System transformation approach to enable “paths for everyone”
PRACTICE UPDATE #1
How do we “build collective alignment to transformative intent”?
Two of my favourite people and mentors Milica Begovic Radojevic, PhD & Giulio Quaggiotto did an excellent reflection on this and what it takes to pivot to strategic innovation. I share their view on the limitations of the current development paradigm: in particular “the projectised logic of our work” and the continued search for “unicorns, single point solutions and industrial scale”. These approaches are “a poor fit with the complex, systemic nature of the challenges we are facing that call for constant adaptation and accelerated learning.”
This vantage point also inspires our work in the change collective En Vej til Alle (translation “paths for everyone”). Here, we are attempting to create new commitment and ownership dealing with the challenge of excluded and vulnerable youth. Around 50,000 young people are not just without jobs and education, but are systematically disconnected from society’s communities. The problem is complex, with fundamental social, ethical, economic and democratic dimensions.
Decades of reforms have only reproduced system failures. We need not just a new reform approach, but a commitment to develop new systems of care and possibility that enables paths for everyone to communities, education and jobs for all young people — regardless of background and conditions.
In our journey so far we’ve been joining forces with like-minded organisations (including Modstrøm, The Academy for Social Innovation, Social Development Centre SUS, and Mobilize) to mobilise a new systemic change approach and influence the political agenda through the ongoing work of the current reform commission.
But what does it actually entail? What does a more strategic innovation effort call for? How can we best begin to catalyse a system transformation movement?
And what role should the role of philanthropy (in this case Bikubenfonden) play? As development partner, mission manager, and/or enabling infrastructure for social development?
In the following I share 8 interlinked elements that we are prioritising and experimenting with to enable a different kind of change effort — and that we hope will develop into an actual transformative change movement. This section will feature the first four — along with an open invitation to fellow peers to engage with us on either or all of these:
1. Building a system change coalition
System changing activities is as much about finding out what we need to change as it is about mobilising the will and strategic support for transformative change. To proactively support this work, we are prioritising to develop a system change coalition.
Led by The Academy for Social Innovation, this part of En Vej til Alle’s work is both about mobilising a new kind of change coalition that is able to drive policy change through new collaborative models (inspired by collective impact work and in particular of the successful “Home to all” Alliance working on reading homelessness in Denmark. Here the combination of shared intent between significant stakeholders provides a voice and expertise with high levels of legitimacy and system knowledge.
This work inherently will also provoke and facilitate debate about the purpose and potential of systems transformation — again reinforcing the need for collective meaning and sense-making. The challenge with these across-system alliances is both getting the right mix and level of engagement as well as finding enough common ground and getting to concrete agreed priorities.
This is ongoing work at the moment — with 25+ relevant organisations currently committing to participate and contribute. One crucial element is using these collective dialogues to co-create powerful narratives that can work as invitations into a process of discovery (as Charlie Leadbeater recently highlighted the importance of as part of the System Innovation Learning Festival).
The challenge with approaches like collective impact — As Millie and Giulio also highlights — inherently means finding ways of building
“the organisational will and capacity to question the coherence of our interventions, elevate our ambition and signal the intent to seek new paradigms and bring our partners along on the journey”.
This needs to happen not just within one organisational framework, but across many organisations’ missions and initiatives.
2. Developing a shared system-changing portfolio
Together with the young people themselves, we are trying to develop (or frame) a new system-changing portfolio of initiatives and learning-oriented activities: one that we hope can become the glue that holds a new systemic change effort together (as Dan Hill would phrase it).
A portfolio approach can be a proactive and humble way to deal with risk landscapes, complex problems and high levels of uncertainty around both cause and effect. We have a new systemic proposition. Not as a specific goal of the final destination, but to enable engagement across the system around shared possibilities, exploration and learning.
We hope that it — in time — helps to strategically build and mobilise sense-making efforts and development initiatives that are relevant, coherent and proportional in relation to the problem we are trying to solve.
The most important design principle for portfolio development is that it helps us “intervene systematically through ecologies of interconnected interventions” — recognising that no one is responsible for the whole.
This is a similar approach to the approach of Graham Boeckh Foundation on youth mental health in Canada. Similarly, we are taking an approach where core narratives of the future system will provide a shared framework for thinking differently about youth care and development in a different way. We are attempting to spread the underlying principles of a new system by investing in developing the infrastructure that connects the many different projects and activities that together must help address the mission’s goals.
Taking this approach, also inspired by the work of UNDP, Chora Foundation, Sitra and Climate-KIC among others, our role can potentially be to put structure to things that are unclear and messy: taking the focus away from projects, leveraging a more strategic innovation approach. We have to allow for being pulled in the directions that effective practice demonstrates and implicates, and take responsibility for “probing for new ways forward to demonstrate possibility”.
UNDP recently developed a comprehensive and practical competency framework for strategic innovation focusing on portfolio-based approaches — articulating the mindset shifts, attitudes and skills groups most in play when leveraging this type of work.
In our development journey, I would particularly emphasise the importance of two elements: firstly, the mindset shift from an organisation delivering your own projects (“outside observer”) to seeing yourself not just as part of the system, but as a unique and essential asset in changing it. Secondly, shifting from a planning logic focused on targets and end-results (“destinations”) to setting a shared direction with a learning intent (without certainty around outputs).
We are right in the middle of trying to facilitate these shifts and will share more on this work during 2023.
