“That’s the work!” — Observations from a Practitioner of Systems Innovation

What does it mean to stand in the messy middle?

Photo by Samuel Austin on Unsplash

When I recently presented my work on systemic investing to one of the world’s largest multilateral financial institutions, they didn’t get it. It was frustrating.

Then I was told by a colleague that my work was too abstract and that the value proposition was unclear. This was frustrating, too.

A few days later we received an email from the team at a public sector organization involved in one of Climate-KIC’s Deep Demonstrations. They misunderstood what we had put forward in a proposal and wanted us to adopt a much more traditional approach. This felt like going back to square one.

Then my wife told me that she continues to have issues with the municipality overseeing her community-supported agriculture project. She has found it exhausting having to explain to their bureaucrats, over and over again, that her project’s requirements differ from those of large-scale industrialized farming.

Her complaint reminded me of a recent conversation with a senior manager at a UK-based charity, who struggles to make her board adopt a mindset shift away from project-based, output-oriented interventions toward longer-term, more open-ended engagements. Reflecting on her struggle, the senior manager said: “I guess that’s the work.”

And then it dawned on me: “She’s right. That is the work.”

Working in the field of systems innovation is utterly fascinating. It’s about experimenting and designing and sensemaking and field building and about thought leadership and the promise of pushing boundaries. It’s about co-creative workshops, colourful whiteboards, and provocative blog posts.

But it’s not only about that.

In fact, most of the time, it’s not about that.

I took this picture at the end of Climate-KIC’s co-creative strategy session in October 2019. This is what working in systems innovation sometimes looks like. However, the work isn’t always about minifigs, sticky notes, and imaginary co-workers called Rosie.

Most of the time, working in systems innovation is about explaining, listening, explaining again, and listening again, without becoming evangelical about your own views or condescending towards someone else’s.

It’s about holding the space during awkward pauses and blank stares.

It’s about being able to stay the course when your board’s chairperson calls your work naive. It’s about having the patience to build something structurally different when others are busy doing tangible — but often incremental — things.

And it’s about keeping your courage, believing in your work, and marching on, even if it’s lonely at times.

That’s the work.

The patience. The tolerance. The empathy. The drive to keep going. The courage to follow your own convictions.

This is part of what it means to stand in the space my colleagues Michelle Zucker and Alice Evans call the “messy middle”.

Systems innovation is hard work. But if you persevere and that large multilateral financial institution adopts systems thinking, that public sector organization starts seeing the value of structurally different approaches, that municipality changes its land-use policies to better accommodate community-supported agriculture, and the charity sector gets comfortable with emergent innovation models… well, then you have accomplished what you set out to do: changing the system.