extinction Rebellion has harnessed people’s passion, concern and shifted a wide sense of disempowerment around environmental issues had given many of us a sense of excitement. Within Point People we were participants, observers and outsiders to this process yet it has affected how we all think about climate change and what might be possible. For some it had prompted questions on why other climate actions hadn’t managed to garner the same energy. We were left asking the question what does radical look like? And wondering where we have been too incremental in seeking change on climate issues or whether there is a role for both approaches? We found the positive and ‘heart centred’ approach a welcome and different approach to what radical looks like.

The Future : We are looking at models of work, what farming could be, what an ambitious social sector might look like, how we can ‘fix the future’, and what stands in the way of us achieving it. We also discussed how we can take a long term view on the future, how far could we look ahead? The future can be a bit of a nebulous term, it can feel hugely radical to look 5 years down the line in some sectors, but what does it mean to step 100 years forward? One of the Point People is working on a process which supports people to do just that through a facilitated immersive experience.

Endings and Beginning: With several members of the group finishing projects we talked about what it means for something to end well, what time needs to be given to bring something successfully to a close. It’s something we’ve discussed before and probably will again. Prototypes like the one for universal basic income in Finland can seem like great news, but what happens when they stop suddenly?

It’s a fine line: Between learning and doing, between what we love to do and where we have most impact, between designing a culture and allowing culture change, between wisdom and cynicism, between giving direction and allow people to self-define.

Language and naming: Many of us are working around supporting sectors, teams and organisations with culture shifts. We discussed what role language can play in this, when people have labels or categories attached to them does this lead them to defend their corner rather than being open to change. Can language stop us moving out of our own bubbles? And how does our own language of ‘system innovation’ hinder us, it can seem very theoretical and abstract. What can we do to ground it?

Celebration: Several of us this month were creating beautiful celebrations for those we love whether 2 years old or 70 years old. They take time and effort to create but actually can give us as much pride, if not more, than working achievements for which we are formally recognised. The theme of celebration also flowed further: one member of the group was returning to doing more art outside of work, the very act of creating the art felt celebratory. Not all acts of celebration are for a person, perhaps the insight is that where we invest in beauty and care, we create a powerful experience.

Survival: How can we recognise that illness and family difficulties can stop us in our tracks? We rarely give visibility to personal issues in public discourse but it is real. People have crises, people can also be exhausted or overwhelmed. As a group we recognised how important it was to each of us to be able talk about these moments and also how rare this was. We had given ourselves explicit permission to do this as part of our meetings and it has created a very different environment for us when we meet. It’s an issue we will return to in more depth later in the year.

Some culture

Finally here’s some of the things we’re being inspired by and recommending:

Reading

• Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall

• Olivia Sudjics’ essays in Exposure — about how impossible it is to be a female author writing in the first person without it being assumed to be a memoir rather than literature

• Brene Brown ‘Dare to Lead’. First of her books I read. Bringing clarity to battle with imposter syndrome. Reminded me why I signed-up for teaching too. Thanks Victoria for sending.

• The Lonely City by Olivia Laing. It is beautiful and languid, And the deliberate slow pace really helps me at the end of each day.

• The Challenge of Communicating Unwelcome Climate Messages’ by the Tyndall Centre most mornings (it’s a big ‘un!)

• Do Pause by Robert Poynton

• A Good Enough Mother by Bev Thomas. Great quick read novel if you are interested in understanding transference!

• Franz Fanon White Skin, Black Masks — Powerful and sobering

• Frame Innovation by Kees Dorst

• Doughnut Economics by Kate Raworth

• Gut by Julia Enders

• Esther Perel’s Mating in Captivity described as revelatory for long term relationships.

• Will & Ariel Durant’s Lessons of History a chance to see what is, and isn’t, still relevant today half a century later esp when compared with works like Yuval Noah Harari’s 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

• Hetty Einzig The Future of Coaching a refreshing antidote to the sometimes self-indulgent conversations about the field.

• The Trauma Cleaner — Sarah Krasnostein : how people’s physical environment, possessions and space can reflect their trauma told through the incredible personal story of the person who helps people ‘de-clutter’ and their own trauma.

Watching & Listening

• This episode of Team Human is a good background to the founding of Extinction Rebellion and this Mothers of Invention with Rhiana Gunn-Wright, policy lead for the Green New Deal

• The DropOut : The story of Theronos founder Elizabeth Holmes, fascinating on so many levels, what leads us to believe in something and how we can stop questioning. Seriously addictive to listen to.

• The audio book of Queenie by Candice Carty-Williams on BBC Sounds app

• A podcast called Hi-Phi Nation — which tells real life phenomena and then unpicks the philosophical dilemmas — first is on honouring the wishes of the dead — e.g. the fortune that keeps amassing to the Hershey legacy

• How to Fail podcast with Elizabeth Day

• Carol Cadwalladr’s TED talk

Collective Points

Cat Drew

Apr 4, 2019 ·

The Point People Monthly Collective Wisdom (and search for it)

Every month, we — The Point People — meet up at a different London location (and with others joining via Zoom as we are based in Copenhagen, Berlin, Brighton and Oxford too). Each of us has a slightly different definition of what we are, depending in part on when we joined and what we value most. For me, we’re a collection of women who are all on the edges of our professions, and therefore have connections into other worlds that we can collectively harness. We think systemically and empathetically about solving issues. And connections, and sense-making across those different but connected worlds, is crucial to that.

We’ve split ourselves into sub-groups to operate the organisation. Some think about finance and operations as a whole, others about the internal monthly meetings, the logistics and what will happen. Others (including me) think about content, and how we share with the world the collective knowledge that is so valuable to us all. Others think about events, places to amplify this sharing and create new connections.

One of the ways of sharing our collective wisdom is this series of blogs (of which this is the first) which summarises a ‘collective wisdom’ document that we all contribute to once a month. We used to go round doing updates, which was fascinating but time consuming. This way is better for three reasons. First, everyone prepares and reads each others’ contributions in advance, adding in thoughts, spotting connections to make. Second, as it’s written, we can start to spot patterns within the month and over time. Third, it forces you to self reflect on the previous month, a discipline that drives more focused behaviours in the next.

So, this is the first summary of our collective wisdom — an attempt to sense-make across some of our hunches and what’s on our radar, the different projects we are working on, and the different questions we are asking:

Patience is a virtue. You might know where you want to get to, or you might be searching for it. It takes time and that’s ok. And even better to look back and reflect on the distance travelled. Hannah’s post on this here.

Climate change has become and is a more focused priority for many of us. We’re setting up Climate Change Coaches, we’re worried that we’re going to need a climate disaster to lead to climate change, and we’re learning about climate activism and the Green Deal, Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration and how the law can be used to create change at scale.

We’re asking how we can be more inclusive and diverse in our conversations. How we can spark and create conversations around social inequality and injustice that exist beyond a minority of like-minded individuals, or diversify events on innovation to attract more than the usual suspects (interesting as they are).

Funding, funding, funding. We’re either looking for funding for starting and scaling up our own individual work (go home or go big). Or convening funders to collectively think through new models for public value in social business.

We’re building relationships and laying the groundwork. Life is in constant transition, and for those of us making a move, we’re preparing for it thoughtfully. The Maori word for relationships and connections is whakawhanaungatanga which we think about a lot.

We’re ramping up conversations to develop various opportunities to tackle problems in a systemic way, from fashion to farming.

Denial and uncomfortability. Sometimes this is bad: people feel uncomfortable speaking about class, are denying climate change. And sometimes necessary: as people deal with grief.

Metaphors range from the pessimistic (a car crash) to the optimistic (ploughing a field) to the calm (a serene lake) to somewhere in between (bricolage).

Collaboration is an art. Working in partnership is valuable, and takes time and its important to be clear about the principles in which we are entering relationships.

We’re learning, and we’re teaching others. Something about our group is that we’re curious for new knowledge and keen to share and support others to learn about the world and themselves. We’re creating accredited courses, and we’re participating in them (e.g. ORSC, compassion focused therapy), and we’re looking for professional coaching and business development support.

Neurodiversity — an umbrella term for a set of neurological conditions such as autism, dyslexia, dyspraxia and ADHD — has come up a number of times at home at work and feels important.

We’re convening our networks in different ways: a walk for a ‘warm circle’ of women to talk about parenting and sustainability, a Brexit party (commiserating not celebrating) on 29 March, a data in the city event for Data Outliers on 14 May, a breakfast with Edgar Villaneuva (on decolonizing wealth) on 15 April, an intergenerational workshop at the Barbican on 29 April, and Fixing the Future at the CCCB in Barcelona on 7–8 June (sign up here).

We can be better as a collective if we also self reflect individually and focus on ourselves. Whether it’s understanding how to be a better leader while maintaining a good work-life balance, how to be poised and focused in our work, letting go to create a distributed network of leaders in the team, having a policy of not working for free, creating the vision for me (not the initiative I’ve created) or developing my own story, talking about myself and my needs, how to keep angry and engaged while zooming out (for a while).

Things we’re being inspired by (and recommending are):

Reading:

• Active Hope by Joana Macy

• A piece on ‘changing everyday behaviours’ my friend Gina wrote in the wake of the Christchurch shooting

• Rebecca Solnit in The Guardian: Why climate action is the antithesis of white supremacy

• Psychoanalysis in the Barrios — working with political and gang related trauma in Latin America. Shocking in places but compelling reading and definitely parallels for responses to austerity in UK.

• William Morris — News from Nowhere — an 1890 speculative novel which is providing visual inspiration for art

• Modello — fascinating study from 1980s on US city estates and a ‘psychology of mind’ therapeutic approach.

• The Wellbeing Quotient

• Social Collective Intelligence — Combining the Powers of Humans and Machines to Build a Smarter Society — Daniele Miorandi

• Conscious Collective: An Aim for Awareness by Joseph P. Kauffman

• ‘Theory U’ … lots in it, “the success of the intervention depends upon the interior condition of the intervener” Lots in this resonated, generative listening etc.

• ‘Radical Candour’ (..and my need to avoid ruinous empathy)

• Bee Wilson’s The Way We Eat Now

• Andrew Taggart’s Total Work series — how we are turning everything into work.

• Hans Ulrich Obrist’s On Curating. It’s so nice to read. I am enjoying having a very different set of references, metaphors, vocabulary. And thinking about our work as curating different types of inputs and juxtapositions

• David Wallace Wells Uninhabitable Earth. He says some very thought provoking things for us all: that he doesnt believe we have time for a revolution — that we have to find ways within some of our systems to create the change at scale and in the time available. But he also talks about how we will keep adjusting the amount of human suffering we can mentally accommodate as the world warms up. It’s a very uncomfortable mix of distressing yet with pockets of hope.

