Building capacity for systems change

Our ambition is to shift the landscape of children’s social care around children’s needs to create greater social impact. But what do we mean by this? Children’s lives are complex — their needs are constantly shifting, adapting and evolving. We recognise we need to do more in how we consciously design and respond to this complexity, in order to address the root causes of the inequality facing some children.

At Barnardo’s in the Service Design team, we are exploring what taking a more holistic ‘systems-informed’ approach means, using a design lens to embed systemic practices, principles and working methods into how we respond to the needs of a child throughout their lives.

In this blog series on taking a ‘systems-informed’ approach, myself and Gemma Drake will outline our journey so far in understanding and defining the mindsets, tactics and roles towards systems approaches.

What does being ‘systems-informed’ mean to us?

Defining this in a large organisation is an ongoing evolution and challenge.

To us, it means that we seek to make sense of — and operate with — a view of how we:

1. Support children and their families and carers through our services
2. Address organisational structures and behaviours, to focus on how we frame and respond to problems we are addressing
3. Act at a societal level to address the root causes of complex issues

Across these levels, we are creating a portfolio of approaches (not a single solution or innovation) so that Barnardo’s can enable impactful and sustainable change from policy advocacy, research, new ways of working, the right services responding to future needs and joined-up actions across the sector and with communities.

We’ve been testing this approach in our long-term co-located strategic partnerships such as our work with Leicestershire County Council with children in and leaving care. This draws upon learning we adopted from ‘the social design pathway matrix’ and other approaches to help us map the ‘system-informed’ approach, which we will further discuss in upcoming posts.

Diagram: the different skills and actions needed to create systems change. Credit: Social Design Pathways

We need to play new roles

Barnardo’s role in addressing the needs of vulnerable children across the UK has traditionally been as a ‘service provider’, a role which comes with particular assumptions and capabilities in how we believe we should act.

We work with sensitive and complex challenges every day as practitioners in this space, and we need to champion new approaches.

We know that we cannot do this alone and recognise we must play different roles in certain circumstances and some simultaneously.

Through our observations with our colleagues, we are consciously exploring different roles that as individuals, programme teams and as an organisation, we can play. These roles require different actions, behaviours and mindsets; our aim is to continue to develop what these mean and how we communicate their purpose both internally and externally. We believe each of these key skills builds the capabilities for transformational change:

Service Provider (our traditional role)
Delivery of services and programmes, which meet our user needs today with continual use of evidence and feedback to improve how we provide services while looking for patterns in changing unmet needs in communities, to enhance the way we provide support in future.

Convenor
Actively bring organisations and communities together, with different voices and knowledge and provide safe spaces for differing opinions to be heard and to allow new relationships to form. For example, sector working groups, community events, local authority partnerships.

Catalyser
Openly sharing and exploring new ways forward and building further ‘joined-up’ practice across our organisational boundaries. Provide challenge, investment, new knowledge and energy across the sector and within our own organisation. For example, strategic partnerships, innovative programmes, policy advocacy and communications, open ways of working.

Co-designer
Creating opportunities to involve children and young people, their families, communities and direct workers in the design of new approaches, programmes, products and services that are built around children’s needs. Taking an active approach to balance power, enhance child-led decision making and ensure authentic co-design experiences beyond traditional views of ‘participation or consultation’.

For example, co-design in strategic partnerships, and through our work within Barnardo’s service design team to design the next generation of products and services such as Journey, Barnardo’s 4 U, leaving care’s new service.

Unlocking new perspectives in the world of children’s social care

To understand where we might create change and encourage systemic thinking and action, we need to collectively communicate the models, patterns and perspective in which we work.

These three patterns below are familiar to us all in children’s social care, but by actively considering these through those new ‘role’ lenses (beyond our traditional view of ‘service provider’) we unlock new dynamics to how we create social impact:

1. The ecosystem of a child: designing with an understanding and empathy for the ecosystem of support and influence around a child in everyday life that shapes how they develop.
2. Life-course of a child: Moving from moments of achieving ‘tasks’ (single services) to understanding integrative journeys and enhancing moments that have cumulative or latent effects in life course outcomes.
3. Our organisational response: The way in which as an organisation we structure ourselves and act in society, our practices, the culture we create, how we bring about collective knowledge, how we make sense of issues and articulate aspirations for the future.

In our next post, we will outline the mindsets and tactics that are being consciously nurtured across the organisation to move us towards a collective systemic approach. We will also explore the learning and challenges in doing this in a large heritage organisation, explore specific case studies to bring this to life and lastly talk about how we measure that change.

Melanie is Head of Service Design at Barnardos’s. To get the latest updates from the Barnardo’s Digital & Technology team, subscribe to blog.barnar.do on Medium, and follow #FutureBarnardos on Twitter.

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