3. Knowledge mobilisation: from project to patterns
A core part of a successful portfolio approach — as also described by Giulio and Millie — is collective sense-making: to identify connections, patterns and opportunities between relevant organisations and their development initiatives. Firstly, to “collectively craft a ‘north star’ that is transformative”. We have involved youth themselves in defining this intent and direction.
Secondly, to create more coherence with our intent in an otherwise messy space of projects and initiatives — recognising an already active field of practice featuring many promising initiatives and ambitious stakeholders. We’ve tried to, using Giulio’s phrase, move from “‘the dance floor’ of project implementation to ‘the balcony’” to be able to create more strategic orientation and prioritisation of a potential of a share system changing portfolio.
So far we’ve invested in strategic pattern recognition across three interlinked knowledge areas:
- Deep user knowledge patterns: gaining deep understanding and involvement of the people that we are trying to serve as well as creating generative narratives featuring their real-life experiences.
- Practice patterns: showcasing and looking across the initiatives that are showing great promise in working differently with marginalized youth and synthesize the patterns of a more effective system practice
- Future system shifts: patterning what desired shifts and priorities a collectively desired new system calls for — with the potential of building core change narratives around them.
In particular in relation to practice patterns, we’ve seen the value of focusing on what Dorte Bukdahl and Robin Vickery analysed as “useful ingredients” of promising practice. Essentially, this is providing practical starting point for the actual design principles for solution concepts with a high likelihood of making a positive difference for troubled youth. This is similar to InWithForward’s work in applying research-based “change mechanisms” in their co-design work to ensure impactful consistency across their portfolio of work.
We are currently testing whether this combined pattern recognition approach can provide a strong and practical knowledge foundation for building collective alignment to transformative intent and enabling shared action.
The greatest challenge in my view is getting stakeholders to see patterns as a strategic starting point (as opposed to desperately searching for the silver bullet example that can work as THE model for the public sector service reform). This is not only about figuring out “where patterns relate to intent”, as Giulio has phrased it previously. It is equally about framing, articulating and ‘branding’ particular patterns as legitimate generative vantage points for systemic change.
We hope to be able to provide a new sense of coherence. Going with patterns as the point of departure allows us to explore a new rationale of planning, going beyond projects and single interventions towards more ecosystemic investment in types of concepts and solutions that are showing potential.
4. Practice-led R&D collectives
One of the things we are trying out — partly to deal with the challenge of creating legitimate generative vantage points for systemic change — is to build up practice-led R&D collectives. The overall intent of these is similar to what the important point made by Charlie Leaderbeater during the System Innovation Learning Festival about the importance of being “open to learn into change”.
We need to allow for being pulled in the directions that effective practice demonstrates and implicates. This inherently brings us to deal with three interrelated challenges:
- How can promising local initiatives drive systemic changes at scale?
- How do we best apply and build further on development initiatives within their own organisational setting and dynamic?
- How best to situate knowledge mobilisation and development within existing practice with a new shared vision about the future system?
The hypothesis we are testing in this light — led by the great partners Social Development SUS and Mobilize — is that we need to build up new R&D-focused learning collectives led by the practitioners themselves.
Similar to the great work by Jason Pearman and this team on Youth Employment and Skills Strategy at ESDC in the Canadian Government, we will aim to offer signals to decision-makers on key patterns and “next practices” that need to be encouraged and designed for — enabling a policy and funding environment that increases the scale-up support for promising interventions.
Our point of departure will different stages of the life journey of the young people and will focus on systemic features with the potential of better outcomes for marginalised youth: for example redistribution of decision making competence, new alternative development arenas, and/or life situation focus (rather than system-generated criteria of success).
The strategic starting point is the patterns we already see and the initiatives already showing promise to:
- Accelerate learning and further explore and validate effective practice-based solution patterns and develop the design principles (change mechanisms, ingredients) with which to change systemic approach to marginalized youth.
- Surface and provide more nuance about the systemic mindset and preconditions for initiatives with system shifting potential
- Make the case for what needs our learning focus — including which assumptions do we need to test through experiments to understand their full potential and possible impact.
We also see this as a way of experimenting with elements of what could be a shared system R&D development agenda and future outcomes-focused learning infrastructure and policy support function.
This would have a dual purpose: firstly, we are trying to learn from and with leading practice initiatives that drive new intelligence and illustrate the potential of new system purpose (on behalf of the broader development field).
Secondly, we wish to open up opportunity spaces instead of narrowing down our options. The outputs should provide new possibilities, not unequivocal answers. This is why we prioritise identifying new patterns and “concept visions” rather than the promise of implementable ideas. In this way, they can become the experimental driving force that both expands and accelerates our learning as well as mobilises a new dynamic between policy and practice.
If we were to dream big, this would be a first step in not only ensuring a more practice-oriented, applicable and forward-looking learning approach, but also constitute a precursor to continuous investment in new social R&D and knowledge mobilisation functions. This would take us away from a multitude of single projects and towards continuous integrated learning, bringing us closer to developing a R&D system for social challenges — similar to the work in South Australia led by The Australian Centre for Social Innovation.
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Elements 5–8 to follow soon. Please get in touch at jcn@bikubenfonden.dk and/or see www.envejtilalle.dk for more details.
Jesper is Program Director at Bikubenfonden and Co-founder of States of Change. He previously worked several years at UK Innovation Fund and think tank Nesta and Danish public innovation unit MindLab. He holds a PhD in Social Anthropology.