Watching:

• Beach Rats on Netflix. Beautifully shot, so raw

• The Time for Love Poem shot in Glasgow Park. Powerful and disturbing.

• Roma — a steely look at power and the underheard and how this is mirrored in the mirco (domestic) and marco (politics)

• The new series of Fleabag which is glorious

Listening to:

• Dolly Alderton’s Love Stories is actually such a great interview format and she is such an empathetic interviewer. Start with Sharon Horgan

• Cal Newport on Hurry Slowly. About how we need to make a great leap forward in tech, to find stuff that facilitates the power of our minds rather than detracting from that power through constant distraction, interruption and busy-ness.

• The RSA events podcast series

• David Wallace Wells on Talking Politics podcast https://www.talkingpoliticspodcast.com/?tag=David+Wallace-Wells

6 things you should know about the women whose stories you never hear

Sophia Parker

Mar 8, 2019 ·

Meet Vera, the ‘everywoman’ of Little Village.

She struggles to think about herself clearly as someone who deserves services, whose needs ought to be attended to. By amazing coincidence, the world agrees with her: it doesn’t really think she deserves help either, it was her fault she ended up here in the first place, and now she’s here, she’ll never escape.

She sees what’s out there as persecuting — people are always looking for opportunities to criticise her. She carries a lot of shame, and a lot of pain, and every contact with a service risks reawakening those emotions. She feels she says the same things again and again, and she’s beginning to lose hope of something good coming out of it. She drags herself to try things she’s not that confident about, not confident she deserves it, not sure if it’s going to hurt her more than help her.

She’s caught in a twilight zone — the past is too painful to think about, and the future is without hope. She wants connection but often the pain she feels means she makes relationships with people who increase that pain. She’s in retreat, she’s bewildered, and she’s defensive.

At Little Village we frequently see women dealing with emotional, physical and sexual abuse. We see women who have given up hope for themselves because everyone around them has too. Women who have turned to drink, to drugs, to childbearing, to ease a pain that’s been left unresolved for too long. Women who are angry, ashamed, defensive and furious at the situation they’ve found themselves in, and who certainly didn’t get there by choice.

I am troubled by what this means for each and every woman who walks through our doors in this situation, and also because the issue seems to be systemic.

International Women’s Day is a great moment to celebrate the brilliant and strong women who are shaping our world. It’s a wonderful opportunity to acknowledge and express gratitude to the women who have impacted our own lives directly.

But I want to hold on to it first and foremost as a day for sisterhood: where we express solidarity for all women across the world. And I don’t believe we can do that by celebration alone. We also need to acknowledge where the sisterhood is needed more; where there are women being failed by our systems and our society. So while I think there is so much to celebrate on a day like today, I also want to use it to remind people about a group of women who are at best, invisible, and at worst, vilified.

To do that I’ve highlighted six systemic challenges that I think we need to address before we can truly claim the ‘sisterhood’ word. What I’ve written here draws upon my own experiences at Little Village, as well as the research findings of a Point People/Agenda project I was part of with Jennie McShannon, Cassie Robinson. and Giselle Cory last year.

1. Vulnerable women are often invisible to policy makers

‘Women experiencing multiple disadvantage’, as the policy wonks call this group, are not well understood by decision makers. Historically, very little has been done to consider the gendering of disadvantage, and traditionally, ‘multiple disadvantage’ has been counted by looking at the intersection of homelessness, substance misuse and offending. This makes it look like a very male problem.

But if you look instead at the interplay of homelessness, gender-based violence and mental health, multiple disadvantage becomes an overwhelmingly female issue. Women face a distinctive and challenging set of issues by virtue of their gender. Whichever way we look at this group of women, violence is a major factor in their lives, and specifically gender-based violence.

One in four women are likely to experience some form of gender-based violence, and one in 20 women experience extensive physical and sexual abuse right across their lifetime as both children and adults. A history of abuse and violence is correlated to a host of other factors, including homelessness and substance misuse, and mental health issues.

Women’s trajectories through public services are also very different to men’s. Women are more likely to show up in mental health or children’s services, rather than the justice system, or drug and alcohol services. They are more likely to enter services later, with very high needs, having stayed invisible to services for longer. This is often driven by a fear of losing children, or because they are trapped in a situation where violence makes it harder to escape. Once women present to a service they are more likely to bring more entrenched and complex issues.

‘Their numbers may appear to be smaller, and their issues can be so much bigger’ — women’s service provider

I get into trouble sometimes for saying that behind most of the strong women we meet at Little Village lies a shit man. By that I mean it is notable how many women are dealing with absent partners, violent dads, abusive family members. Yet so often this is treated as incidental to their story, and goes unrecognised, uncounted and untreated.

2. Their lives are shaped by toxic social attitudes

In the criminal justice system, women who have been involved in street sex work and heavy shoplifting have much harsher sentences than men who have committed equivalent crimes. This gender bias is present in the criminal justice system and everywhere else from the pay gap to public service design, despite the weight of evidence about what these ‘bad women’ share: neglect in childhood, early or prolonged exposure to violence and abuse, early loss — and negative experiences of agencies trying to help.

“The journey to where they are is symptomatic of wider social attitudes, which are toxic.” — commissioning manager

Last year at Little Village we ran a series of workshops with mums we’ve supported, to encourage them to share their stories with each other and a wider audience. One of these sessions, facilitated by sounddelivery, explored labels and judgement. The women talked about being judged repeatedly, by members of the public and professionals. Their awareness of the media was heartbreakingly clear: as women in poverty they knew they were defined as ‘scum’, ‘scroungers’, ‘on the take’, ‘drug addicts’ and ‘bad mums’.

These labels make it a great deal harder for public services to then support women in the way we know is effective — by building trust and hope, by offering time and friendship, by meeting the women where they are without judgement. These are the things that are needed precisely because the difficulties women experiencing multiple disadvantage face can make it very hard for them to build positive relationships.

Here are a selection of labels that the women participating in our workshops would like to be given.

3. Public service cuts have fallen disproportionately on women, and especially those experiencing multiple disadvantage

It is notable how often an assumption is made that ‘equality’ means men and women should be treated the same, with access to the same services. But there is no evidence that equal treatment leads to equal outcomes: in fact what we can see is the vital role that gender-specific services can play in supporting women and helping them to move on in life.

The widespread failure to recognise the importance of gender-specific services has led to very patchy provision for women experiencing the most pressing needs across the country. For example:

• The overwhelming majority of substance misuse services in the UK are mixed gender services, and only half of local authorities report having women-specific substance misuse services.

• Three quarters of the councils in England reduced the amount they spent on refuges between 2010 and 2017. Nearly a third of local authority funding for domestic violence and abuse was cut between 2010/11 and 2011/12, with the most significant cuts to the smallest organisations.

• There is also evidence of greater insecurity and reduced services in the voluntary sector, with women’s organisations and specialists such as those providing services to Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) women particularly affected. An EHRC study found those organisations most at risk were those offering holistic services capable of reaching the most disadvantaged women.

Broader public service cuts are exacerbating this situation. Local authorities had their government funding cut by 50 per cent between 2010/11 and 2017/18, at the same time as demand rose for key social services. Many local welfare funds have been closed, and councils have reported reducing their related expenditure by 72.5% between 2013 and 2018. The collapse of this resource — at the same time as designing in five week waits with the rollout of Universal Credit — is nothing short of a disaster for households where there are no savings to fall back on.

“2.5 million people in the UK survive with incomes no more than 10% above the poverty line. They are thus just one crisis away from of falling into poverty through no fault of their own” — Statement on Visit to the United Kingdom, by Professor Philip Alston, UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights

The fallout of reforms to our social welfare system fall disproportionately on those who are most disadvantaged. Women, as the majority of informal carers, carry the burden of cuts to social care services. Women, as the majority of single parents, are hit hardest by benefits caps (two thirds of UC recipients who had their benefits capped in 2018 were single parents). Single payments to households mean that women are less able to control the family income, playing into the unhealthy gender dynamics that are present in domestic abuse.

“There is a really remarkable gender dimension to many of the reforms. If you got a group of misogynists together in a room and said ‘how can we make a system that works for men but not women?’ they wouldn’t have come up with too many other ideas than what’s in place.” —Professor Philip Alston, UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, in a briefing in Westminster

I am furious about the possibility that organisations like Little Village are stepping into this breach. Foodbank usage is up fourfold since 2012. Baby banks now number over 100, where fewer than 10 existed in 2010. Our work should not be celebrated as some nostalgic idea of communities looking out for each other. It cannot become an alternative to government obligations or our collective commitment to a social security net that helps people get back on their feet rather than dragging them deeper into poverty. It is a constant dilemma for me to strike the balance between alleviating the very distressing levels of need we see daily, and fighting a system that assumes that poverty is an inevitable fact of life, and that we, and organisations like us, will pick up the pieces.

4. We’re obsessed with ‘managing’ the immediate presenting risk, rather than exploring how a woman can thrive longer-term

During our work with Agenda last year, we used an approach called ‘causal loop analysis’ to try to understand how we so regularly and repeatedly fail some of the most vulnerable and excluded women in society. This methodology operates on the premise that different parts of the ‘system’ around a woman interact in unpredictable ways. Rather than looking for inputs and outputs, we were looking for feedback loops and multiplier effects. These are where apparently small factors interact with other elements of the system to create much larger outcomes than we might otherwise expect.

One of the most significant feedback loops we identified was centred on risk. When women’s needs are not met because of some of the issues outlined in points 1 to 3 above, the problems they are dealing with become more severe and enduring. That in turn leads to greater vulnerability, often in the form of increased victimisation, involvement in criminality, and not coping well with parenthood.

A professional making an assessment of the situation at this point is likely to note that there’s an increased risk for any children involved, or that a crime might be committed. The immediate response becomes a risk-based one. Understandably, the focus goes to the child, or the crime, rather than staying on the woman herself and her unmet needs.

This risk-based approach is reinforced by other factors, such as a system of legal duties that focus on children more than mothers, and the targets set by the criminal justice system itself. Political pressures and social expectations are strong. There are concerns about the immediate risk to children’s wellbeing, as well as a fear of trauma being passed on to the next generation.

The net result of these feedback loops is that our current system of public services focuses primarily on risk reduction, rather than on enabling a woman to thrive. Of course, it’s vital to address pressing risks. But unless the system can also stay focused on the woman herself, it will be hard to break out of the current cycle we identified that drives driving risk-based commissioning. And that focus on risk is to the long-term cost of the women we’re talking about here.

