Alliance Mapping for Change
How we’re learning to use systems tools to harness the power of alliances and influence systems on the Support Rethought programme.
A little while back, we wrote about the importance of young people as the experts in the systems with which they interact and as experts in what needs to change. In that blog, we also talked about listening when trying to make change. One of the things we said was:
We listen to our partners and figure out what constraints they are working within (ridiculous workloads, broken bureaucracy and silo working are just some that come to mind).
And that’s just what we’ve been trying to do. In the past month alone we have met with over ten individual partner organisations all working in the complex Child Sexual Abuse support system to learn from each other and to form alliances.
One of the things we have been thinking about is how we leverage these new networks to improve those things in the system that expert young people are telling us aren’t working and to create change.
For some time now we’ve been using graphs and matrices to help us plot potential paths to change in terms of their level of difficulty and their possible impact, kind of like this…
A systems changer loves nothing more than a pretty graph so we thought we could take this one and put it to other good uses. Partially inspired by a brilliant presentation given to us by our colleague Sarah Wayman on how this is done in campaigning and also by tools shared with us by Adam Groves, we’ve started ‘plotting’ our alliances.
By doing so we have been able to think about the impact different influencers have on the changes we are trying to achieve. So how does that work?
Mapping influencers
Imagine our mission is to preserve the natural state of a beach. There are a countless number of people who could be involved in this mission, and who could influence it both positively and negatively. We might have the local bird sanctuary, who are really keen to support us but keep running out of funding or a particularly enthusiastic councillor who organises litter picking sessions at the local beach. Then there’s the national hotel chain who are looking to construct a new luxury resort on the beach, the board of directors of the hotel chain, the town planners, the weekend sandcastle-makers… we could go on.
Each of those ‘stakeholders’ will have a different level of interest in our goal being achieved and a different level of influence over it. Compare the councillor’s power to that of the sandcastle-champion for example.
Our graph might now look something like this:
Instead of mapping problems we are mapping people.
Spotting opportunities
This can help us to see things we couldn’t see before, such as where we should focus our energy within partnerships. The bird sanctuary and the litter pickers are both really interested in our goal but they don’t have that much power. How could we bump them up the power ladder? We could:
- Facilitate an alliance between the two organisations, showcasing to them how aligned their individual aims are and creating strength in numbers?
- Nurture our previously ignored sandcastle-makers and get them more interested in our goal by creating some amazing sand sculpture installations about beach wildlife and the environment.
- Get the sand-castle makers involved in the local bird-sanctuary and litter-picking collective? Now we have moved a non-interested party to the interested side and bumped three groups up in the power stakes through strength in numbers!
- Persuade the councillor to harness the collective voice of this group to push themselves up further the power ladder and trump the influence that the hotel directors have over the town planners? Now we’re onto a winner!
Harnessing Motivation
Another technique we might use to build on our map is to think about the motivations of the people we want to influence. In our beach example, our main blockers are the hotel chain and the hotel directors. Let’s focus on the hotel directors as they have more power over our goal. They seem like a shadowy persona at first but if we have a think and do a bit of research we can probably fill in a lot of blanks about them.
They have a set of wants, needs and motivations of their own. What interests them? Who influences them? What are the gaps in their knowledge? What groups are they a member of? How can we help them? Let’s say we do some research and find out that their company profits have dropped three-fold since Covid, they’re under pressure from shareholders and they’re looking to recover their losses. They are interested in the luxury tourism market, but from what we can see on their marketing materials they don’t seem to know anything about the growing luxury eco-tourism trend.
Now, using our original alliance map, plus our new insights, we can see new opportunities. Perhaps we could use the influence of our councillor to persuade the hotel directors of the profitable benefits of luxury eco-tourism, for example. In exchange for a more modest hotel build that fully embraces the natural state of the beach, our litter-picking organisation will agree to organise eco-awareness events for them and the bird sanctuary might offer discounted bird-watching courses for their guests. Suddenly the foe of our goal has become its most unlikely ally.
Part of systems change is looking at a goal in a very messy setting and figuring out the best way to navigate the obstacle course that stands in the way of us achieving it. Any obstacles we see are probably someone else’s solution to a different problem. When we can more clearly see other’s perspectives and their influences then we can work out how to leverage and connect networks and create alliances to achieve change. The same goes when we’re looking to achieve change for children and young people. Putting on our systems change glasses when it comes to partnerships can help us to see the pathway through the obstacles more clearly. Some people call this battle mapping but we like to think of it as alliance mapping.
Creating Change
Now we’ve started thinking about how we might use this approach more broadly within The Children’s Society, showcasing just how powerful systemic approaches can be in a whole range of scenarios, including when we’re zooming in on the system and thinking about individuals. Consider the possibilities of mapping out the stakeholders in an individual young person’s life, the social worker, the youth offending officer, the headteacher, the pastoral support worker, the parent or carer, the sibling…
In this example a map enables us to see that if we exerted some of our efforts on coordinating the youth worker, the social worker and the young person’s mum, this alliance could then work collaboratively with the Independent Reviewing Officer, who has a lot of power in the system, to positively influence the social work manager who has been overwhelmed by other outside pressures. The youth worker could also exert some positive influence on the social worker to enable them to better argue their case for accommodating the young person. Or they could influence the accommodation by providing them with some training to increase their confidence and move them over closer to the young person’s agenda.
This path forwards might have emerged naturally anyway, or instead we might have sat in meeting after meeting being frustrated with the lack of movement forwards. We might not have noticed our other stakeholders’ pressures and might have missed the opportunities created by powerful levers in the system.
Ultimately, it’s actions (not maps) that lead us to solutions, but maps and graphs like this enable us to better see where our efforts should be focussed. Then we can form the right alliances (or support young people to form alliances of their own) and leverage the power in networks in order to achieve change.
So on that note, we’re taking our colouring pencils and we’re off to make some more maps…
Becky Fedia is National Programme Manager of the Support Rethought Programme at The Children’s Society.