5. Mental health services are in danger of making things much, much worse

Women experience mental ill-health at higher rates than men. Agenda has shown that women’s mental health is closely linked to gendered life experiences, including abuse and violence. For example, women are twice as likely as men to experience PTSD, a fact often attributed to women’s more frequent experiences of sexual violence.

In every interview and workshop we conducted for the Agenda work, people acknowledged the difficulty in getting mental health professionals around the table when working with women experiencing deep disadvantage. We heard about how limited resources create barriers. We encounted endless complicated and energy draining re-structures and re-organisations that made accountability more opaque than ever.

We seem to be in a bizarre and troubling situation where local areas are being forced to measure women’s needs based on their capacity to deal with them. As one frontline mental health professional commented, “A lot of barriers are created to protect services from people.”

Another practitioner painted a picture of three islands of support that are narrowly defined. The first island is the local hospital surgery. GPs struggle to do what they can within their limited appointment slots, and often fall back on prescription drugs. The second island is IAPT services, which work for people whose problems can be dealt with by cognitive behavioural therapy, or where issues are neatly defined and specific. The third island are psychiatrists. To access an adult psychiatrist more than once, a woman would need to be on the border of hospitalisation.

As this practitioner noted, many people fall between these tiny islands. Historically holistic services such as the Drug and Alcohol Teams, Family Recovery Projects, and Family Nurse Partnerships filled the gaps. But it is precisely these services which are disappearing as funding runs out, leaving many vulnerable women with nowhere to go between short courses of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and a serious mental health crisis.

We heard stories of how the culture and structure of mental health provision makes this worse. Mental health providers are seen to have rigid requirements, for example around women attending appointments on time, and without having used substances, that simply aren’t appropriate or realistic for women whose lives are in crisis.

“It’s a very black-and-white view of the world” —social work professional

As a sector mental health could be leading the way in designing new ways of supporting the most vulnerable women in society. We know so much now about the impact of gender violence on mental health. It’s impossible to deny the evidence that ‘Adverse Childhood Experiences’ can shape entire lives and the lives of a woman’s children. And so I find it utterly bewildering that mental health services can be so disengaged from women, distant from other services supporting this group and unable to take a more holistic view of impact.

6. The professionals supporting women in crisis are often overworked and struggling to process trauma themselves

In systems where traumatised women are judged and deprived of agency it is not that surprising that they will feel angry, anxious, stressed, helpless and hopeless. And it is perhaps not surprising that these feelings can rub off on professionals. These are people who are constantly dealing with high levels of need, without enough resources to respond. It’s hardly surprising that in this situation, staff can become deeply frustrated and emotionally unavailable, as a coping mechanism in the face of what can feel like voracious demand that’s impossible to meet.

Social workers and others certainly feel the very same feelings of the women — anger, fatigue, hopelessness — effectively replicating them and reflecting them back. The Stand Up for Social Work campaign showed that 91 per cent of social workers suffered from emotional exhaustion, and 61 per cent suffered from ‘depersonalisation’.

And herein lies another feedback loop we identified through our causal loop analysis with Agenda. All of these difficult emotions reduce the capacity of organisations to sustain relationships with women, because it ultimately reduces expectations about the positive change a woman might be able to achieve.

And when a service fails to build good relationships, it increases the chances of the woman herself choosing to disengage. In turn, that diminishes professional views of what’s possible, which, in the end, impacts on funding decisions as the woman begins to be seen as a “hopeless case “- an “antisocial tenant”, a “bad mother”, an “unreliable witness”.

We noticed how many of the organisations trying to support women experiencing multiple disadvantage talk of their own powerlessness to effect change, their own unmet needs in terms of funding and agency. Lack of sustained resources has led to poor staff retention and disrupted relationships with their clients. In this way, the system has come to mirror the experiences of the women themselves. It’s worth speculating that what we see here reflects the fact that systems are inherently fractal — what happens in one part of the system is unconsciously replicated throughout the rest of it.

To conclude— we’re failing some of the most vulnerable and excluded women

Women experiencing multiple disadvantage are losing out because of the way services are currently configured; they are losing out disproportionately after a decade of cuts which have hit specialist services hard; and they are losing out because of wider social attitudes to them, which remain prejudiced and problematic.

We are failing some of the most vulnerable and excluded women in society thanks to powerful social attitudes and political pressures. These drive the culture and spending priorities of public services. I believe that these things reinforce the exclusion of many women and cement the growing inequalities we can observe in the UK every way we turn.

With all this going on, we should probably see the professionals I write about here as survivors alongside the women they are helping. I don’t want to argue that we should apportion blame to workers who are often struggling on low incomes themselves, and internalising other people’s traumas with very little support.

But there is no denying that the structures within which they are operating are failing women with a depressing regularity. That is what we should really be talking about today.

A simple (but long) run-through of the Systems Changers programme

Cassie Robinson.

Feb 7, 2019

We are 5 months in to the Systems Changers programme with the Children’s Society and Lankelly Chase and there will be more posts to come about the learning from that, but as the programme evolves and is adapted for different contexts I thought it might be valuable to write a post that simply lays out the programme in it’s simplest form* — as it was, when we first designed it, back in 2014 (delivered in 2015).

The programme was initially designed for frontline workers working in organisations trying to change the systems that perpetuate severe and multiple disadvantage. It was designed to be a 6 month programme, with 10–12 participants. The ambition was that it could always be used in other contexts — with all the different people working in those systems — from commissioners and policy makers through to middle managers and local citizens.

The premise of the programme was to take & deploy a systemic lens for change by…

• Acknowledging the Sectors that have less power & voice

• Making the invisible, visible

• Building systems’ adaptive capacity

And in 2018 we edited and adapted the design principles.

The programme has always used the three lens’ as shown below — to build a literacy in plural perspectives and holding both the micro and macro view.

The programme has always emphasised the middle space visualised below. It has some aspects of a personal development programme, but that is not what it is. In the same way it isn’t an incubator or accelerator programme fixated on solutions. In fact we always said that if people left their jobs after taking part in the programme, we had failed. The programme is about surfacing, nourishing and directing the wisdom (insights) from the frontline to influence change. It was always a challenge to hold this space — people on the frontline like springing in to action and are great “do-er’s” and problem solvers.

And the focus was always on the collective insights (intelligence and wisdom) of the group as much as on each frontline workers individual journey and experience. What does the collective know that the individual can’t? How can a collective sense-making across a system be useful in generating new insights? It’s why the programme was originally designed to be made up of people working in different places and parts of the system.

The programme broadly follows the stages below, although it is not linear — the mapping, testing, reflecting and adapting are all continuous.

The participants were asked to do maps of the systems in which they work, or/and the systems that they wanted to change, for the interview. We also ensure that everyone applied with their manager so that they had permission to make space for the programme and feel able to surface insights about their organisations to reflect back to them.

The Residential

The programme starts with the Residential. Even in this latest iteration of the programme, I don’t think we’ve figured out how to run the programme in a way that doesn’t need this kind of introduction. It’s very resource intensive and not very scaleable.

Alongside time to get to know one another, meet the delivery team, and understand the functions of things like the Learning Lab, learning partners and coaching, the residential is primarily an introduction to systems thinking and design.

Cartography

We start with an analogy of cartography (inspired by some materials Sian had been developing for her students) — using the visual below to mark the start of the Systems Changers journey.

Using this framing we talk through and explore each one. What does it mean to do the following, in the context of the programme?

• Have perspectives on the landscape — which provides a way to introduce the 3 lens’s of the programme (individual, organisation, wider system)

• Record and document — what are the ways to record and document the programme and why it’s important to do so. Who of your fellow travellers is visual? Who is a talker? Who writes? How are you going to record what you find? We talk about gathering data, and how documenting gives you material to be a better reflexive practitioner.

• Navigate the known and unknown — the programme is likely to place people in surroundings, language, learning etc that is unfamiliar to them. We ask them to think about when they did something different to the usual — when they went off the beaten track.

• Be in the landscape — sometimes it’s important to really *be* in the landscape. To observe, to be present, to sense, to experience it from another’s perspective. We talk about the value of ethnography and the importance of not making assumptions. Experience it for yourself!

• Ability to survive precariousness and change — be a camel! Plan for the long haul because change takes time. It requires patience, vulnerability and it is never predictable.

• Record altitudes and measurements — this is all about gathering evidence and using different types of data. Feelings are data, digital can be data.

• Observe and be curious about your surroundings — we encourage people to use all their senses. To explore what the terrain is like. To literally go outside. Open doors.

• Share and generate — like Hansel & Gretel we encourage people to leave a trail — to practice and design for sharing, being open and transparent to help others navigate. Being generative also helps new patterns emerge and things come in to view differently.

Design, Design thinking and systems thinking

The rest of the residential is like one mammoth lesson in Design and in Systems Thinking and Systems Design — the slides for that are here, and it’s too long to blog about!

Connecting with the planet and our ecological systems

Traditionally the residential’s have taken place in the countryside where we could draw on fellow Point Person Hannah’s experience of building intimacy with nature and weaving analogies between ecological and planetary systems, together with our human systems. We haven’t figured out good ways to do this in an urban environment and with less resource, which is a real shame as it was quite pivotal in the first few programmes for helping participants connect with the heady concepts of systems thinking etc. Some of Hannah’s brilliant exercises and activities — which draw on her extensive experience in group process, coaching and nature-based work — are here.

Socialising the programme

Another touch point that I think is really important is how participants ‘socialise’ the programme back in their organisations. We give everyone a “kit” to take away and use to decorate a space back in the office — posters, information and tools (that invite participation) showing what the programme is about — taking their wider organisation on a journey of change too.

Month 1

Understanding the system — Day 1

The purpose of this day is to deepen participants’ understanding of:

• ‘People in systems’ including themselves and how to explore this

• How power and judgements play out in relation to the self, organisation and system.

In this session participants are led through processes to help them understand their role in systems. Taking the 3 lens approach to change (self, organisation, system), they start first with the self, asking questions like:

• What shapes our sense of identity? What are the labels that we apply to ourselves and others?

• How do these labels shape our perceptions, experiences, values and opportunities?

• How is our personal power affected by the labels others apply to us and we apply to others?

In the first two programmes Shilpa Shah ran whole day sessions looking at structural, cultural and personal labels — asking questions such as:

• Which aspects are visible/invisible?

• Which aspects are dominant/subordinate/neutral?

• Which labels did I choose? Which labels were not a choice?

• Have I changed or modified any of these aspects to fit in?

• What’s good about being a ….

• What’s difficult about being a ….

• How do these labels affect our perception of ourselves and others?

• How do these labels affect others’ perceptions of us?

• How do these labels empower or limit us in our work to create change?

Understanding the system — Day 2

The purpose of the day is to help participants use their voice and feel more confident to do so — following on from the day before where they located their identity and beliefs in change. Working with Jude Habib from Sound Delivery, the focus of the session is on:

• Experimenting with their voice

• Trying different voices on

• Testing out tools for having their voice heard

The intention is that participants leave the session feeling able to:

• Express their voice through different tools (on camera, through audio etc)

• More confident to express themselves

• Clearer about what they want to express

• Comfortable to try and experiment with different voices

An introduction to “Dark matter”

The last part of the second day is an introduction to the concept of “dark matter” — deepening their understanding of systems by looking at the norms, culture, rules, process and structures in systems. A key part of ‘Seeing the System’ is understanding these rules and processes — they can be invisible but are very powerful. They often shape the way frontline workers, their organisations and those that commission them are able to work. Seeing dark matter is about seeing what can be shifted and where to find the flex to make positive change in the system.

‘The city we experience is, to some extent, a product of a city
council’s culture and behaviour, legislation and operational modes,
its previous history and future strategy, and so on. The ability for a
community to make their own decisions is supported or inhibited by
this wider framework of ‘dark matter’, based on the municipality
they happen to be situated within as well as the characteristics of
the local culture.’ Dan Hill on Dark Matter in Systems

We encourage the frontline workers to question which rules and processes might seem to be fixed and immovable, but which actually can be changed. We look at the different types of ‘dark matter’ at play in the system around complex disadvantage — law and guidance, strategies and policies, contracts and processes. We examine how what can seem to be the law may actually be someone’s interpretation of it. We look at how through investigation you can start to question rules, by discovering that the reason the rule was initially created may have changed, so that the rule is no longer needed.

In between the first and second months, participants are asked to go in search of the ‘dark matter’ in their organisations. Like archivists and ethnographers they gather evidence to bring with them to Month 2. This includes the tools above as well as things like journey mapping and a data audit.

Month 2

Finding the flex — Day 1

The purpose of Day 1 is to draw on the data that the participants gathered in their Dark Matter explorations — mapping and unearthing exercises — and use it:

• To develop an understanding of systems dynamics and how to find the flex.

• To learn the skills needed to do cause & effect mapping and feedback loops.

• To explore barriers to change — both organisationally and personally.

Some of the tools used in this session are found here. Broadly they take people through the following:

Multiple Cause Diagrams

• How to surface different perspectives (above and below the surface)

• How to discard detail

• How to see the cause and effect — it’s not linear!

• How to use Multiple Cause Diagrams and why they are useful — (used to trace the sequence of cause and effect through a situation/system) — and can be useful for clarifying one’s own thinking, identifying potential interventions, debate what is going on, and identify feedback loops.

Participants do their own Multiple Cause Diagrams using an issue or problem that has resisted attempts to change, that they identified in their “homework.”

This involves, identifying the event or variable at the centre of this issue, extending the diagram backwards by asking “what causes this?” and forwards by asking “what does this lead to?”, check for connections between items on the diagram (if necessary iterate by starting again), identifying any feedback loops and reflecting on understanding of the issue.

Feedback Loops

Participants also get a deep dive lesson feedback loops. Feedback loops are sequence of causes that feeds back on itself. When the effect is additive it is described as positive feedback (reinforcing) and when the effect is to subtract or counteract the initial cause then the feedback is known as negative feedback (cancelling).

All situations that involve growth and change include a positive feedback loop. All situations where a system is being controlled include a negative feedback loop.

Most real world situations involve several loops — of both types. Positive circles — also known as vicious and virtuous circles — and an important reason why unintended consequences and side effects to interventions are so prevalent — the extent to which actors in a system ignore the interconnections between the parts and ignore the effects of feedback.

Through understanding the cause and effect in the system. And the reinforcing and stabilising feedback loops, participants are able to see where it is that they want to start experimenting with change.

Finding the flex — Day 2

Now that the Systems Changers have more systems literacy and have ways to identify flex in the system, how can they test and use that flex? What kinds of change might they be able to create? In Day 2 we cover three things:

• Understand how to create theories of change

• Understand different levers of change

• Understand how to do systems prototyping — designing a range of experiments and potential interventions.

Plurality is an important part of the day, as it’s likely that there will be multiple ways that each person can create or influence change. By the end of these sessions the aim is for the Systems Changers to recognise that change happens in different ways, in different parts of the system.

The day starts with an introduction to Theories of Change — with the cohort articulating their own theories of how they think change can start to happen, and the kinds of outcomes they want/ expect to see from the changes. Following on from the exercise of articulating hunches about how and where change can happen, the method of prototyping is introduced. Not as a way of finding solutions to the changes the cohort describe, but as a way of asking questions about the change and experimenting with the questions.

The second part of the day is about bringing together theories of where flex in the system opens a window for influencing change, alongside a range of different prototyping methods to test and experiment with those windows (or levers) for change. We describe this as “Systems Prototyping” — experimenting with a range of opportunities for change, but with a coherent (and plural) narrative that links them all together — some are simultaneous experiments and some in sequence.

The work they go away to do this month is more gathering of evidence about where they see flex in the system and the potential for change. They go off and do ethnography, interviews, mapping and plotting to make the case for their experiments and to find coherence across the different ways they intend to prototype change.

Month 3

Making change happen — Day 1

Month 3 is all about the different ways to make change happen. The cohort have identified multiple areas of flex, started to plot out, as systems prototypes, some of the micro-experiments they want to do and are now introduced to a range of “change makers” who have experience using different approaches to influencing and experimenting with change.

In the first few programmes we either had speakers come in and give short talks about their experience of doing this kind of change work, or we took the cohort on visits. That has included visits to the GLA, Policy Lab,Government Digital Service, FutureGov, OnRoad Media, NEON and the People’s History Museum.

Making change happen — Day 2

Day 2 is all about “systems readiness” and understanding how to build networks and alliances to influence change.

Change always requires relationships and allies.

It also always requires the quiet and slow work of preparing and cultivating the ground for change — people, organisations and the wider system — so that it (the system), and they, anticipate the change, and plan and budget for it.

Some of the relational mapping and tactics tools we use — the kinds of questions the participants will be asking themselves are: who else do I need on board? Why should they care? What will they need to see and understand? What can I show them? What is the ask?

The cohort leaves these two days ready to go and start their experimenting.

Month 4

Experimenting with change — Day 1

This whole-day session is designed as Studio Time — a space for the cohort to reflect on what’s happened with their experiments so far, to develop them and also design new ones. They come to the session with scenarios like…

• I’ve done some experiments. I’d like to reflect on what I’ve learnt and think about how they make sense in the wider context of the many experiments I want to do.

• I’d like to design some new experiments.

• I’ve done some experiments and want to keep experimenting with the same question in deeper/ different ways.

• I’ve done something and don’t know what to do next…

• I didn’t manage to do any experiments…

The Studio Time has bookable support surgeries too — the support on offer includes the following:

• Prototyping

• User research

• Story and narrative

• Engagement

• Sense-making

• Partnerships

• Influencing (internally and externally)

• Data and digital

Experimenting with change — Day 2

The Purpose of the day 2 is for the cohort to feel supported and ready for the next stage of their experimenting and to better understand their inner journey of change.

The first session helps the cohort understand the inner journey of change-making, including self authorisation, boundaries and resistance (inner and outer). It’s really difficult to change the system. Feedback loops (and entrenched/old power) can be very powerful and with this resistance in the system it’s hard to break the cycle.

If you can understand what’s difficult about changing something on a personal level then you can get a better sense of why the system also resists change. So we use a tool called Immunity To Change and do an exercise in Force Field Analysis to look at our personal systems and think about what it is that makes us so resistant to change.

The cohort leave these sessions to go and continue with their experiments, plotting them on their Systems Prototyping map. They also have a deeper understanding of why change can feel so hard.

Month 5

Experimenting with change — Day 1

The purpose of this day is for the cohort to learn more about how to build narratives, coherence and influencing strategies around their change experiments. A range of speakers talk through:

• Working with the media

• Building systemic narratives

• Using framing

• Strategic communications

• Storytelling

• Policy influencing

• Presenting and “show & tells”

The experts then run a Story Studio, working with the cohort to design their own narratives, stories and talks.

Experimenting with change — Day 2

The whole day is used as Studio Time. And briefing the cohort to collect their experiments, insights and learning together for the final residential.

Learning and Reflection

Alongside the programme as it’s been laid out here, there were also the following elements:

Free-writing power reflections that happen at the end of each session. Principles of free-writing power reflection:

• Give the question/ theme

• Let the participants know that they will not be reading this back to anyone and that it does not need to make sense

• Write the first thing that comes into their mind, don’t edit or judge

• Keep the pen moving- if they get stuck, different techniques include repeating the question in writing, or drawing a spiral until you think of another word.

• Once the time is up give them a few minutes to read over what they’ve written and underline any words or phrases that feel important.

A coach — available to support the cohort in their own personal journey’s through the programme. Change work can be hard!

A Learning Partner — in the first few programmes this was a crucial role and distinct from the Coach. The Coach’s role was to support people, the Learning Partner was there to surface insights with each Systems Changer — what were they observing and what insights were they generating at an individual organisational and systems level? This was done as a monthly call and interim visits to see the Systems Changer in their work place.

A Learning Lab — in the first year we had a physical space and a learning framework, as written about here. The focus was on the collective intelligence of the cohort, and how those insights, surfaced through their own experiences in different contexts and organisations, could be used to influence change. Key to the Learning Lab is ongoing documentation and content creation — generated by the cohort and the delivery team, to create regular feedback loops so as to “reflect the system back to itself.”

Some of the tools and content from the original programme can be found here on the Lankelly Chase website.

Last week the Point People published a new tool — the Systems Canvas — which encompasses a lot of our collective learning from doing systems change work and designing the Systems Changers programme.

*We do ultimately still plan to host all of this on a website that is easy to access and download tools and guides from!

I’d like to acknowledge all the people (alongside the Point People) who have contributed content to this programme — Sarah Drummond and Shilpa Shah. As well as all the Lankelly Chase team who have supported this programme and in particular Alice Evans, who’s idea it was in the first place.

Moving from “can they?” to “how can they?”

Cassie Robinson.

Feb 7, 2019

I started this blog post a year ago! And it feels like a good precursor to the blog I’m going to follow with. It also follows on from some of the previous posts, that included the Design Principles for Systems Changers, ways we thought about and tried to document learning and change on the programme, a post that might be useful for anyone trying to do change work inside an organisation and a “how to” slide deck on practices of systems change.

When we ran the first version of the Systems Changers programme we were asking the question “can the insights of frontline workers influence systems to change?” – when we realised the answer was “yes!” the programme that followed in 2017 focussed on the how. This blog shares some of the lessons we took across from the first programme to the second and that have continued to inform the programme towards its latest incarnations.

The first cohort of Systems Changers back in 2015 — I LOVE this co-created story they made about the programme.

The need to better understand the system

Finding the flex in the system

We realised that over interpretation was creating more ‘dark matter.’ Policies and legislation are easily misinterpreted. Frontline workers (like many of us) don’t always know what statutory rules are inflexible or not.

Designing for feedback

Feedback in all parts of a system is inherently valuable — as an encouragement mechanism and way of tracking progress, and as a tool for showing where change is needed. In a lot of public sector organisations the current norms err on the side of noticing ‘bad’ practice or behaviour — focusing on penalties rather than rewards. The frontline workers started designing systems that generated encouraging feedback to counterbalance this.

Data can change the story

Numbers can give us the impetus to act but are insufficient for telling us how to act. Systems Changers (and frontline workers more generally) have an opportunity to bring together “hard” and “soft” data. Frontline workers hold the stories of those both working on the frontline and of those using frontline services. Gathering the data of those stories is something that we should be designing into a frontline role more explicitly and designing good tools to make this possible for them. Alongside this, they already collect data about those accessing services, the numbers, the quantitative data — they are in a well placed position to bring those two types of data together.

The 2015 cohort in Parliament.

Effective ways of starting to change the system

Make better use of technology

“The holy grail for me is a shared information system and a map of local systems. It has been talked about for millennia but I don’t think anyone has been ambitious enough to try and implement it. Effective communication is key to multi-agency working and even a basic tool alone could have huge impact. I could also imagine about another two dozen extensions and other applications for it.” Systems Changer, 2015 Cohort

Over time many different frontline workers insights need to continually feed into shaping the system — if service design and policy making no longer have a boundary between them, there is potential in this to dissolve that boundary even further. This is definitely something that could be afforded by digital technology — however, we are a long way off that happening on this programme unfortunately!

Ensuring the system is receptive

It doesn’t work to influence change in one way or at one point in the system. The skill is in assembling and orchestrating different points of change over time. And as part of this, the wider system needs to have other receptive points or places that are able to adopt new approaches. We call this “systems-readiness” and it involves dedicating time and resource to prepare the system for change — this could be lining up commissioners, through to policy influencing.

Design the system for “whole responsibility”

“ A sort of universal responsibility toward a service user is something that few people have adopted, can adopt or can even perceive. I try and drive this point home at every opportunity but there are a number of barriers to this. A typical service user of mine can be sanctioned from the DWP, asked to leave a hostel, miss an addictions appointment and have his/her file closed, end up in hospital and be discharged to the homeless unit, left with no option but the street, arrested and charged and be sent to prison all in a 24 hour period. The action or inaction of every service within a city negatively affects another service half an hour later and in the long term (or a month later) the impact inevitably returns to all of those services (and the individual) again.Explaining this to people doesn’t seem to carry an enormous amount of weight. More needs to be done in terms of pooled budgets, joint commissioning, co-location and obligatory pathways.”

Systems Changer, 2015 Cohort

Systems prototyping

Or another way of describing it is sequencing and orchestrating experiments towards the change(s) you want to see. This kind of prototyping might involve experimenting with new roles (and the power that comes with them) or designing new HR policies, through to building parts of a new service or testing new policy for regulation. This practice still holds onto the long-term and often complex challenge of the change you want to make, whilst using prototyping as a way of asking and experimenting with questions, and to better understand the nature of the change or demonstrating what is possible.

Systems needs not just user needs

“The starting point, then, is a view of the individual that isn’t standard in economics, but should be: individual desires and standards of behaviour are often defined by experience and observation; they don’t exist in social isolation as “consumer preferences” are so often assumed to do. This simple remark has strong implications: if a person’s behaviour is conditioned by the experiences of other individuals in the cognitive neighbourhood of that person, these may be all-important in driving group interaction and group dynamics, in a way quite different from what the simple aggregation of individual ‘preferences’ would lead us to believe.”

The question, then becomes, how might we shape the experiences of a person’s cognitive neighbourhood — the community and wider contexts of which they are a part? How do we make sure that every role and “user” within the system participates in shaping it?

Doing the groundwork for long-term co-ordination and collaboration

There is inherent ambiguity in words like “coordination, collaboration, partnership.” An agreement about the centrality of relationships in creating change is not the same as knowing how to structure them so they yield transformative results. Partnership means much more than coordination or collaboration — it’s stakeholders sharing resources, outcomes & activities.

Changing the narrative of the mainstream

It’s not about only agreeing on values and principles across multiple organisations and the staff who might work together. There needs to be a public narrative that changes the status quo.

“I’m not sure this is always the problem — everyone agrees helping people in some way is a good thing. It’s perceptions of people where the problem lies.”

Systems Changer, 2015 Cohort

Designing where to embed

An unrealised ambition from the Point People was to embed Systems Changers as a ‘permanent function’ in the social sector, enabling organisations to be more of a ‘platform for developing solutions, rather than delivering services.’

Systems change can’t be done with a ‘project-based approach’ — what’s required is to build R&D capacity and mobilise movements of civil servants, practitioners and ordinary people.

After the first programme we designed the following programmes in a way that more explicitly moved from “finding the flex” through to “experimenting with change.”

Designing for scale?

Some questions we are left with:

• At the individual level, how do we enable people to have the role they want in systems change? Whether that be as the change agent or to keep generating and directing their insights to have influence in other ways.

• How do you design for collective intelligence? How do we bring together the insights of frontline workers across the system together with insights from other roles within the system?

• How do you spread this out into a movement for change across the UK?

• What are we spreading? Mindset? Practice? Ideas? Behaviours?

Creating a systems canvas

Cat DrewFollowing

Jan 27, 2019

Why do it in the first place?

Towards the end of last year, I asked the Point People Whatsapp channel, does anyone know of a ‘systems canvas’ that I could use on a project? I was after something that people and organisations from across a system could work together to create which would serve as a visual reminder of the ingredients they needed to take a wide and sustained approach to achieving their goal (increasing physical activity).

It is of course, not as simple as that. Systems change is complex, ever emergent and is forged in relationships rather than setting out a nice, rational plan on a piece of paper. However, in the same way as mapping is valuable in creating a shared understanding of what is going on, it is similarly important to communicate a shared sense of where we are going to.

There are many tools, guides and articles out there (including Systems change: a guide to what it is and how to do it by NPC & Lankelly Chase, Systems Changers by The Point People, the Systems Changers Programme designed by the Point People & Lankelly Chase, Systems Practice by the Omidyar Group and Putting the system back into systems change: a framework for understanding and changing organisations & community systems by Pennie Foster-Fisherman). This exercise was not to duplicate these, but rather to draw on this work, and bring together the conclusions into one place to share with the system you are working with.

How did we do it?

We have been developing this together over the last couple of months. For those involved, it has been a learning journey. It’s been a fascinating process to identify our different needs for a canvas type tool, and to understand our different systems practices (ranging from design approaches to soft-systems methodologies) and define them more collectively. It’s a small symbol of how we are greater than the sum of our parts. Some of our different collective practices include:

• Thinking about different lenses through which we view the system, importantly starting with ourselves, and reflecting on the type of system we are working in, our role and authority within that and our personal motivation to act.

• Thinking about different flows of activity and demand around the system (e.g. feedback loops and delays) and the more ‘invisible’ dynamics that are holding the problem in its place (e.g. values, behaviours, mindsets).

• Thinking about what gets lost and intentionally putting in place a process for dealing with grief.

• A focus on flipping the principles or paradigm of the current system on its head to create those for future system.

• Developing a community, thinking about what the experience of being in that community feels like, and how our role can be to empower the community to take action and reinforce itself)

• The use of design prototyping to test out the new principles. Principles are quite easy to sign up to when nothing sits behind them. Identifying ‘the greatest possible expression of a new principle’ and testing it will help move more quickly into action, will bring to life more intangible principles, and will also surface resistance and other invisible dynamics that have remained unspoken thus far. This is something we have used a lot in the Systems Changers programme we run with Lankelly Chase, where we frame it as “systems prototyping.”

• Different methods of asking questions, for example using rich picturing or the use of metaphor in order to explore what the system looks like from different perspectives and where there might not be the right or easy words to describe what is going on.

The ‘canvas’ page of our systems canvas which brings together the findings of many question prompts

This was not just bringing together a list of tools from our various practices, but trying to create a more collective process which we could share for others to use. We’ve been listening to each others’ practices, reflecting on what is important, how much we need to ‘expose’ the process to stakeholders involved, how much you can codify up building relationships and the things that sit outside what is written down. We’ve also been trying it out on real projects, for example work I’m doing at the moment with FutureGov and Camden Council on bringing together the ecosystem of organisations and businesses to get more long-term unemployed residents along the journey to good work, or the training Jennie Winhall and I are doing for the Skoll Foundation’s Social Innovation MBA students.

Personally, in my role collecting together this knowledge, I have learned a lot. As someone who thinks systemically but has had no formal ‘systems thinking’ training, it’s been an unusual approach to learning: listening to practitioners I admire talk about and gives examples from their practice, playing back and sense-checking what they have said, trying these approaches out and then (finally) going back to the theory (rather than the other way around).

Some of the challenges

One of the challenges has been about trying to boil down an understanding of complex systems to a series of questions and boxes on a ‘canvas’. The nature of systems change is more messy and nebulous than a business model, around which the first innovation canvas, Strategyzer’s Business Model Canvas grew out. Our canvas is more akin to those that don’t just help you bring together the essential components of a new venture (whether it be a business, policy idea, open data project etc), but which act as prompts to help you work out what they are. So it is a canvas, linked to lots of other tools to help you paint it, or rather work out what colours and medium to use.

Another has been about language. Systems language — like innovation language — can be quite jargony. There is a question upfront about how much the people you are working with know about systems change. If only a little, it’s really important to understand their language and talk to them in their terms.

Both of these challenges point to the need for conversation and questioning. It is not a case of filling out the canvas = systems change. Using these questions as prompts for discussion and reflection, giving it the time it needs, is crucial.

So while my initial ‘need’ was to be able to have something I could use to work through with a group, I suppose — if I’m honest — to ‘show’ I was doing systems change. Through the process of developing it, I’ve learned the power of opening up questions rather than immediately pinning down the answers.

Use the Systems Canvas we’ve created — You can find it at the link here.

Making the canvas involved so many rich conversations that it is also useful to see how these evolved it. You can see previous drafts here.

New year reflections from (some) of the Point People

Dec 31, 2018

There is a mini update about what we’ve been doing this year as an organisation at the end of the post, but first, some end of year reflections from different Point People.

Hannah Smith

What’s been significant?

Continuing to deepen my connection to Aotearoa New Zealand — beginning my te reo journey with a Beginners’ Māori language course and spending time on a rural marae in Te Urewera with the Tūhoe, the ‘Children of the Mist’.

What I’ve learned?

The idea of a pathway — from disconnection, to connection, to acquaintance, to deeper acquaintance and finally to intimacy. We are familiar with treading this path in our human-to-human relationships, but what if we were to tread it to in our relationships with the rest of the natural world? I’ve written a longer blog post here about these questions.

Something that gives me hope for 2019 and going forward

A friend of mine — Rebecca Loncraine — was writing a book about learning to fly — but she died before it was finished. This year it was published. In the book she talks about ‘soaring with birds, the hope with feathers’, a line inspired by a beautiful poem by Emily Dickinson. It has buoyed me up in some the darker times this year. However dark things get, I love the idea that hope will always be perching, singing and keeping us warm.

“Hope” is the thing with feathers — Emily Dickinson

“Hope” is the thing with feathers -

That perches in the soul -

And sings the tune without the words -

And never stops — at all -

And sweetest — in the Gale — is heard -

And sore must be the storm -

That could abash the little Bird

That kept so many warm -

I’ve heard it in the chillest land -

And on the strangest Sea -

Yet — never — in Extremity,

It asked a crumb — of me.

Cat Drew

What’s been significant?

This year I’ve spent more time reflecting on personal mission and purpose and a sense of who I am personally in the world. This is a very different type of ‘leadership’ (if you can call it that) from the courses I went on in the civil service. And I’ve experienced the power of doing that with a community who are also kindly interrogating themselves.

I also feel incredibly lucky with the networks and chances that I’ve had, professionally. And so this year I’ve more deliberately supported others to have access to those and grow.

What I’ve learned?

Showing patterns in intuition! Whether it is frontline staff knowing the best course of action, or personal decisions, I think more space is being called for trusting intuition rather than process. However, sometimes to make that case I’ve found it useful to go back through, lay out and question those decisions — as they reveal patterns. Intuition is based on a wealth of experience after all.

Something that gives me hope for 2019 and going forward

This is the image on my iphone that I took from a collection at the 21st century competencies course, run by the International Futures Forum. I originally picked it to represent how I was trying to prioritise and focus at work, but it’s taken on a bigger meaning about maintaining a life purpose wherever role you find yourself in.

Sarah Douglas

What’s been significant?

Most significant for me workwise has been developing, delivering and now looking to scale-up a project called Night Club through The Liminal Space and with Wellcome Trust. The project seeks to tackle the adverse effects of long-term night work on the often invisible workforce that keep our 24 hr society running by bringing frontline workers from Co-op together with leading sleep researchers. I’ve learnt so much about the challenges (and benefits) of creating long-term change with multiple stakeholders with very different perspectives and experiences. And am continuously learning about the skills, approaches and mindsets that are required to hold these partnerships and enable them to flourish.

What I’ve learned?

I’ve learnt about and need to learn more about collaborations and partnerships…

I believe it’s only through truly interdisciplinary exchange and bringing many different voices to a challenge that we can start to address major social issues. And so linked to the above, I’m interested in examining what conditions, practices, structures and attitudes are needed to create ongoing working partnerships with multiple stakeholders that can really deliver longterm change.

Something that gives me hope for 2019 and going forward

I’ve been reading in lots of different domains for my research on an upcoming project with the Barbican that aims to bring about a more nuanced public discussion on the challenges of an ageing society. And came across this lovely quote by Virginia Woolf:

“I don’t believe in ageing. I believe in forever altering one’s aspect to the sun.”

It resonated with me well beyond the topic of ageing, in terms of cultivating one’s ability to turn one’s aspect to whatever is ‘our sun’ — essentially an inspiring, nurturing and motivating idea, person or force.

Sophia Parker

What’s been significant?

It’s very hard to write about this without sounding schmalzy, but the power of love continues to blow me away. I see this in my personal life raising three small kids, and also in my professional life, running a charity where love is one of our core values. The process of offering love, and of experiencing love that is offered unconditionally and respectfully, grounds us. It makes us feel whole and seen. And it gives us agency. From that place, anything is possible.

When I was training as a coach in 2017 I did a lot of work on my own life purpose. At the time I confess I was a little mystified at what came up for me: to ‘transform through love’ but I feel like 2018 has really helped me to begin to see what that means and why it’s significant. We need to talk more about love!

What I’ve learned?

2018 was a year of poor mental health for me. Not pleasant in many ways, but it’s highlighted the degree to which our leadership models are dominated by a very warped ‘hero’ narrative. In these stories, we over-attribute change and impact to single individuals. We don’t allow leaders to admit vulnerabilities, and self-care is seen as a sign of weakness.

I’ve battled with this myself, and hope that 2019 is the year that I put self-care up there with all the other things I’m working on. But I don’t think this is something unique to me: I see it everywhere. In particular I have been shocked at how little self-care we expect from our frontline staff who are dealing with trauma and distress on a daily basis. Institutionally we fail these staff and collectively we are poorly equipped to support them to process the difficult issues and upsetting situations they are dealing with on a daily basis.

It’s refreshing to see a growing number of voices challenging these conventions around being a hero, but I feel we still have a way to go before it’s ok to put your own mental and physical needs before whatever else is on the to-do list. One of my mantras for my team in 2019 will be “Don’t be a hero” — by which I mean — do the best you can with what you’ve got, and look after yourself.

Something that gives me hope for 2019 and going forward

People’s agency and sense of efficacy is an abiding theme of my career and so it’s perhaps not surprising that my hopes for 2019 continue to focus on it. I think we are beginning to realise that power is in the eye of the beholder, and that where there is power there can also be resistance. Two quotes in particular that I love on this:

Michel Foucault: “Power is exercised rather than possessed”

Margaret Atwood: “This above all: to refuse to be a victim”

For me these translate into a series of questions like: what power do you have and how are you exercising it? What action can you take, right now, on an issue you care about? Who else do you see who can help you achieve the change you want to see? What can you do to ensure you aren’t making others victims? Where are you behaving as a victim and how can you change this?

Abby Rose

What’s been significant?

I have practised not always trying to please people. Since I was at school I have been trying to make sure people like me and that I’m nice. Through coaching last year I started to recognise that I didn’t have to be like this anymore, sometimes it’s helpful to be very straight with people and potentially upset them in the short-term to engender respect and a better relationship in the longer term, this enables supported growth. I realised that this is true integrity.

What I’ve learned?

Feel like I have to learn this again and again in many different contexts but this year I learnt once again the power of finding and staying true to my voice. When going out and sharing about our product with customers I got all worried about not knowing ‘how to sell’ etc. but what I learnt was that actually I needed to reconnect with my voice, speak my truth. People really appreciate when you speak your truth. Of course sharing your true voice isn’t always that simple. In this case I had to be very honest with myself about insecurities that were affecting my true voice. I had some hang ups about money particularly about having money, asking people for money and what my offering was worth. It is in facing these insecurities that I am finding my true voice in sharing how our software builds ecology, profitability and beauty on farms around the world.

Something that gives me hope for 2019 and going forward

Huge international multi-racial, multi-cultural people powered movements that unite millions committed to food sovereignty, from every corner of the planet. In particular, going to the Slow Food Terra Madre gathering in September and being with people of all colours and cultures, including many indigenous peoples, gives me hope that we the people will come together and nurture ourselves and the planet — and that food and farming is at the core of that. Another great examples of this is La Via Campesina!

The power of collective sisterhood and tuning into the moons cycles also gives me hope for 2019.

Jennie Winhall

What’s been significant?

This year I both set up a new company to host ALT/Now work and took on a permanent part time role at the Rockwool Foundation. I really appreciate the different and complementary opportunities these two roles give me to invest in a mission, an interdisciplinary team and collaborations with a broad range of people I believe in. I am more convinced than ever that the social challenges we face now require creative responses, not technical solutions.

What I’ve learned?

Invention, not compromise. Jerry McGrath introduced me to the work of Mary Parker Follet, who said that the true resolution of conflict is not compromise but invention. This is important for anyone doing the hard work of sytems innovation — when it comes to making the transition between current and new system approaches it’s easy to fall into compromise.. Anna Fjelsted and I are exploring how to train teams who are implementing new approaches to uphold radical principles when they meet ‘reality’ and find a third way through.

Something that gives me hope for 2019 and going forward

Radical Help went into a 3rd edition just before December. This is Hilary’s book about our experiments at Participle over the last ten years — and it’s a pattern book for a different model of public services, based on relational welfare. It gives me hope personally that so many people are picking up these ideas now — because I deeply believe that services based on these patterns make a significant difference to people’s ability to flourish.

Two groups of people give me hope. The Indigenous leaders I have met forging reconciliation in Canada — Karen Joseph, Marilyn Poitras, Dianne Roussin, Denise Williams. Here’s artist Michelle Nahanee’s decolonizing board game. And the original ALT/Now cohort who all remain committed to closing the gap between rich and poor in their various endeavours — such as Denise Hearn’s new book on the concentration of corporate wealth which I look forward to reading in the new year.

Anna Mouser

What’s been significant?

For the first time in my life I turned down a job, one that I actively applied for. It feels like an important watershed moment for me, I’ve tended to seize every opportunity that came my way in my career. But after a period of real reflection on not just the jobs I’ve done, but all the learning experiences I’ve had as an individual I could see that I had often done things because I felt I ought to, because I could do a good job or in some cases out of a fear that nothing else might come up and I’d miss the rent payment. Don’t get me wrong, pretty much everything I’ve done I’ve been all in with heart and hard work. But going forward I’m making a commitment to try and invest my time where I really want to be and where I really want to make impact.

Another part of next steps for me is having the right balance so that I can continue to invest a good chunk of my time in the other significant thing I’ve spent my year on, raising my small folk. As individuals in society we are involved in caring in a myriad ways, there are many different approaches and philosophies and these can be as difficult to talk about as Brexit as we all fear judgement for our choices. But I do want to reflect that when I’m asked about significance and meaning in the world this still feels like this area one shouldn’t talk about. I think this feeling is deeply rooted in our system and culture, it’s about where we place value and status. I remain interested in how we achieve a long term shift on how we think, feel and act when it comes to this side of life.

What I’ve learned?

I’m a political geek at the best of times but this year has been one of those where you can’t quite tear yourself away from reading about it even though it is like watching some horrible event unfold. I see a couple of patterns: first that people will vote for what appears to be an alternative with a good emotive story to tell, second that we are coming to the point where many of us are only looking for emotive story and no longer want to see the detail or nuance, even in each other. This is perhaps not a new commentary to read but within it lies the way out, if we are to stop the dangerous alternatives from rising up, we need to give space to true alternative thinking to emerge, not go into system lockdown. The more difficult thing is how to pull the debate back into balance where there is room for myth and story, but as a servant of facts and evidence, not the other way round. For positive change to occur in politics we somehow need to lose the tight grip on things as they are, a return to the status quo.

Something that gives me hope for 2019 and going forward

Its funny that in looking for hope for 2019 I feel I need to look back at 2018. So actually I’m going to opt for something that feels timeless to me. The concept of impermanence, that everything shifts, moves, changes, however you like to put it. Whether you feel this intuitively, rationally or practically it holds the same truth. And as everything changes there is always cause for hope and potential for change, always. Maybe I might also mention reading ‘Why the Caged Bird Sings’ by Maya Angelou. I have put off reading this for years as somehow I worried I’d find it too bleak knowing a little of what Angelou had lived through. But I was overwhelmed by the beauty and resilience with which Angelou conjures up her world even at its most challenging. It was in fact hugely heartening.

Cathy Runciman

What’s been significant?

Significant for me this year was that — with my partner in all things Atlas, Lisa Goldapple — we met our goals for our ‘still-very-much-a-start-up’ Atlas of the Future. The first was: to survive! (We live to fight another year, so bring on 2019!) The second was to develop new partnerships: and we were lucky to work with fantastic partners (thank you Goldsmiths, British Council, Divest Invest, Textiles Exchange, Comic Relief, City of Barcelona) to explore some questions that matter (Will creativity save us? How can textiles producers be better stewards of the earth’s resources? Why is divesting from fossil fuels is a moral and financial imperative? What can digital social innovation in a city achieve? What is ‘new power’ and where is the shift happening?). We also tested ourselves ‘in real life’ at our first major event — Fixing the Future — and heard a lot about the inspiration and ideas people are looking for to be part of shaping more diverse and equitable futures.

What I’ve learned?

This year has taught me how urgently we need to (re)learn how to listen: I’ve been challenged about the difference between listening in order to answer and truly listening. Hearing without listening seems to have got us into many fine messes but maybe we are ready to slow down, listen better, and ask more questions. I feel like I am, and I hope others will help by holding me to that.

Something that gives me hope for 2019 and going forward

I sense that 2019 will be a year of collective action and, taking inspiration from Lynne Segal at our recent Point People/Atlas of the Future Collective City event, that gives me joy.

Ella Saltmarshe

What’s been significant?

Developing the Long Time project has been significant for me on many levels. The project focuses on fostering our capacity to care about the long-term future of our planet/ species. It is the culmination of years of thinking and working on climate change communications. As part of my work on story, I’ve become interested in how to shift foundational narratives that could raise the tide for all environmental organisations. The Long Time project is based on a question about whether stretching people’s sense of time and their emotional relationship to the future, can get them to take more responsibility for it. It has been incredible to develop this work in an emergent way with fellow point person Beatrice Pembroke, and to see the real enthusiasm with which it’s being taken up all over the place by broadcasters, cultural organisations, funders & financial institutions. We’re cooking up lots on this in 2019. The work is incredibly personally meaningful for me- it’s changed how I view my place in the epic, unfolding history of this planet and it’s got me to me to ask myself, what does it mean to be a good ancestor?

What I’ve learned?

To focus on sharing questions rather than imposing answers. Build community around your questions instead of thinking you have to wait until you have all the answers to act.

Something that gives me hope for 2019 and going forward

To be honest at the end of the complexity and craziness of 2018, I have no idea how hopeful I feel, but luckily over the years I’ve realised that I don’t have to feel hopeful to act. The idea about hope that I always come back to belongs to Gramsci. He wrote of the pessimism of the intellect and the optimism of the will. This resonates, as regardless of how hopeful I feel, I find myself repeatedly doing hopeful things. As Vaclav Havel said:

“Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”

Eleanor Ford

What’s been significant?

Perspective in hindsight. This year I have taken a three year programme (The Good Lab) through to the final part of its lifecycle. We have launched new businesses out of the programme, but, perhaps more importantly, we have set out to capture and share the learnings of the practical journey of ‘transformation’ with those that have taken part. It’s been a complicated, messy, prescient, purposeful path and I have begun the sense-making process of assessing the impact and value, and reflecting on the course that we decided to charter. It’s reminding me that any initiative of change is difficult, and about more that just what is materially evidenced — and certainly takes time and distance to understand. Both the activity and the reflections on the ‘how’ feel significant.

Also a massive personally significant year in caring for one of my dearest friends as she battled a rare aggressive cancer, with tiny babies, and seems to have made it out of the woods. Again makes me reflect on time and its preciousness.

What I’ve learned?

Recently we came across the concept of “Eco leadership” at Simon Western’s course. It is a bit of a clumsy term but one that really resonates with me and allowed me to articulate better the way I have always chosen to lead. I have always seen my ‘style’ in relief to ‘command and control’ leadership that I felt I ‘should’ demonstrate — it felt male, authoritative and hard to reach. Instead having a way to point to distributed, instinctive, collaborative, hopefully generous, and open ways to operate as leaders has been important to me. It’s been said before but suddenly felt robust.

Something that gives me hope for 2019 and going forward

Ella mentioned the Gramsci quote I live by! Love it. But despite everything going on at the crazy time, lots of things give me hope — there are certainly books, there are definitely people (many pointy ones), and many new initiatives and projects. But as I am writing this I am listening to Rudyard Kipling’s ‘If’ on spotify, and it’s reminding me that it is all about the long game..

“If you can dream — and not make dreams your master; If you can think and not make thoughts your aim; If you can meet Triumph and Disaster And treat those two imposters just the same;”

It’s reminding me to not give too much importance to the now.

Cassie Robinson

What’s been significant?

I’ve made significant changes in my life. I find it really hard to let go but I have let go of a lot this year — of people and places that didn’t value me and who needed me to make myself smaller. I’ve ended relationships, jobs and friendships. Endings are hard and relationships that feel difficult are often a mirror to something in yourself that you aren’t being honest about.

What I’ve learned?

I love this from @wildfemine on Instagram.

Something that gives me hope for 2019 and going forward

The people behind organisations like Kin, Girl Dreamer, Fearless Futures and Cradle Community, and the networks, community groups and voices that organisations like NEON are supporting. Alongside this, people like Sascha Romanovitch, departing CEO of Grant Thornton, who represented something far too rare in the corporate world — someone who cared about social and public values and recognised the need for bold change — yet the shareholders couldn’t face the truth. The Financial Times described her leaving as “a challenger of the old guard cuts loose”. And let’s face it, we need many more people to take that kind of stand.

Kelsey is the Founder of Cradle Community — I met her on NEON’s movement building course and she’s so inspiring in her ongoing activism.

Charly Cox

What’s been significant?

Finding a tribe to keep me honest in my ambitions around climate change… I’ve spent nearly three years journeying into environmentalism, mostly alone, while watching my old tribe recede from view. At times it felt like thrashing through brambles in a bikini: it was damned hard and I was ill equipped to do it. Along the road, I had so many conversations with helpful sages, but this year the turning point came in meeting and then building powerful friendships with other travellers, who are joyously at a similar stage to me. I knew that I needed them, but I hadn’t realised how hard it would be to find these people until I started. Looking back I can see why it is hard to find a tribe, and why we need to prioritise this when we start to make change. It was hard because I needed to find people who were a) at the same stage in thinking and readiness (and the vulnerability of reticence) to act as me, b) who didn’t have all the answers either, and c) who did have a deep conviction. I met many people for whom some of those things were true, but they were either just arriving on the path and looking to me for guidance, or already a long way down the road, giving me assistance. The solidarity of fellow travellers was like a tonic when it arrived, and created it’s own vulnerability — I had to resist the urge to cling to them once I’d found them.

The three people that have formed my core tribe this year have more than anything kept me honest when my fear told me to go back to business as usual. They helped me push my new website over the line and say ‘I’m a Climate Change Coach’ out loud until it stopped feeling alien. They have given me a feeling of a normal, when the old world that I was leaving made me feel anything but.

I’ve put the tribe as the most significant thing of 2018 because of what it in turn unlocked. By meeting fellow travellers, I have also come to realise that I like being a bridge between the old and the new world, and that I don’t want to become one of the sages on the roadside, at least not about environmentalism itself. Instead I’ve learned that I want to know everything there is to know about behaviour change, because that feels like the heart of the problem, to me at least. That realisation about behaviour change was possibly the biggest, and was the eureka moment I’ve been hacking through those brambles to find. As a coach, realising that we can solve climate change by getting better at human change and resilience, was as much a lightbulb as a relief that I did have a role to play after all. Again, it was through conversations with these comrades in arms that the light was switched on. Without them, I’d still be in the dark. And as a result I then launched The Climate Change Coaches at the very tail end of 2018, proving the concept that you can coach everyday people about climate change just as you can about anything else that concerns them. I was overwhelmed by the positive response from colleagues who gave their time for free on a weekend right before Christmas on an untested idea. In a lot of ways, it proved a bigger point: people want to help when you give them a way to do so. I was going to make the Climate Change Coaches my big significant act of 2018, but to do so would be to miss the foundation stone on which this and so many other things are becoming possible. Relationships are at the heart of everything, and it’s from relationships that we create possibility and action. I’m immensely grateful to have stumbled onto such a can-do, crazy smart and fired up group of fellow travellers this year, and for the first time in a long time I’m excited again. It feels as always like there’s work to be done, but unusually like that work will give us energy, not sap it.

What I’ve learned?

Focus is hard! I thought for a long time that my poor ability to focus must be a result of spending the last two years multi-tasking around a toddler, but single friends tell me they have no such excuse! I’ve had to learn the hard way this year that juggling less makes you better at the few things that you are juggling. I know, I’m a genius. Too often I find myself saying “I’ll save that article for later/when I have time/another day”, because it will involve more than 10 minutes of my time. Nevermind that I can easily spend thirty minutes on a single email… emails are categorised in my head as ‘a quick job’ and reading quietly (something I surely must have done during my degree and my masters) required ‘a whole clear day’ in my diary. Reader: those long clear days never come. Instead we need to cultivate the inner calm that slows us down enough to run at a gear low enough for reading that report or watching that lecture. My engine feels like it is constantly running a little bit too fast, so that whenever I sit down, I can feel a revving inside my chest. My body is out of sync. If I were a car, I’d be sent for a retune. I guess the equivalent for a person is a meditation retreat, but who has time for that ;)

It can seem very chicken and egg to try to work out why you struggle to focus. Is it that you’re trying to do too much, or that you’ve worked yourself into a frenzy and couldn’t even do one thing well, if that was the only thing there was to do? This year someone introduced a new to-do list idea to me, which is new to me but old to the world, and involved splitting your to-dos between rocks (important, big work) and sand (the small stuff that can easily fill a day on its own but means you never get any rocks done). I had a lot of sand that was taking up a lot more time that it should have done. But I also had a LOT of rocks. At the same time I didn’t have a lot of clear diary. Each week there was a morning teaching at a university and two whole days coaching. I worked out I could comfortably manage 6 hours of ‘rocks’ in two-hour chunks. That felt like 3 rocks. I had 6 each week at least. I tried to defy my own system, determined to prove that I could do it all. That was exhausting. But I also learnt that when I know what I’ve got to do, I can be uber-focussed. I could walk out of my seminar room, sit down with a sandwich and ninja that two hours of work. It began to feel like focus wasn’t my problem, lack of time in which to focus was. I have had to make some tough choices, as a result of all of this. I have quit undergraduate teaching in favour of the much more flexible and occasional MBA. That hurt because I love teaching students, but looking ahead into 2019, I already see more space and more concentration ahead. I’m longing for days in the library working quietly. As an extrovert, I know I’m overdoing it when I long for silence! I still feel like my motor is running on too fast, but I trust a little that if I make (and hold) space in my diary and concentrate on a small handful of things well, I can retune the engine. Watch this space… slowly.

Something that gives me hope for 2019 and going forward

Watching Greta Thunberg tear the COP 24 audience a new one was a moment of real ‘pull your finger out Charly’ hope for me. I found her so deeply inspiring, as much for what she said as for the ‘I don’t care if you like me’ attitude with which she said it. I feel like a generation and more of women has been socialised, myself included, to rock the boat as little as possible, and ‘make nice’ for everyone around them. Overcoming that is a real struggle when you want to do something incendiary or even just plain different. Greta is the latest in a long way of people who have started to make significant noise about climate change and this gives me real hope that we can put and keep this on the political and corporate agenda in 2019. I was just sent the below quote, which seems to sum up the realisation that we’re starting to come to now as a civilisation. My big hope for 2019 is that we can start to move people from “I want to do something but I don’t know how” to the here’s how.

‘You’re on Earth. There’s no cure for that’

Samuel Beckett

Sadly, Sneh Jani, Jen Lexmond, Nish Dewan, Victoria Stoyanova and Beatrice Pembroke weren’t able to contribute to this, but you can catch up with what their doing via the links on their names.

Last year’s review pretty much sums up the work we have continued doing this year — Systems Changers with Lankelly Chase, supporting their place-based Associates (and now the Children’s Society too), navigating complexity with the International Futures Forum, and we finished the work with Agenda, on place-based systems change through a gendered lens (what a mouthful!).

The difference between Networked Leadership, Systems Leadership and Digital Leadership ?

Cassie Robinson.

Nov 8, 2018

I have moved between various communities of practice over the last decade and in the last 3 or 4 years I’ve heard people talk about networked leadership, or systems leadership or digital leadership.* I was thinking about what each of these mean (to me) and what I’ve seen as the benefits and challenges of each, and where they are of course talking about the same thing anyway.

I think of them simply as:

Networked Leadership

Understanding that we are in a networked world, and that change can really only happen through networks. Anne-Marie Slaughter’s book, The Chessboard and the Web is good on this. I also wrote a blog about a networked mindset last year.

Systems Leadership

Understanding that change is continually happening anyway and having the ability to see and understand the interconnections between things and the root causes of issues, whilst stewarding all those different parts of the puzzle forwards. (The now quite old article in Stanford Social Innovation Review is a good overview of this). We also created this site back in 2014 talking to a group of ‘systems leaders’ about their practice (excuse the awful videos!) and created this publication with Oxford University in 2015 about the different elements of systems change practice. It’s also worth reading Collaborate’s new compendium of Systems Leadership in Local Government.

Digital Leadership

I think there are two aspects of this actually.

One is that you are adept at working in an agile way — making use of the way software is built (openly, iteratively and through data driven design), to inform the culture of how you work — this is what people mean by the culture of digital.

The second is that you have an understanding of technology — a basic level of knowledge about how the internet works and an understanding of how technology effects all the different aspects of your organisation, as well as its impact on the wider context (community and society) in which your organisation operates.

These two things often get conflated which is unhelpful.

The good and the bad

What I’m interested in is how the good aspects of each of these can combine. People in the systems change space are great at understanding what’s really going on, at building trusted relationships, at surfacing what’s difficult (especially power), and at holding complexity. What can happen though is that moving into action can be quite stifled. It can feel at times like there is inertia, or opaqueness, or so much “deep democracy” to ensure that every voice is included, that you end up forgetting what you were all trying to achieve in the first place.

In the digital community, people are great at making things happen, at being pragmatic, at working in the open and at pace. The other side of this though, is that it doesn’t always feel authentic in terms of acknowledging the complexity, and the messiness of human life. It can work well for transactional government services but doesn’t neatly translate to other contexts. The urge to get things done can also knock important things out of the way, and this means they don’t always take root.

And just being networked isn’t enough without intent, without actively curating your networks to be more and more diverse — you end up existing in a huge echo chamber, talking to the same people and getting your theories of change validated by people just like you.

New Additions

*I actually started this blog 9 months ago (think what that says about my blog backlog!) and since then, there’s a few more to include — Collective Leadership, Responsible Leadership (something Anita Roddick was talking about in the 90’s but in a different context), and Ecosystem Leadership.

Responsible Leadership is something Doteveryone are doing. Janet Hughes wrote this blog when she and I kicked off the programme in 2017, and now Alex Mecklenburg is doing a great job of adapting it to be fit for purpose with senior leaders at City Hall. I’m hoping all City Leaders will adopt this approach. Like Theo Blackwell said at TiCTEC Local on Tuesday — it is the responsibility of city leaders to consider what they commission and advocate for, especially in relation to technology.

Collective Leadership is something that the government is doing. I was involved in the scoping (through interviews and sharing my experience) of this work that Sandra Armstrong and her team are leading. This kind of leadership embodies the principle of ‘greater than the sum of our parts.’ This is also the kind of leadership that makes sense for Mariana Mazzucato’s work and IIPP, when thinking about what kind of person/people are needed to lead Mission-oriented Innovation.

Ecosystem leadership (creating shared intelligence across a system) draws on a few practices. The movement building work of NEON and Ayni Institute is worth looking at. The now relatively old but still useful writing on taking a collective impact approach is too. It also links to “Generous Leadership” a term my new employer, the Big Lottery Fund, talks about — having a collective awareness and generosity towards the wider set of people and organisations with whom your work is connected.

My personal practice

The book that has most influenced me in terms of leadership is Dancing At The Edge by Graham Leicester and Maureen O’hara. The Point People are currently doing work with the International Futures Forum to build on the contents of the book, and share it more widely. Some of our early interpretation and translation of this work is below. This is a list of some things we think are important to know about when leading in an increasingly complex world, and in a world that is fostering more polarity, and more inequality:

• Strategy — not about imposing goals on the external world but about reading the landscape and seeing the potential for what will happen next

• Seeing the whole and root causes

• Sensing opportunity and resonance at an individual, group and system level

• Giving time to sensing and seeing patterns

• Doing reflexive practice — which is like wisdom in action

• Constantly moving between your internal world and the external context

• Seeing movement and flows, not fixed stocks

• Active listening — listening is generally hugely undervalued

• Problem setting and framing, not assuming you can problem solve

• Be driven by the problem and or curiosity rather than by yours and others skillset

• Don’t reduce the problem to fit the existing competencies you and others have, but expand ourselves instead (transformational competence)

• Build wise groups and create conditions for collective efficacy

• Develop competency in the old and the new — this involves warning of the threats of not-changing, heralding the new and encouraging commitment and passion.

This is a lofty list — when we publish that work it will talk much more about what these things look like in practice and what they enable.

A few people I’d like to acknowledge that I see really embodying this kind of leadership are Kit Collingwood and Imandeep Kaur. There are many more people of course but I’ve personally experienced their leadership on projects.

I’m also hugely grateful for the Action Learning Set of ‘Digital Leaders’ I’ve been part of for 18 months that Janet Hughes and I set up. And the informal learning group I’m a part of, of phenomenal women leaders in the social sector,with whom I meet every month and have learnt so much from — Catherine Howe, Anna Birney, Rowan Conway, Alice Evans, Anna Randle and the elusive Helen Goulden!

The ‘how’ of systems change

Cassie Robinson.

Nov 6, 2018

A few weeks ago, the Point People ran a one day workshop for Lankelly Chase and their Place Based Associates, talking through some of the thinking, methods and tools we use for designing systemically for change.

This is part of the Point People’s ongoing relationship with Lankelly Chase to help build the field of ‘systems change’ and especially the need that we all feel to “democratise” it. My colleague Ella Saltmarshe is writing a longer blog post about that, coming soon!

The idea of the day was that through us sharing *how* we do things, those that joined the session could go away and use some of tools in their own work — all of whom are involved in place-based systems change. Some of the participants included Collaborate, MEAM and Save The Children’s Local Systems Change team.

We tried to deliver the session in a way that made practical sense — when might the different tools and approaches be useful? How do you use them? And with whom?

The slides we created for the session are here. They show the different elements of the Systems Changers programme (Seeing the System, Finding Flex, Experimenting with Change), some of the tools and methods we use, and when we use them. We hope people find them useful.

After the session I reflected (and then tweeted) on how organisations doing “systems change” work need to get much better at describing, in detail, what they actually do. It was also one of the things that made our work for Agenda (#awomansplace) really challenging— when we were doing interviews with ‘systems change practitioners’ they seemed to find it incredibly hard to get down to detail.

I think there’s a lot of..

“Build coalitions and relationships across the system”

“Work with power”

“Build empathy and trust”

“Agree on shared outcomes”

“Demonstrate generous leadership” etc etc…

….but if people want these approaches to spread then what’s needed is a much more granular telling and showing of the *how* — hence my tweet.

Thank you to Ella Saltmarshe and Jennie McShannon, my co-designers and co-facilitators on the day.